Ecopoetic at its core, Kristi Maxwell's My My is concerned about the world, "that abundant stray," and scrutinizes the messiness of human relationships to each other and to the nonhuman-how acts of seeing can lift up or erase. Maxwell's seventh book operates under the sign of "or," testing out alternatives and revisions in the hopes of landing on a truth that can be lived with. Part-sigh, part-sly, these poems make friends with their own shiftiness and recognize that the imperfect might be the best place to look for our next c(l)ues.
"How I long to sit on a patio in the summer with the brilliant Kristi Maxwell, inside 'the foam night' of her poems. Like Emily Dickinson, Maxwell is fierce, twisting and turning loss itself with wordplay and wit. And also like Dickinson, language is simultaneously foreshadowed and recedes to the background, a playful ghost disquieting a room. 'What field aspires to be a lawn?' she asks, mourning the wildness of our formal world. Compassionate, eclectic, and clever, My My is a book that tenderly reminds us 'we were each made/ beyond our own.'"
