The Sea and A Fortnight

Authors: Victoria Cóccaro and Lindsay Turner

Translator: Rebekkah Smith

Publisher: DoubleCross Press (2024)

Two chapbooks bound together. Edition of 250.

Victoria Cóccaro’s long poem, The Sea, is made up of names waiting to be conjured on the page—human names and place names, the act of writing lovingly and sensually defined, moving like a wave through consciousness. The sea, not only with its movements and with its sound, but also with its rays and reflections. The present before it dissolves. The orchestra that practices every afternoon in your head, but that no one else hears. In this poem, Cóccaro investigates a world distilled, vaporized, and once again condensed in a new space, where time goes on simultaneously with its influences and recesses, tides and colored fish waiting to be discovered at the bottom of the sea. This is a poem of discovery, of a sea made up of naming, inside a book, a book that like a life, sleeps, until no more.

Deep in a rainy Southern winter, the small jewels of Lindsay Turner’s prose poems shimmer and refract. Each poem is a dense knot of observation, sound, and feeling. Each poem is a downhill run through thick undergrowth, propelled by gravity while tugged-at and stung by bramble and vine. In A Fortnight, Turner’s poems glitter with a marvelous sensitivity to shifts in the light, in the language, in the mist that rises between reader, text, and world. Simultaneously meditations on place and records of work in the kingdom of words (as a reader, as a writer), these poems transmit their quietly thrilling songs.