Covenant (With)

The shadow of death hovers over Mockler's poems: the dead of Pompeii, the dying soldier who inscribes his name on the wall of a Civil War hospital, her instructions for living in a city devastated by cluster bombs. She invokes ancestors who lived in 'beehive' tenements on the banks of the Erie Canal and drives past the descansos that mark where 'the world/falls farther away/each day. Someone's child/ejected, roaring/lifeless...' Yet death is also transformed in these poems into something new and powerful. At times that transformation feels miraculous, as when the horses in the night pasture come forward 'like a drum coming out of the darkness...to turn your mist into body.'"

-Kim Roberts, editor By Broad Potomac's Shore

Susan Bucci Mockler's debut collection will be known for its horses, "a three-toed horse [that] grazes on gumweed," or "the horses [that] thought they were waiting for you/ to bring them in from the pasture, in from damp / night air, where sweet alfalfa, oats, hay, would be, / where they always are-the horses names etched / in wooden plaques over their stalls." I don't remember a book so wild at heart, but so crafted to corral, coax its horses home, poem after poem. Across these verses about family, ghosts, erasure, invisibility and escape, the horses of Frost and James Wright are what engine us; what they carry is nothing short of some of the most delicate and beautiful poetry I have read in years. They truck and bewilder; but they always come home to clarity, the certainty of music, "three-beat canter/ four-beat gait,/ a horse in full gallop." Such a covenant with impermanence and swiftness, you will discover in these pages.

-David Keplinger, author of The World to Come



I find myself, inside this moving debut of poems, thinking about the horse and our affinity for it. Like us, it is bound to the earth but is able to achieve a power in motion that is almost like flight, something our bodies cannot manage. And yet, the horse is fragile too-easily injured beyond treatment. This balance between power and delicacy-in the body, in the mind, in the natural world-is what Mockler succeeds in staying attentive to and articulating. Through its varied formal and conceptual modes, this body of a book achieves a wholeness-a covenant between the pieces-to gallop, teetering between flight and oblivion.

-Kyle Dargan, author of Anagnorisis: Poems