Quiet
out from The New School University Press, 2013
winner of The New School Chapbook Award Series in poetry, selected by Matthea Harvey
"Quiet is a deeply evocative poetic sequence that charts, with uncanny elliptical precision, the coming of age of a child and the attendant textures of consciousness and sensual experience that resonate with and from that experience, while at the same time exploring issues of love and maternal lineage. Overall, it is a sequence rife with enchantment; yet it always takes care to root itself in the palpable, quotidian world. This is a poetry of the movements and textures of mind and consciousness as much as, if not more so, than of outward action and the body."
– Laurie Sheck
"If one were to send a postcard back through time to one’s childhood, it might slip through the mail slot in a cloud of fog, the stamp curling to reveal a secret message written behind it. On the reverse side, is that a photograph taken through a lens smeared with Vaseline or a watercolor? These are the kind of imaginings spurred by Morhardt-Goldstein’s poems, lyrics that paint with precise description, then shimmer and dissolve into another world constructed via simile - 'time will get away from us like line'. "
– Matthea Harvey
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Read publications from quiet: we like possibility, Levee says let’s go down to the river, the house understands --->
Of the house what wooden beams, what belly of a ship, the ports of glass
where poured the rain like light and, holding,
patchwork-armed, our mother-with-chameleon-eyes.
Before we knew of loss.
Before like flock the colors and the paintings flew the house black-wild, half-sick,
and we into our room the window watched
how changed its view.
*
In the tall grass, in the weft of our clothes a darkness [after] in the silence,
and the glass leaves, and our palms
as a soiledbed bloody.
Oh the perfume of our mouth and his face upturning;
oh the sharp sucking of his marble teeth.
