Angel Bones

Rapturous and heartbreaking, Kusnetz’s posthumous second collection (after Small Hours) grieves both her own impending death from cancer and the decay of Earth due to humanity’s negligence. Kusnetz offers a masterful examination of the minute details and baffling unknowns that sculpt our lives, excavating the liminal and giving meaning to a bleak existence through beauty found between the physical universe and cosmic energy of the soul: “Here is where our heart fires start.../ The singularity’s inky nothingness from which everything in a/ glory of harmonic dissonance bursts.” She writes about the paradox of existence, “the future controls the past...// again—we control the past by viewing it/ from the future,” contemplating our mysterious reality through a lens of antithesis: “Stars are blinding, silver/ nitrate reminders of the light// inside our souls. Dark matter/ is the expression of sonic joy.” With scintillating nuance, Kusnetz’s animate vision of the world is one that resurrects everyday awe: “at dawn, the sun// takes its burning claw and parts the day’s/ cool skin with promise...// Dusk, like an incautious mouse, creeps in,/ sweeps in the blue of slate...// day/ forged into night, thought upon its anvil.” Kusnetz absorbs “heaven’s vibrations” and endows the secular world with a divinity ubiquitous in nature, body, and soul, resulting in a work of pure alchemy. (May)