So this book isn’t totally obscure, having won the 1997 Barnard New Women Poets Prize, but Dark Sky Question by Larissa Szporluk still deserves a dose of the spotlight.
A blurb from Gregory Orr describes Szporluk as a kind of wedding between Georg Trakl and Emily Dickinson; that’s apt, but I’d throw a poltergeist into the mix as well. These are lavishly strange and spidery poems, surreal as a desert noon. The phrase “intimate desolation” comes to mind, along with about a thousand others — cryptic, evocative, alien, owlish — but the best way to see what I might mean is to simply read the fucking book.