I'm going to talk primarily about Rusty's second book,
although she's the author of Weathering, her first.
So Rusty Morrison's second book of poems,
The True Keeps Calm Biding Its Story
is in the words of poet, Claudia Rankine,
"A lyric refusal of the stop that death proposes."
This elegiac push against the silence of the deceased evolves
into a critique of the limits of language.
Each of the nine lines on each page of Morrison's
remarkable collection is grouped into three tercets
and ends with one of the three following words--
please, advise, stop.
In fact, each page begins in the top-left corner
with a combined request of please, advise, stop.
This telegraphic language asserts the urgency of
and the need for both written and spoken communication
across distances, however literal or metaphoric
they may be.
While the persistent "stop" commands our attention
and vigilance, the gentle "please" and "please advise"
that follow simultaneously suggests the frailty
and vulnerability of both the speaker
and of language-- just as soon as they have asserted
their presence and utility.
When I taught the book to my undergraduate class,
one of my students described the book
as being marked by a tenuous fragility.
It took me a moment to realize that this seemingly redundant
assessment actually opened up the potential
for profound agency within the speaker's grief.
In this scenario, fragility-- here functioning as a noun that
is also a synonym of the adjective--
could itself be tenuous.
That is, in the dictionary definition,
"liable to break down when challenged."
Morrison's work enacts this complex confrontation
with the acknowledgment of human despair and suffering.
She writes, "A few darknessess are
inward, a few outward pointing branches
in a stand of poplar stop and the passionate urge to defy it.
Despite our inability to conquer sorrow,
the language in the true keeps calm, biding its story,
allows us the courage to fracture,
or at the very least dislodge, our own fragilities
during such times of emotional duress."
She poses the question, "Do the reckless simply
hear the avalanche before the rest of us?
Please advise."
And while her work refuses any kind of definitive answer,
it is rife with a type of call and response
that begins an interesting dialogue between the speaker
and the deceased father, the reader and language itself.
In the eighth section, the implied I
in the final line of one of the section 6 pieces
advises us gently to "keep imagination busy,
testing its talismans."
The word talisman is ultimately derived
from the Greek word telein, meaning
to initiate into the mysteries.
And so, please help me welcome an imagination that
is certainly never stagnant and always firmly,
but gently, guiding her readers further
into the realm of the unknown--
Rusty Morrison.
[APPLAUSE]