Description
Flies filling a kitchen; grackles filling the branches of a tree; a bruise blooming over skin: in Shedding Season, nature is a force that constantly threatens to overwhelm those who would keep it in check. Instead, Morton explores what it means to refuse the language of dominance, to recognize oneself as a small part of an impossibly complex ecosystem. From this vantage, insects’ legs can form a chorus and violence can be worked like a bow against an instrument, attempting beauty. In turn, a house can become a trap; a family a threat; and the notion of salvation something you can drown in. In Shedding Season, a broken narrative follows cycles of violence and ecological degradation across generations, illuminating the ways in which our relationships – with others, ourselves, and our environments – define us even as we define them.
Obsessed with mutability, Shedding Season traces the growth that necessitates shedding an old skin. In the aftermath of violation, the poems swelter in heat and the white noise of insects, searching for beauty among the decay, moments of power in a vulnerable body. Morton oscillates between rapture and revulsion towards the humid, overgrown landscape of the south, as towards the body that inhabits that space, conflating self and circumstance with claustrophobic intimacy. With language, image, and narrative always in flux, these poems inhabit the grey areas between desire and disgust, safety and survival. In Shedding Season, Morton meditates on what we do to survive and, just as pressingly, what we can do after — when you should “bite harder than you’re bit” and when to let go.
Shedding Season grapples with the possibility of transcendence and rebirth in the wake of violence, how “a new body” can be “stripped of old blood.” Throughout the collection, Morton uses form to contain the instability of its inhabitants and their surroundings. In one contrapuntal poem, a family is devoured as it is created; in another, the truth becomes a lie as it is spoken. Often, formal expectations are set and just as quickly subverted, invoking Morton’s insistence that everything must change. In constant search of breaking points, Morton interrogates the impermanence of identity: how many times can something evolve before it becomes something else?
