DRIFTWOOD

Presented in prose poems—arguably the genre’s most seductive form—Sophie Klahr’s DRIFTWOOD is a narrative of defiance, empathy, and risk. An Angel, once a high school friend, reappears like a spring hailstorm in the life of a now-middle-aged speaker, his presence unearthing their shared past as addicts and drawing the now-sober speaker into the Angel's adult reality. From rat poison to Euripides and police tasers to the Talmud, their sudden reconnection poses urgent questions about faith and suffering. “The heart only has a certain amount of memory, the Angel says.” This sequence of poems becomes a rope bridge across dark swaths of cognitive dissonance, the chronicle of a deep love story despite the players, as the Angel grants permission for the speaker to act as scribe to their present and past, full of missing children, wrongful convictions, acts of grace, and self-made tattoos of flames. “We are one another’s survival, the Angel says, write that down.”