Jesse Morse

Flash Floods are Anomalies Jesse Morse

These brief prose poems function as "meditations in an emergence," though what is coming forth-which is existence, being, all of it-remains ever unfixed, out of reach. The result is not disorientation but a kind of tenderness for the fragmented though often beautiful attempts at knowing, "the way words unvelop on the page." These poems feel right for our time. They evoke the uncertainty and enormity that seems to dwarf us, and the hope that humans are "something other than lost."

-Allison Cobb, author of Plastic: An Autobiography




These prose poems hopscotch and hover above a playground of swerving soundscapes like flash floods of murmurations over windswept wheat. "Ablaze in a barnstorm." "A television in reverse." "Agogged." Morse's discrete instants of disjunctive astonishment welcome us as friends with these mercurial passages through the whir of words. "Dear slipstream, I'll call you come what may." Dive into the current of onomatopoetic anomalies and you will swim with dolphins cresting, "dreamt afoot. Or afloat."

-W. Scott Howard, editor of Denver Quarterly