Glossary of Snow

Exquisite precision and thrift of language and the pure pleasure of its mouth music mark A Glossary of Snow as a stunning poetic debut. But these poems do much more than reveal Feral Willcox's assured mastery of craft. They emerge from deep interior silence to put us in touch with worlds of meaning that extend beyond our consciousness. Numberless forms of snow, each like a moment's clear utterance, cross psychic and sensuous realms, returning us to ancient ways of knowing. Trauma, exile, regeneration-in this wise, original collection, life flows across it all.

-Joan Larkin, author of Old Stranger

A Glossary of Snow is one of the most beautiful books of poems I have ever read, and no doubt will ever read. Even as this book places Willcox among the best lyric poets the world over-think, Tranströmer, Calvino, Simic, Plath, Sappho-her language is so utterly inventive, so evocative, and so strikingly individual, she is, like all the greats, a poet unto herself. A poet's poet.

-Melanie Almeder, author of On Dream Street

Feral Willcox's poetry collection, A Glossary of Snow, offers the luster and brightness of a gloss in deceptive garb. Willcox's sixty-four entries for snow reveal worlds marked by chill whiteness, yet enticing in imagery, sound, and sense: "The silence, when it comes, terrifies the mind, a silence/ of snow falling on snow falling on snow. But we are not/ cold...." Words, like flakes of snow, gather and form shapes; the reader remains anything but cold.

-Meredith Rose, author of Lesbian Neurotica

Feral Willcox makes up words for snow in a valiant effort to stop the erosion of the language of the natural world. The poems in this book delineate with subtlety the facets of crystalline experience.

-Alice Teeter, author of Here, at the End

Snow, in many guises, the blanket, the threat, the cover-up, the comforter. We have great writing here.

-Kathleen Culver, author of Finding the Well

This collection is an invention of snows in the stunning language of confessional poetry, delicate and sharp, gorgeous and chilling. At its core is the suffering of women frozen into the lies of capitalist culture, Launching from the work of Rich and Plath, Feral Willcox extends into a new realm of music and image, of sudden hallucinatory surprise, of extraordinary concoction-the new brew of a new witch.

-Victoria Boynton, author of Contraptions