Parallel Resting Places: Poems

By Laura Wetherington

What happens when a poet tries to filter the untranslatable from another language? The rush of unknowing, decoding the wind, the body becomes an antenna. Following behind Jack Spicer's After Lorca and swinging its ovaries, Laura Wetherington's second book uses the concept of translation to create original poems from the work of writers like Liliane Giraudon, Marie Étienne, Dominique Fourcade, and Jean-Marie Gleize. These poems run through a liminal linguistic space where meaning, mishearing, and dreams collide, sometimes midsentence, where they hinge into song: "My man animal took shape in a shadow, / climbed over an obstacle, / became the void." Interstitial love letters to queer writers process a miscarriage, the most recent election, and queer puppy love. This is a book of yearning—for a foreign tongue, for a body growing inside the body, and for a form of communication that can capture feeling.
"There is a constant textual drama in the address and voice of Laura Wetherington’s heady poems; a mirror staged. With monologues, letters, lyrics, and prose she performs a writing through to a new ground of sensation and thinking. Call it the present. The music is gorgeous and the sound is captivating. Parallel Resting Places is a wonderful book and a welcome addition to a tradition that troubles tradition." —Peter Gizzi

• Language: English
• Publisher: Parlor Press, LLC
• Release date: Jan 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781643171920

Laura Wetherington

Laura Wetherington’s first book, A Map Predetermined and Chance, was selected by C.S. Giscombe for the National Poetry Series. She published a chapbook with Bateau Press, chosen by Arielle Greenberg for the Keel Hybrid Competition. Her work appears in Narrative, Michigan Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, FENCE, and VOLT, among others, and in three anthologies, The Sonnets: Translating and Rewriting Shakespeare (Nightboat Books), Choice Words: Writers on Abortion (Haymarket Books), and 60 Morning Talks (Ugly Duckling Presse).

Book preview

The body free falls through history, memorializing the seventies

after Dominique Fourcade

My body, made

from language,

touching your tongue.

Every word in

an accidental affair.

I blame

the heat of the sentence.

I blame each chance—

a broad opening

in common with inhalation—

I. No more nature poems*

A poem should always have birds in it.

—Mary Oliver

bird poems

The book is a mirror

after Carole Darricarrère

I.

One must look at a book

as though it is a small faith.

The bird-book, in spectrum, glimmers—

bird-book’s field of vision

unknots a blue voice: supple timbre

stirring up inskinuations.

Within: each bird illuminated—

what no gentle boy could hold in his hand for long—

the world performed in absentia—

II.

Sudden heat marks a prayer on the bird-body.

Not for one moment the memory of eternal summer.

We pray a bird-book, its dust jackets fluttering,

holding open the possibility that

our bodies bathe against and

ending in a comma is a kind of grace that

makes a circle of all the questions.

Dear Hannah,

When we move to the woods to start our free skool, we’ll take a big screen TV and some way of streaming ESPN because, you know, college football and women’s basketball. I’ve been hoarding extension cords just in case not all the buildings have power. (Our school will have buildings, right?)

Remember the guy from Portland, Maine who camped out in a crosswalk dressed as a tree? He’s totally invited. How did he explain it? He wanted to understand how his performance would impact people’s natural choreography. His tree performance is to nature poetry what the History Channel is to history. I love it so much. But seriously, do you think he’s read Cage’s writings?

When I tried to explain to my husband how I’m not heavily invested in nature poems, I said, I don’t really need to gaze into a deer’s eyes, you know? and he replied, What if it’s a queer deer? and I’ve never loved a man more.—He comes too.

             Love,

             Laura

I’m a religious delicate

after Francis Picabia

Sometimes we think

responsibility involves only