The fifth book of poetry by a true poet's poet with a unique mastery of language and experimentation.

In Julie Doxsee’s The Fastening, the permanent imprints of love, childhood, death, and pleasure are elongated, handled delicately, celebrated, puzzled over, all while underpinned by hauntingly vicious origins. Landscapes in the book shift and jolt, melt into snowman slush or gash the flesh with matter-of-fact craters, thorns, rope burns, and rocks.

The poet wants to scrub the sharp peaks with steel wool but recognizes how millions of these violence-borne imprints have ganged up to keep her alive. In The Fastening, bodies are soft sketches that could detonate at the pop of a flashbulb, diffuse into a cloud of vapor, or escape into a small recess with just enough space to breathe.

“The Fastening posits time as an oil, a sap, a skin, a river (of course), as blood—whatever sustains or poisons, muffles or protects, fossilizes or commodifies us. A barb that pierces through to the raw nerve, or a balm that sheaths it. Its poems still the past, present, and future in Doxsee’s crystal ball, her amber deposits, which we must then chuck from the sea cliff. That's a life. Moments released bleed together in the sea, and we go through all this before the rest of the world wakes up. I'm obsessed with this book of days. Oh, baby. These days are golden in their perversity, outwardly blowing wide and returning.”—Danielle Pafunda, author of Spite