Trickster

Trickster opens with a crank call to the reader: How was I to know / You were thin, your garden / Was covered in smoke / That you sat in your house / Coughing? Over the course of these beautiful and eerily accomplished poems, Potts’s reader is taken on a journey that is at once time-scarred and resolutely contemporary, earthy and haunted, moving from estrangement to reconciliation. Amidst a deepening sense of crisis, the Trickster of Potts’s imagination emerges as aggressor, prankster, victim, and healer, forging resilient music from the afflictions of the mind’s infested nest .

Trickster veers quickly from meditation and narrative to song, plunging the reader into a liminal world of dreams, archaic lyrics, and fables, populated with figures ranging from the Hawk and Worm, the Cat and Dove, to Cold and Death. It is a wilderness in which all things are alive: a blade of grass / equal to the suffering / of a lifetime . Yet it is also a place of menace, where a fly with one wing, keeps / tipping over in the grass, where / the ants will have him . Whether or not the Trickster reaches utopia, he reckons with the world that is achievable on earth and in words, those dreams of woods / relayed to you .