The Rumpus reviews The Glacier’s Wake

“In the same way that a mausoleum door bars entrance to the living, thus emphasizing the cemented barrier between the alive and the dead, Katy Didden’s debut poetry collection, The Glacier’s Wake, begins with a titular frontispiece which challenges the reader to work for admission into the landscape of grief she creates. Establishing the text’s most crucial metaphor of the glacier as a symbol of grief and the grieving process itself, Didden observes that accepting death is like “[waiting] in a cell of air/for the year to melt each brittle inch/into what’s green” (1). So, too, must the reader wait for progress—of both the passage of time and the turning of pages—in order to fully access the work’s complete purpose. From the broadest holistic perspective, The Glacier’s Wake serves two chief purposes: as a tripartite textual representation of the individual’s experience with trauma as well as a meditation on the process of living, the collection acts as both a quasi-biography of anyone who has experienced grief and a diagram of the varied planes of humanity which construct the awkward shape of being.
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Read the rest of the review at The Rumpus.

The Glacier’s Wake by Katy Didden