An Exodus of Sparks
explores how violence reshapes family, geography, and faith. Predominantly set in the high desert, these poems explore the micro-losses of a father and brother (to downwinder-related cancer and substance abuse) against the macro-losses of a geography to nuclear testing and a tradition of faith to the ravages of grief. Liberally appropriating Judaic symbolism and wedding it to an inherited Mormon vocabulary and iconography, the poet/speaker wrests her power from her culture’s sacred texts to revise her position in sight of patriarchal systems.
This collection is for anyone exploring how loss reshapes identity. The book is structured around a crown of sonnets in which the speaker assumes the story of Moses and resituates it in the American Southwest. The book itself is an elegy composed of several smaller elegies; a fallible history; and most of all, a love letter to the family, culture, and geography that shaped the poet and her work.