Grace

the book of

I am a terribly slow reader, mostly because i don’t like to gobble my food, not if i can help it, and some meals you don't want to hurry through besides.

The Book of Grace by Kate Mapother is one such meal, delectable as it is tender, and titled most appropriately, for are we not called upon to ask for Grace with every supper?

It is a deeply liminal work as well, which is weird to say out loud—liminality is borderlands, is crossovers, is visas waiting for a stamp of approval to cross to the other side... borderlands aren't supposed to be deep nor thick, are they? They're just lines on the map, aren't they? But you're breathless with the anticipation of crossing over, but you're still waiting for the fingernail to let go of the plucked string so it can vibrate and create the world...you're caught between the exhale and the inhale, between actualization and potential, maybe you need to put the book down because its buzzing in your hands but you don't, no, you just turn the page because you have to.

Postmortem and autopsy without the cold floors of the clinic—how can one be breathless when there is so much room in a Vermont farmhouse? The world becomes a thickness, a weight and a current, and you're drawn along into its flow, you can't help yourself. Nor, you find, do you want to.

Much of the narrative is from a ghost’s perspective, which is well and good as the text is esoterically charged, in sync with the Moon and other rhythms that require breath and space and time. And that is all in-between the poems…(Falconer, gawddammit)…Kate/Grace island universes flowing along, dusted of stars and thrumming to the beat of taut-but-not-quite tortured heart-strings. I have to type all this out because speaking around it gets me choked up. You ever stand so close to something so big it makes your eyes water?

The Book of Grace is available here.

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