Sidestep Catapult by Anne-Adele Wight

This book is so good that I keep wanting to write, “Dear Anne-Adele Wight, I love your poems and…” No, that’s not right. “Dear Anne-Adele Wight, you change me with your poems…” No, that’s silly. “Dear poet, look what you have done to me. Leading me out to the spindly forests of inclination, barely ready for the foreign elements surging from your poetry, your poetry I am surrounded by and in love with, and live in fear of, how, do, you, do, this, to, me?” With love.

––CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank (Wave Books)

Sidestep Catapult is a deeply empathetic and superbly special book. Anne-Adele Wight’s phrasings perform subtle critiques that articulate exigencies along social curves. Biometric cues pop up. The quotidian is presented as melting images of muted strangeness in the form of sound crystals, uremic frost, fault lines, and thyroid necklaces. Wight unravels the multiplicity of contexts that gives discursive life a present and presence.

––Brenda Iijima

Anne-Adele Wight is the Great Mother Earth of poetry in Philadelphia. She loves, provides for, worries about, beautifies, and cries over. Enter Sidestep Catapult and prepare to be transported, rewarded, and transformed. Urgently, Wight’s poems burn like the wisest of tigers––the tiger of all time––protecting our nights while an “anti-gravity disco ball” hangs overhead. And don’t be surprised if this lush debut leaves you grasping at life with “four thumbs,” for that’s the kind of mysterious, awareness-altering power that Anne-Adele Wight possesses.

—Paul Siegell, author of wild life rifle fire

In Anne-Adele Wight‘s monumental collection, Sidestep Catapult, she maneuvers time and space to bring us to a new sense of being. With fresh and gorgeous language, she makes a world where letters and colors come together, where “every letter an element/each element its opposite/ each opposite a color/ every color on fire,” where “Birds land on an island to become black flowers,” and where in a “family cave/…hunted animals flank us running in paint.” And she bends our own world into hers so as to show us a truth where “love is grief,” where a sense of longing for a place more beautiful than this world always uncovers the next one.

––Dorothea Lasky, author of Black Life (Wave Books)

Anne-Adele Wight lives in Philadelphia, works with the series Poets and Prophets, and writes as much as she can. She talks to plants and animals and considers herself lucky when they talk back. She is worried about the fate of the biosphere and hopes for a reversal, but doesn’t count on it.

Book Information:

· Paperback: 44 pages
· Binding: Perfect-Bound
· Publisher: BlazeVOX [books]
· ISBN: 978-1-60964-073-6