Share the Wealth

Author: Maureen Thorson

Publisher: Veliz Books (2022)

Share the Wealth trains a wry and closely-observing eye on chance, exploring a world in which we collectively stand always on the brink of change—for good or ill. Sometimes the roll of the die delights: Cherry leaves turn into tortillas, snowbanks wear makeup, and hotdog-sized caterpillars wander the night, munching pecan leaves. But death and hazard are present here, lurking beneath world's abundance—its overflow of bookstores, turkeys, paintings, freeways, and flowers. Still, these poems attune the reader to the strange riotous-ness of the universe, its wealth of natural abundance, sensory detail, and time. Balanced between gain and loss, these poems allow room for bliss as much as decay.

"I’d call Maureen Thorson’s Share the Wealth quietly captivating, if it didn’t truthtell so insistently and open the mind with bright images that make familiarities like January, for example, more permanently real than they’ve ever been: 'And last year’s flowerpots drift in the snowpack // burnt sugar dusk persistent non-roar / of the highway over the river / that uses the thick light like pomade.' Other moments skate by like Olympians, and you only recognize their power when they’ve left you behind, marveling, like this one tucked into an encounter with some skittish wild turkeys: 'This world is chockablock / with death and joy and hazard, / and it would be right for a woman alone / to be its scariest thing.' These poems comfort and discomfit, coaxing weirdness out of the familiar, deep emotion out of the natural world, acceptance out of tragedy. You’ll find this book’s unique perceptions—for a moment, for good—will locate themselves somewhere in you."

—Kathleen Ossip