HEIDI RESZIES
artist + poet
Of Water & Other Soft Constructions
Anhinga Press
“Wake up,” commands Heidi Reszies, in this fine-spun collection, “we’re here.” Of Water & Other Soft Constructions introduces a poet who can turn her lines like an Olympic luger, getting more out of each breath than you might think she ought. Verbs tense toward now; nouns collectivize the dull promise of universality. An almost-narrative moment begins to form, then refuses us. Find futurity in the way Reszies forevers each line into “incipient bloom,” in how she engages her solemnity of white space through sound and syntax. Recollections become “museum” while “moon phases” are a thing one becomes. Compound images enchant our expectations. The poet shows her work, “a process not a fixed condition,” as analog thread stitching toward the reader’s own location. Is this her magic? In naming her constraints, Reszies activates a kind of liberation that lets us really reckon with what poems can do.
—Samiya Bashir,
author of Field Theories