Headwaters

Voigt’s slim eighth collection of poetry is defined by a liquid precision. The poems, constructed of long lines and spontaneous rhymes, put Voigt’s technical mastery of verse with no punctuation on full display. Her pieces open without capitalization as though she has burst in on each poem mid-thought: “end of the day daylight subsiding into the trees lights coming on/ in the milking barns.” The simplicity of her titles is deceptive: poems called “Cow,” “Mole,” “Geese,” “Privet Hedge,” and “Bear” begin with these common animals and objects but glide into intimate and fearsome spaces. Voigt regards a chameleon, stating, “I see you do not move unless you need to eat you almost fool/ the mockingbird nearby in a live oak tree flinging out another’s song/ which is me which which is me.” In another poem titled “Noble Dog” she recalls the haunting experience of someone watching her daughter in the bathroom: “we thought when we bathed in the claw-footed tub we could pretend/ we stayed inside the natural world no shutters no shades at night” but after calling the police and tracking the stranger with a dog, “we knew this was a moment of consequence but we couldn’t tell/ whether the world had grown larger or smaller” (Oct.)