{"product_id":"nowhere-was-a-lake-poems","title":"Nowhere Was a Lake: Poems","description":"Captivated by the simultaneously routine and disruptive nature of violence and desire, \u003ci\u003eNowhere Was a Lake\u003c\/i\u003e marks a luminous debut from poet Margaret Draft. What do you do when a horse dies? \/ You hollow out the land, \/\/ you try to make enough space, \/ and when you think you have enough, \/\/ keep digging. In these poems, our own tenderness endangers us, and yet -- when faced with the enormity of our hunger, an appetite that proclaims both the bounty of nourishment and our capacity for loss -- Draft keeps digging. He said this because \/\/ he himself had to enter the hole \/ with the horse and shovel, \/\/ shift the legs, reposition the head. The speaker here has an unflinching pragmatism, a characteristic that paradoxically makes her emotions all the more tangible. This is how you prospect a grave, she seems to say, but you'll be in it, too. You with your body among the other bodies. Draft rejects simple binaries, insisting that oblivion can be a place, that fidelity and betrayal can coexist in our most intimate relationships, that to live as a human animal means embodying both hunter and prey. Deft in its exploration of female sexuality, the emotional complexity of polyamory, and the distinction between freedom and abandonment, \u003ci\u003eNowhere Was a Lake\u003c\/i\u003e mesmerizes with its erotic pastorals and frank prose poems. Edge interrogates the dialectic of trust structuring romantic relationships and negotiated through sexual physics: It is not a question of whether you will \/ harm me, but whether you will \/ stick around long enough \/ to hold me when I am harmed. The risk and reward of such exploration is uncertainty: anything could happen, but anything could happen. In no place, going someplace, I know. \/ There are so few things I can say I know definitively. \/\/ But this must be the definition of plenty. \/ The sun slowly setting over the valley. And, yes, love may wend through the field as we thresh it. And, yes, we are in the light as it goes down.","brand":"Phoenix Books","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46610341560489,"sku":"PHBK-9781954245884","price":17.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0578\/9899\/1785\/files\/content_6be8e6fb-d508-4ca3-9406-854d236e7235.jpg?v=1764815828","url":"https:\/\/myti.com\/products\/nowhere-was-a-lake-poems","provider":"Myti","version":"1.0","type":"link"}