Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open

Author: Laura Woltag

Publisher: speCt! Books (2022)

"I am grateful to Laura Woltag for making poems that are so much like 'real life' that they are real life itself. Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open endeavors to find out what happens 'if you follow a body into time,' and creates a record of that following, examining what’s found along the way. Woltag finds a bright, evocative world where lust and love edge against the ludic, and where grief is a welcome presence: grief for lost beloveds, for victims of state violence, for species forced into precarity by human greed. In their particular hand-wrought fashion, Woltag '[dips] mullein in fat to use as a torch,' illuminating microscopic scales of desire with an attentiveness that calls to mind the poetry of Lorine Niedecker. The language in Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open is offered as a kind of healing modality, intuitive and nonlinear, and warm as 'really good gossip / every time the sun comes up/ between two mysteries.'”

—Iris Cushing

"Serviceable Clothes for Life in the Open vibes with manifold ecological amplitude. A mercurial network of floral, faunal and mineral relation, of desirous accumulation in a mode of queer apperceptivity and affirmation -- 'all are valid here.' The glistening erotics of Laura Woltag’s lyrics thrum a 'mid-hushed, cool-rooted, fragrant-eyed' ambience. Woltag encourages play as a strategy of livability while attending to mounting losses. Her mentors are named and honored in a ceremony of entanglements calling on 'love at the limits of enclosure.' This book is a vivid ode to phenomena as prismatic experience, enhancing forever terrestrial life. Wispy, ephemeral and kinesthetic, every utterance is sheer resplendence."

—Brenda Iijima