ALTERATIONS

Writing from an eddy of loss.

Award-winning poet Winrock creates a haunting meditation on grief, on being caught in an obsessive circularity of thinking and feeling, and on wishing, achingly, to undo a painful narrative. The memories to which she returns again and again are the loss of her unborn twin child and her fear of losing the surviving twin, born prematurely, who spent 10 weeks in the NICU, fragile and vulnerable, before she was healthy enough to go home. Brief, lyrical sections read like prose poems and are punctuated, literally, with the symbol +, indicating a variant: “an expansion,” or pause, or choice, that can change the meaning of a passage. Attending to variants, sentences themselves can be repurposed, when a word or phrase substitutes for another one. Winrock’s themes recur in a wide range of allusions, including Emily Dickinson’s elliptical poems, Margaret Wise Brown’s Goodnight Moon, with its twinned images; Gertrude Stein’s The World Is Round, with the famous circularity “A rose is a rose is a rose”; and women’s work of sewing—the painstaking revision involved in hand-sewing spacesuits for astronauts, for example, or making, altering, and undoing bridal gowns to repurpose them, even into burial garments. Winrock sees Dickinson as a sewer: Look, she writes, at “the way she chose to stitch her poems—leaving audible pinholes in their fabric—morse code notes poked straight through the pages.” Sewers can convey and remake history. “Listen closely to any worn garment,” Winrock writes, “and you will find fine lines that mark details of construction + patterns of wear + indications of more than one wearer.” Sometimes gowns can be “stripped back to their nearly pre-stitched state.” That state, for Winrock, is the miraculous alteration for which the mourner yearns: an elsewhere, before anguish.

A radiant evocation of longing.