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Show HONORS PROGRAM SPRING 2007 Abigail M. Yearsley 135 As Living Stones Abigail M. Yearsley (William A. Hoffmann) Department of English University of Utah My work began as an open field with the final intent being the creation of a unified book. It is composed primarily of a series of poems as well as some short prose and fiction pieces. As I began exploring the range of my own creative interests I found myself often slithering belly to the ground toward a dangerous and yet crucial precipice. I crouched at the edge of the Kiss, and stared into the tender violence with hooked fingers holding to poetic form and velocity as a guard rail. My poems are an exploration of the Kiss, the moment of vital breath in the meeting between earth and heaven, swamp and sky, physical and spiritual. As I started to narrow my perspective, my poetry began to focus on bringing voice to sensation, the tactility of the desire to ascend and yet slog through deep earth. The moment of the kiss is always longed for, the glimpse of eternity from the brutality of the succulent swamp. Yet, in that touch, that brief and tender collision of Spirit and Body pain is inevitable, violence the consummation. In writing I explore worship from the mire and the dust, God reaching for the sweltering buzz of this planet, and the terrifying, passionate moment of their intersection in holy agony. In carving out the poems, which would eventually become “AS LIVING STONESâ€, I found the Kiss to be a journey. Clawing up from the quagmire of human proprioception and desire to breathe spirit in the desert, I’ve wandered into the air, the light, and felt the cliff sinking away. Language has become the pathway, the Kiss the destination, and yet also a second descent. |