Night Burial

by Kate Bolton Bonnici

Overview

In Night Burial, Kate Bolton Bonnici mourns her mother’s death from ovarian cancer by tracing the composition, decomposition, and recomposition of the maternal body. Opening with an epigraph from Julia Kristeva’s Stabat Mater, which recognizes the “abyss that opens up between the body and what had been its inside,” Night Burial moves from breastfeeding to laying sod on a grave, weaving together Alabama pine forests, fairy tales, philosophy, classical and Renaissance literatures, church practices, and hospice care. Through centuries-old and newly imagined poetic forms, Night Burial crafts a haunting litany for the dead. These poems ask the essential questions of grief, intertwined with family and place: how do we address the absent beloved and might the poem become its own conjuring whereby the I can once again speak to the you?
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781885635730
Publisher:	Center for Literary Publishing
Publication date:	11/15/2020
Series:	Colorado Prize for Poetry
Edition description:	1
Pages:	84
Product dimensions:	6.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.30(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Kate Bolton Bonnici grew up in rural Alabama and is a graduate of Harvard University (BA); New York University School of Law (JD); the University of California, Riverside (MFA); and the University of California, Los Angeles (PhD). Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, Southern Humanities Review, Image, Tupelo Quarterly, and elsewhere. She was a finalist for The Georgia Poetry Prize and The Fairy Tale Review’s Poetry Prize, as well as a semi-finalist for the Word Works’ Washington Prize, the Crab Orchard Series Poetry Open competition, the Gold Wake Press Open competition, the Zone 3 Press First Book Award for Poetry, and the Brittingham Prize. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and daughters and teaches early modern English literature and creative writing at UCLA.
 

Table of Contents

I Fall Risk

[Mine eyes dry & cannot see have] 3

"Corpses like night soil / get carted off" 4

It Was a Common Night 5

Household Tales 7

Morrow, Morrow, Valentine 8

Witchspeak 9

Burn Permit 10

Burnt Offering 12

Fall Risk 13

Coming, Mama, to Carry 14

Recurrence 15

[Walking the path of] 16

The Palace 17

"In the old time, they used to putt a Penny in the dead persons mouth" 19

The Child Breaks a Glass of Milk 20

II Ordinary Time

"In your absence there are no mortal banquets." 23

Measure of Ordinary Time 29

For My Mother Whose Mother Is Ill 30

[This week my mother's mother fell. Hemorrhagic stroke.] 31

"let the quick then cast forth the dead" 32

Blood Lines 33

"She died - this was the way she died." 34

Primer 36

III Night Burial

[Quiet & you are not among the] 39

[Look upon your servant] 40

[Thanksgiving I sat with her] 41

[flex to the woods] 42

[My other grandmother has stopped sewing.] 43

[After the rains a path of needles,] 44

[Just wear it] 45

[How to know someone is dying? Check their feet for mottling.] 46

[In the opera, Manon speaks] 47

[Keen & cry out for the] 48

[My husband holds my hand] 49

[My mother fell into a sleep] 50

[For one minute] 51

[She left the room & she stopped breathing] 52

[Enter Mary] 53

[Daughters sing from the backseat] 54

[On foot my daughters aim stiff-arms, a Stop!] 55

[Give me haint blue inside of which] 56

[When she came home] 57

[I am mad at you] 58

[You, she, we, I can't,] 59

[Night burial, a winter sky, a winter ground] 60

[You lie here do] 61

[An ancient loop-someone] 62

[Your mother dies.] 63

IV The Former Object of My Everything

"For this daie your daughter hathe bene bothe alive and deade" 67

Transcendental Étude 68

Gallery 69

Primer 71

To Lay Sod on a Grave 73

The Former Object of My Everything 74

Notes 75

Acknowledgments 77

Editorial Reviews

“Such gratitude for the chance to observe what Kate Bolton Bonnici calls ‘witchspeak,’ wherein she tells us, ‘I deliver a child daily into want.’ Such gratitude to read the lyrics of ‘old stories’ that ‘say burn the skin / of what you’ve become.’ Such gratitude to stand with these poems between Euripides and Homeric hymns and The Midwives Book of 1671, between silence and that space wherein ‘between us every word / is dirt swaddled.’ Every elegy a bloodline and, the poet says, ‘daughter, I lie with you on the crackling chuck pad, burning where your body / opened mine to be born.’ Every elegy is ‘an ancient loop—someone / looking means someone’s gone. / Something unequal / makes its way forward.’ Bonnici's beautiful and moving Night Burial is a daybook for daughters, an elegy for mothers, a lyric work where ‘my mother remembers the echo / from her mother's heels on the hall.’”
—Ilya Kaminsky, author of Deaf Republic and Dancing in Odessa
 

"There is such an ease, a clear precision to her poems, composing a lyric of direct statements packed with nuance and density."
—Rob McClennan's Blog 

From the Publisher