Salient

Download A labor of love applying extraordinary vision to documents of war, Liz Gray’s Salient sharpens the details of the record, even while broadening the record’s range. Taking as her occasion the battle of Ypres in World War I (and, in a signature move, introducing elements of Tantric figuration into the textual design), Gray interweaves analytic and lyric threads — microcosm with macrocosm, explication with implication, scholarship with song. The patterns cross conventional lines — time lines, gender lines, genre lines, lines of authority. Earth in the body, language in the jaw-hinge, spirit in the air — they all occasion insight…. But Gray concludes this striking work by praying that the goddesses will do what humans never could: Just stay.

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