Some Churches

“When will the past be done with us?” asks Tasha Cotter’s poem “Stranger,” one of many instances in Some Churches where the reader is confronted with truths few poems dare to approach. Like Szymborska, Cotter manages to crystallize moments of transcendent simplicity, and to make memory palpable. Illuminated with images both familiar and surreal, the poems of Some Churches give us a new reverence for the everyday.

--Mary Biddinger, author of O Holy Insurgency and Saint Monica

Churches are fixed structures that enable intangible beliefs. In Some Churches, Tasha Cotter gives words similar power to transform. Each poem in this collection is like a penance, a salve when "we are strangled by the walls," when we feel like only "shell and shadow." Here's a book that fills the spaces between "what we say / aloud" with tight lines and fresh thoughts; a worthy poetic companion as we "drink the galaxy and try to locate an edge."

--Nick Ripatrazone, author of Oblations

In one poem of Tasha Cotter's new collection, Some Churches, the narrator asks, "When will the past be done with us?" The answer, judging from the bulk of the poems in this collection, is never. The past is ever-present. "Sonic Memory" ends this way: "I still recall the sound / of the rupture in orbit, how the sky pelted gray rocks that echoed / off our backs as white lightning tinged with indigo crashed our shores." And in "Animal in a Bell Jar," she writes: "She senses something has been locked up and she did the locking. She recalls a time when a small bird tried to land on her and how she wouldn’t let it." Throughout the collection, we are repeatedly startled: "my throat glistens with an ice-slick lullaby," and "This house listens like a glass bottle," and "Everyone was looking up music videos from the ‘90s and it was dark except for a strand of twinkle lights someone had thrown up." These poems, like the twinkle lights, illuminate Cotter's past by emphasizing the darkness. Prepare to be charmed.

--Charles Rafferty, author of The Man on the Tower and Where the Glories of April Lead

A poetry collection full of mythical literary magic. Tasha Cotter's words dazzle and revive the senses. In "Paris" I swear Frida Kahlo is born again.

--Nikky Finney, National Book Award winning author of Head Off & Split