{"product_id":"constance-merritt-a-protocol-for-touch-9781574410839","title":"A Protocol for Touch","description":"\"Constance Merritt is a poet to defeat categories, to oppose 'the tyranny of names' with a poetry that sets its own terms of encounter, its 'protocols of touch'--tender and austere, formal and intimate at once. Hers is a voice with many musics, sufficiently rich, nuanced and various to express, maintain poise and wrest meaning from the powerful cross-currents in which the heart is torn. I have seldom seen intelligence equal to such a scorching degree of intensity, or mastery of form so equal to passion's contradictory occasions. Merritt's prosodic range is prodigious--she moves in poetic forms as naturally as a body moves in its skin, even as her lines ring with the cadenced authority of a gifted and schooled ear. Here, in her words, the iambic ground bass is in its vital questioning mode: \"The heart's insistent undersong: how live?\/how live? How live?\" this poetry serves no lesser necesssity than to ask that.\"--Eleanor Wilner Between us, how we wrestle over words\n\u003cbr\u003e\nStrain to wring some blessing from the silence,\n\u003cbr\u003e\nDeliverance from violence, its fear, its lure,\n\u003cbr\u003e\nThe tyranny of names: night day,\n\u003cbr\u003e\nSable and alabaster, flint shale,\n\u003cbr\u003e\nSteel and lace. Who among us can afford\n\u003cbr\u003e\nTo speak the language--any language--rightly?\n\u003cbr\u003e\nAs if it weren't enough to bear one heart\n\u003cbr\u003e\nEternally divided in its chambers?\n\u003cbr\u003e\nWe stand close enough to touch. We do\n\u003cbr\u003e\nNot touch. Between us burns a sword of fire,\n\u003cbr\u003e\nA rusted turnstile glinting in the sun.","brand":"University of North Texas Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54653028860246,"sku":null,"price":0.0,"currency_code":"EUR","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0925\/5829\/5382\/files\/product_image_9781574410839_1.jpg?v=1794624116","url":"https:\/\/www.momoxbooks.com\/products\/constance-merritt-a-protocol-for-touch-9781574410839","provider":"momox","version":"1.0","type":"link"}