Riddle Field: Poems

by Derek Thomas Dew

Overview

Winner of the 2019 Interim Test Site Poetry Series Prize

"Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry." —Publisher's Weekly
 
The beautifully crafted poems in Riddle Field explore two parallel themes, the impact of the impending destruction of a dam on a small town and the trauma of sexual abuse and eventual recovery from it. This work focuses on the environment, human and physical, in which the loss of nature and innocence is born and calls attention to the many ways we create both intimacy and distance when trauma is hidden or denied. Derek Thomas Dew’s language is harsh, honest, and sometimes heartbreaking. His poems capture the confusion and fatigue that must be navigated for a victim of abuse to piece himself back together and the internal strife that comes with carry-ing a traumatic secret that can no longer be ignored. 

Rich with unforgettable images and the quiet strength of hard-won survival, Riddle Field tackles the complex process of achieving self-awareness and recovery in the wake of profound trauma.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781948908771
Publisher:	University of Nevada Press
Publication date:	10/06/2020
Series:	Test Site Poetry Series
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	64
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Derek Thomas Dew poems have appeared in Interim, Twyckenham Notes, The Maynard, The Curator, Two Hawks Quarterly, and Hawaii Pacific Review. He lives in Oregon.

Read an Excerpt

I'M WALTER

Some stretch their legs out and place their feet far to claim domain.

Some keep their legs together and their knees half-topple to one side.

Some cross their legs and are not unpleasant to speak with.
 

I’ve made towns of fathers out of small afraid boys
 
who peel the stickers off my model helicopters

while my force has no beginning and no end,

an action which has always been a memory

like an average man in a town.

*

I had wanted to give

if not mine when was he 

of my little intensities 

a now I never know

what in the flesh I had wanted

to share until broken like flesh

a fever tans his wrist

rich in dead yawn of a trash truck

moaning through an alley

on the last day of California.
 

                       

Table of Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 

PART I.

Town in the Radio 10
Mainland 12
Far From Walter 13
Wet Down 14
Old Carver 15
Confluence 16
Yellow Corner 17
The Nameless 18
Winchuck 19

PART II.

I’m Walter 21
Baby Prince 22
Articles 23
He Ring 24
Grin Burnt 25
Little Bread 26
Last November’s Burn 27
The Mermaid Club 28
Soft Thieves 29
Blue Masking Tape 30

PART III.

Gambit 32
Big Drown 34
Inosculation 35
Short Leg 36
Border Huts 37
Low Bite 38
From Trains 39
My Helicopters 40
Light Us Down     41
That Clapping 42
Cat Root 43
Ring Up Dawn 44

PART IV.

Griddle Six 46
Liar’s Dice 47
Tunnel Music 48
Watchcoat 49
Ducksing 50
Placeholder 51
Trouble Knuckle 52
Elkstone 53
The Allowance 54
Cairn 55
Topples Cake 56

 
PART V.

Between Churches 58
Land That Knows Hands 59
Cursorial 60
Reliquary 1 61
Reliquary 2 62
Reliquary 3 63
Reliquary 4 64
Very 66

Afterward 68
Notes 69

Editorial Reviews

10/19/2020

Dew debuts with a thought-provoking contemplation of the role of memory in shaping the present moment. In sweeping, Whitmanesque lines, the poems read as a conversation between a past and present self, or a dialogue between parts of consciousness. “I’ve hated that creek since I was three apples high. It’s incapable,” the speaker writes in response to his own description of a creek in the poem’s opening line. Dew’s innovative approach to polyvocality relies less on exposition or narration than on his choices in form. “And if the hill is still blue smoke when the snow climbs to counters, we’ll surely freeze,” his speaker warns the character who voiced the preceding, nonitalicized line. Throughout, Dew engages ambitious philosophical questions while building narrative tension, maintaining a riveting sort of mystery: “the moon outside, an unknowing.” By leaving much unsaid, the collection cultivates and sustains an aura of inventive possibility. Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

"The collection cultivates and sustains an aura of inventive possibility. Dew is an exciting and complex new voice in contemporary poetry."
—Publisher's Weekly

"Riddle Field is replete with lines that fuse unlike dimensions, relentlessly juxtaposing realms and ideas that create a new kind of knowing. Here, collage and stream of consciousness reveal the interconnectedness inherent in all things. Each line: a deep noticing that can only be chanced upon, relentless and sublime."
—Sherwin Bitsui, author of Dissolve and Flood Song

"In Riddle Field we are made witness to a miracle of the new millennium: America rising out of its actual soil, covered in flowers and malice, music and weaponry, into a body wholly new. These poems propose a spaciousness in what Shakespeare once called "the wide gap of time". They refresh and reprimand us all at once.”
—Donald Revell, author of The English Boat and Drought-Adapted Vine
 

From the Publisher