Thursday, November 15, 2018

Julia Drescher, Open Epic



Hunting is about
The hunt meaning
Something & such
Force one more than one
Containing such as
More than one such
& such waiting on beasts
& are our means for
Hunting hares using
Hounds are for coursing
Out & horses & hunters
With knives &/or guns
For both gentle & dangerous
Ones such as
For deer for boar for bears in
Woods are still common
Enough wolves too could
Make the hunt
Last for several (“Hilda’s Hunting”)

Colorado poet and editor Julia Drescher’s debut full-length poetry title is Open Epic (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2017), a sequence of poems constructed via fragments. Structured in four poem-sections – “Hilda’s Hunting,” “Open Epic,” “Hands Chalk the Walls” and “Plural Bell,” alongside the opening lyric poem “[through her]” – the poems in Open Epic are expansive and detailed, evasive and suggestive, as her opening poem begins: “through her // the emptying // forms [.]” There is a lot going on in this collection, and a great deal to admire. Really, one might say that Open Epic is entirely a book on form, as much as it is an epic poem moving through and across the story of Hilda, who, by the end of the first section:

Our HILDA perhaps

Our hiding heart bone begun warning


What rights of warren

Still thrilling what chase what viscera


Delicious our sad to say reports our

Foot festers brutal our aches all hour


Clicks or rattles that is to say

Whatever else              we had our


Hearts battered

No better HILDA


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