Lapis - Paperback

by Kerri Webster (Author)

A record of visionary experience in the wake of loss

In Lapis, poet Kerri Webster writes into the vast space left by the deaths of three women: her mother, a mentor, and a friend. Using a wide array of lyric forms and meditations, Webster explores matrilineages both familial and poetic, weaving together death, spirituality, women, and a sense of the shifting earth into one "doctrine of Non-linear Revelation."

Elegy

And I was equal to my longing:
the mums blackening;
sorrow a carboned figurine;
the firmament steaming; your ashes
interred in the boulder;
the ugly birds crying dolor dolor dolor;
the sky smoke-choked--what, then,
would you have had be my register?
As the beasts of the field rub their antlers off
with ooh-itch pleasure; as the screen says
You often open around this time; as the grapes
blight: listen: sometimes
we're the pilgrim, sometimes
we're the site.

Author Biography

KERRI WEBSTER (Boise, ID) is the author of the poetry collections The Trailhead, We Do Not Eat Our Hearts Alone, and Grand & Arsenal, the latter of which won the Iowa Poetry Prize. The recipient of awards from the Whiting Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, she was a Visiting Writer-in-Residence at Washington University in St. Louis from 2006-2010. She currently teaches at Boise State University.