Runoff

From acclaimed poet and novelist Melissa Ginsburg, an observant, unflinching collection examining the interconnected systems between the domestic and natural worlds.

“Again and again // you ocean the marsh, lock the hurricane in the bathtub,” Melissa Ginsburg writes in her raw, wise third collection. “You walk straight into the spider’s web // and close its door behind you.”

Rooted deeply in landscape, Runoff treads the invisible lines that separate one property from another, that separate the land from the water and the air, the self from the surrounding world, the self from other people, the living from the dead. While the speaker endures the final years of a long marriage, the last years of a mother’s long illness, and the unavoidable reminders of our worsening climate catastrophe, she roves and pushes against boundaries both physical and psychic: property lines, fences, the impossible distance between one human mind and another. In times when everything seems porous and nothing feels safe, these poems are born from the moment just before the speaker wakes to the conscious understanding that freedom is a possibility, and that she is strong enough to claim it.

In search of meaning, the speaker turns to geometry and architecture, to the mechanisms of locks, hinges, germinating seeds. Woven throughout are figures including plants, animals, ghosts, waterways, the minds of storms, domestic spaces, images from fairy tales and tarot cards. Even while undone by grief and fear, she looks closely, intently, at the world, in the belief that heightened attention is a form of communion and a path toward a more hopeful future.