A Vertigo Book

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Tenth Gate Prize for Poetry. Carolyn Guinzio's A VERTIGO BOOK reads like a condensed novel in three parts. We have 'V' a woman alone at the end of a life, her 'light skeleton' nearly lifting 'right up off the earth.' V's loneliness is our loneliness, yet Guinzio describes her with such care, we find ourselves mesmerized, keeping intimate company with the details of her almost-not life: snow, deer, apple, mirror, lake. It 'hurts us to see, ' but we want to see, to find out how it is there at the very edge of being. When we leave her, it's to draw even closer to Guinzio's impeccably observant eye. She enters the natural world with all the passionate attention of a lover, and we follow. In a final staccato section, we find Jenny Mentink, a settler somewhere in America's prairie. How is Jenny's story also V's? How might their lostness be America's lostness? 'What ground is this?' they ask, we ask, as we enter the long American story of un-belonging to this land that holds us only briefly.--Julie Carr