Tangible Terrain - by Christy Wise (Paperback)

About the Book

A young girl finds adventure and solace in nature where she can escape silence and secrets in her family home.

Book Synopsis

Poems in Tangible Terrain explore a girl's 1960s youth as she navigates interior family dynamics set against the expansive natural landscape of a semi-rural northern California county.

Review Quotes

In her chapbook collection, Tangible Terrain, Christy Wise engages a sublime friction between her home "ground," the world she was reared in and the alternate "ground" of the city taken on by her father, a melancholic love letter to the alternate lives that beckon like sirens to the ships of our seemingly secure lives. Wise undermines the glossed exterior of these lives "as we wander among prickly bushes/avoid ubiquitous bees/seem natural/not like long silences over dinner/which make me feel invisible." As the author lets us deeper and deeper into her life, we see the fears of adults, the dreams and advice they thought best to dispense to their own, manifesting deeper in the family and the poet's consciousness, until we are released into the embrace and revelation of the natural world as the way to reclaim "our ground."

-Paul Corman-Roberts, author of Bone Moon Palace and The Sincere