Poetry. This first book by a trained vocalist explores the transformation from "I am speaking" to "I am singing," and where exactly poetry fits between these two limits. Restlessly, in abrupt (sometimes humorous) shifts it examines the subtle, the inaccessible, what is too fine for our senses, "the song that is sung between notes." The poems seem almost to disperse, to float off into a space as vast and as tolerant of indeterminacy as Barbara Guest's, where seeming emptiness can turn into a fullness of motion, potential, song, being.
Christina Mengert has crossed the country from her native Georgia via Rhode Island to Denver (where she earned a Ph.D. in English & Creative Writing) and now on to New York State, to teach in Bard College's Prison Initiative Program.
