Publisher's Synopsis
Building upon the long-line, lyric narrative style of Deborah Fries’s first volume of poetry, this collection addresses familiar themes of place, love, mortality, and modern life. Place plays a major role in this collection: from the ennui of a Massachusetts suburb and the transience of a town in shale country to the fresh joy found on a Minnesota hiking trail, Fries nurtures a sensibility shaped by surroundings. Love, however, is most often out of place or ill-timed in book, where dolphins shape-shift their way into women’s beds, bucks drive does into oncoming traffic and men are as habituated as elephants. Love and loved ones are both constant and ephemeral in these poems, as the body becomes less reliable, friends are lost and yet, as in the field of everything, they remain with us. The poems inThe Bright Field of Everythingstrive to understand a world that is made thinner by technology, richer through memory and attentiveness, and visual through words chosen like paints.
