Rivermouth Shouting - Paperback

Free Verse Editions

Edited by Jon Thompson

The two sequences of poems in RIVERMOUTH SHOUTING explore the permeable, unfixed nature of embodiment. "To Noah, From Wife" considers the play of boundaries in a long marriage after the flooding of everything. Through a prehistory of early made objects and the voices of Homer's soldiers and civilians at Troy, "Rivermouth Shouting" traces the evolution and unmaking of the idea of the stable, separate body, as notions of fixity and boundary are built (by skin, armor, ideation) and unbuilt (by wounding, dying, and practices of unselfing and dereifying).

What People Are Saying

If you're drowning in the world of things, use this book as a flotation device. Jean Gallagher's contemplative new collection, Rivermouth Shouting, lets catastrophe speak for itself-through correspondence, deathbeds, and birdsong. These meditations are musical, at times breaking language down to its syllabic particles-"I'm its roadway. Its road. Its way." Whether in the form of emails from Noah's wife regarding the flood and semi-permeability of marriage, or the last thoughts of Troy, spoken by unnamed soldiers from The Iliad, this book intersects life and death, featuring observations of the self that only seem possible as it dissipates. Writing poems bonded to ancient thought in ways that feel contemporary, Gallagher is a singular poet whose many gifts include subtlety and an enigmatic ability to surprise. -Alan Felsenthal

What a pleasure it is to encounter Jean Gallagher's luminous new collection, Rivermouth Shouting. Here are spare, elegant, lyric poems that do what only the best poetry can do-register the mind in motion. And what a shining mind it is. Gallagher's poems are lit from within by an idiosyncratic, wild, and vibrant consciousness-a river of "thought by thought" that moves along the page to reveal "what it's like to be alive." -Deborah Landau

Jean Gallagher is the author of Stubborn, winner of the FIELD Prize; This Minute, winner of the Poets Out Loud Prize; and Start. She teaches creative writing at New York University and lives in New York City with her family.