Rough Ground

Author: Alex Anne Shaw

Publisher: Etruscan Press (2018)

With a lyricism that is both delicate and painful, Rough Ground explores the devastating consequences of trauma on our ability to speak about the world. Based upon Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logi-co-Philosophicus, Rough Grounddistills philosophical speculation to poetic text, enacting an utterance almost beyond speech. While the philosopher concludes “that which we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence,” the poems writ on “rough ground” enact a portentous silence, mapping a path between word and world.

"This book is many things beyond and besides being a “translation”: one of those things is, a poem: a made thing of language, about language in the same way a painting is about paint. But it is also evidence of a mind assimilating another mind’s most beautiful work. I have not read anything quite like it, which is to say, I have never before known this kind of beauty. The things that fall from this poem as I read all glitter, and of them I have made a secret collection. Alix Anne Shaw’s powerful transformation of the contemporary conception of “Wittgenstein,” not just his language, invites each reader to participate in this poem-project, while “the sky unfolds its secret.” 

–Bin Ramke