Each morsel of Wisby poetry makes me swoon, and then knocks me down, then picks me up--dusts me off, and then, we start all over again.

It's apropos that this collection; bruised fruits and emotional artifacts bears the dedication
"for the losers, and the for the light." I opened the pages of the book and hoped hard that what followed would deliver...and it did.

Wisby has built the reader tight word boxes, tiny coffins, the justified alignment works hard, like a hand wrapped tightly around the throat, asphyxiates-and then releases, or not:

Then all the boys/ sprang up at once as if from some subtle signal/ or a shared knowledge that their work was done./ They ran away laughing and she could finally move, though now there was no reason to.

(from BOYS CARRIED HER OUT INTO THE FIELD)

But within these tights spaces there is something else that is happening, words tug at the collective memory of messy things like love and living, reminding the reader of those painful things, those things that fracture, and somehow there is still the light:

The other woman forfeits her right to be called a

woman. She moves out of her apartment and into a cave, lives like a snarling thing, devoid of com-pany, charmless. And still he comes to her, hurls his fresh carcass at her feet. His scent turns her back into a woman.

(OTHER)

I am a believer in the fine art of multi-tasking, but only when well executed. Wisby leaves nothing to be desired, her language makes the tongue hungry to speak words aloud, and her manipulation of form creates the ultimate vessel for her poetic missives, and finally her tales transport us to that limbo place of mythos-our too human lives, the stuff that is at once unbearable and devastatingly addictive.

-MK Chavez