Back in December 2020, I had the pleasure of reviewing Helen, or My Hunger by Gale Marie Thompson. I am happy to report that Thompson has finally published a new collection, equally as rich as Helen, but in a very different (and more personal) way. "It seems important to know the name for this smallish mountain. What cleave could take me on, wounded in an under-the-porch way, still marked with the blueprint of a predator." ("The Divide") From this beginning, Thompson takes us on a journey exploring the losses, temporary and permanent, brought on by Covid among other things, and the isolation and uncertainty they triggered. "The Turnover" describes the fragility of even simple residing on the earth: "In the time it took to produce this sentence, the spinal// shadow of my house has leaned  its wet angle over the yard// so completely, a massacre so small….// how little and yet how much it matters to count the dead." Language itself is problematic in "The Dialect Remembers": "Frightening, though, that language can mean exactly what we want it to mean. Or, what it wants us to mean. Like when I say I love you or I want to die—how terrifying it is that those words might be true.// "But crisis is only the beginning. The break. So we turn its wheel, push our hands through to the wrist, and watch the minutes pump and pump. Then—the brink, the strike of open slit, sweetening of ferment, all sugar and sun. And the painful, florid bloom of passing forward. A wheel set round with teeth." In the long title poem, the speaker tells of the difficulty in finding a place and holding it: "No longer new to this valley, I am still stupid and faithful. I blister the tomatoes and over the phone declare this is good news when they move my uncle to a new hospital. The lowing cattle make hideous sounds that I confuse with chainsaws and processing machines. Elevation is the only direction here. My cup runneth over, but who can I tell.// To be out and away from the world is not a virtue. Even my face has become something  glass-green and lawless. A kind of loosening of the cheeks.// The rain pulls each leaf away without pomp, rearranges the air.// My cup runneth over, but who can I tell." ("Mountain Amnesia") The cost and emotional aftermath of violence is examined in "The Responsible": "Because I am thinking of a little girl I didn't know, once a girl, but now a dead woman I knew, just a bit, and the sweet things about her being alive: lemon berry shortbread and the backs of knees, raw dates, the thickest of milk and rage. I am still watching her tiny body gloss away. She the victim of someone else's buckshot orbit. Who is responsible, as in: who answers for this? Something happens to the sweet things….// Nothing is arranged. The day is short but never ends, only folds in, over. The rooster's queasy crow starts early and sickles, and sickles. It's not the boot, but the hands that make the boot." The collection ends on a note of—not hope, but perhaps a determination to survive in the face of death and other loss: "There is so much to learn here, in this place where fire does the kind of good violence we need it to. Already I have taken to calling this valley floor peat, the most useful of gathered deaths. Each day my dog and I nod to the soft, pulpy rot of the world from behind the sleek blackberries. Good work, good work, we say— meaning step back, step back….// But the things we love are already over, send off the same sleek gasses of death as anything else. There is no satisfaction or defense, just the true song of collapse. Our fox announces herself like a star in wobbling red. She makes her finite mistakes, then releases them at the end of her shift. Step back, step back, she says. We fire to raze." ("Ground Rules") One can only touch on the richness of this collection in a short review. In addition to the power and beauty of the language, the poems display a rare moral and intellectual depth. Order Mountain Amnesia here: https://upcolorado.com/university-press -of-colorado/item/6502-mountain-amnesia