Rise and Float

Poetry

Rise and Float

Poems
"Masterful . . . The language, gorgeous in its precision, remains as its own testament of perseverance."—LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS
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Chosen by Randall Mann as a winner of the Jake Adam York Prize, Brian Tierney’s Rise and Float depicts the journey of a poet working—remarkably, miraculously—to make our most profound, private wounds visible on the page.

With the “corpse of Frost” under his heel, Tierney reckons with a life that resists poetic rendition. The transgenerational impact of mental illness, a struggle with disordered eating, a father’s death from cancer, the loss of loved ones to addiction and suicide—all of these compound to “month after / month” and “dream / after dream” of struck-through lines. Still, Tierney commands poetry’s cathartic potential through searing images: wallpaper peeling like “wrist skin when a grater slips,” a “laugh as good as a scream,” pears as hard as a tumor. These poems commune with their ghosts not to overcome, but to release.

The course of Rise and Float is not straightforward. Where one poem gently confesses to “trying, these days, to believe again / in people,” another concedes that “defeat / sometimes is defeat / without purpose.” Look: the chair is just a chair.” But therein lies the beauty of this collection: in the proximity (and occasional overlap) of these voices, we see something alluringly, openly human. Between a boy “torn open” by dogs and a suicide, “two beautiful teenagers are kissing.” Between screams, something intimate—hope, however difficult it may be.

Keywords: 
mental illness, grief, addiction, illness, chronic illness, loss, religion, Christianity, atheism, family, New Jersey, cancer, death, transgenerational illness, hereditary traits
ISBN:
9781571315199
Publish Date: 
02/08/2022
Pages: 
80
Size: 
8.5 × 5.5 × 0.25 in
Weight: 
4.7 oz
Author

Brian Tierney is the author of Rise and Float, which was selected by Randall Mann as the winner of the 20-2021 Jake Adam York Prize.

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