Nowhere Was a Lake (eBook)

Captivated by the simultaneously routine and disruptive nature of violence and desire, Nowhere Was a Lake marks a luminous debut from poet Margaret Draft. "e;What do you do when a horse dies? / You hollow out the land, // you try to make enough space, / and when you think you have enough, // keep digging."e; In these poems, our own tenderness endangers us, and yet - when faced with the enormity of our hunger, an appetite that proclaims both the bounty of nourishment and our capacity for loss - Draft keeps digging. "e;He said this because // he himself had to enter the hole / with the horse and shovel, // shift the legs, reposition the head."e; The speaker here has an unflinching pragmatism, a characteristic that paradoxically makes her emotions all the more tangible. This is how you prospect a grave, she seems to say, but you'll be in it, too. You with your body among the other bodies. Draft rejects simple binaries, insisting that oblivion can be a place, that fidelity and betrayal can coexist in our most intimate relationships, that to live as a human animal means embodying both hunter and prey. Deft in its exploration of female sexuality, the emotional complexity of polyamory, and the distinction between freedom and abandonment, Nowhere Was a Lake mesmerizes with its erotic pastorals and frank prose poems. "e;Edge"e; interrogates "e;the dialectic of trust"e; structuring romantic relationships and negotiated through sexual physics: "e;It is not a question of whether you will / harm me, but whether you will / stick around long enough / to hold me when I am harmed."e; The risk and reward of such exploration is uncertainty: anything could happen, but anything could happen. "e;In no place, going someplace, I know. / There are so few things I can say I know definitively. // But this must be the definition of plenty. / The sun slowly setting over the valley."e;  And, yes, love may wend through the field as we thresh it. And, yes, we are in the light as it goes down.