The past wants you back. It wants you to leave
whatever you’re doing now:
eating oysters, brushing your hair,
and return to the scenes where
you were already yourself.
***
…The past needs you.
Every day someone dies
and, with them, all the scenes
from those rooms.
from “The Past Wants You Back”
Winner of the thirteenth annual Dogfish Head Poetry Prize Book, Faith Shearin’s Orpheus, Turning takes that moment before Orpheus loses Eurydice a second and final time and applies it outward to mythologize her own life and act as a lens to interpret a broad array of both factual and speculative subject matter. Alongside historical and familial figures, dinosaurs, aliens, and Cain all seamlessly make an appearance at their own moments of truth.
Rhiannon Thorne 