Published by the Center for Literary Publishing at Colorado State University
Winner of the 2004 Colorado Prize for Poetry
"In agile lines that canyon-open, exposing an unfashionable, edgy sinceritas, Rusty Morrison explores the intertwining of life and language in quiet, gorgeous meditations inflected by barn swallows. Whethering leads us into a shapely attentiveness to those particular others human, animal, vegetal that situate our affectual and perceptual experience and call us to find our 'way again and again/ outside the one thing.' With trenchant political and philosophical repercussions, Morrison's poems cut through the constraints of systematic thought to articulate gestural meanings, powerful rivulets of suggestion and sensibility that reopen the world and wound of being."
—Forrest Gander, author of Torn Awake and Science & Steepleflower
"What happens when the sensual world interacts with the word, when knowledge bows gratefully to perception, is Whethering. Such a brief, rare, unexpected music ensues: the artery / of a lark's cry."
—Gillian Conoley, author of Lovers in the Used World and Beckon
"Whethering demands that its reader wake into what are already only the traces of language's making. From its first page, this book variously implores and compels language to move from desire to the real, 'the hind leg of every thought / always crouched, / a leap / to outlast the visible / this stalking sky. This trying to fix / with intention' is a dangerous endeavor, but Morrison is alert, gutsy, and agile."
—Elizabeth Robinson, author of Apprehend and Pure Descent
