Soft Volcano

At the core of Libby Burton's highly anticipated debut poetry collection, Soft Volcano, are the vivid details underpinning the relationships we hold dearly in our lives. A feminist force, highly wrought and impressionistic, surges from these intensely lyric distillations that show us what we look like standing in the hallways of the museum of lost love—where we stand, how our hair looks, what marks of woe and time are left upon the body after love is strained or abandoned. Soft Volcano is a book of vivid and crushing lyric poems, each one a swell of danger, beauty, and truth. Playful, penetrating, and often operating by aural law, the poems in That Our Eyes Be Rigged take shape as one word quickly transforms into another via sonic slippages. These fluid transformations simultaneously reveal the worlds within a word and build correspondences between unlikely terms{u2014}highlighting the very notion of exchange between the linguistic and the physical realm. Maxwell{u2019}s poems are both generous and demanding. While the operating intelligence behind the poems incessantly questions how one makes a life in language (and vice versa), the poems themselves enact arrangements that might make such pathways possible. These restless and inventive poems provide feats of language that lead us to agree with Maxwell{u2019}s speaker when she says: Our awe is our confession