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