Sorry Was in the Woods

Author: Michelle Taransky

Publisher: Omnidawn (2013)

In a woods where bodger and cabinet maker are at work, Michelle Taransky’s second collection of poems, Sorry Was In The Woods is that landscape where perspective is not singular, where waiting, worrying, watching, and recording are able to both arrange and derange our understanding of place. Taransky’s subject matter suggests our pressing need to face directly into the reality of each moment, and to question what it means to be moral in this troubled world of ecological and cultural calamity. Yet her surprising language use and references will invite her readers to walk with her through the forest of Yeats' and Howe's Seven Woods, and to feel the presence of Bob Perelman's leaves, Zukofsky's bough, Olson's hand, and Gertrude Stein's tree. In these compelling poems, a reader will find many familiar images and figures, and yet sense how the forest of event is always just beyond our capacity to describe or understand it. A sense of fear and wonder at our circumstance is one of Taransky’s great gifts to us, one of her finest achievements.

“Who knows what lyric lurks in word’s woods? Michelle Taransky’s elusively alluring poems make a path. They beckon. Listen.”  

–Charles Bernstein

“I will be in Michelle Taransky’s woods. . . . I will go there to see what she says . . . and I'm pretty sure I'll be better off everafter.”  

–Dara Wier