Poem of the Week | August 21, 2017
Alison Rollins: “Character Building”
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Alison C. Rollins, born and raised in St. Louis, currently works as the Librarian for Nerinx Hall. She is the second prizewinner of the 2016 James H. Nash Poetry contest and a finalist for the 2016 Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in American Poetry Review, Hayden’s Ferry Review, Meridian, The Offing, Poetry, The Poetry Review, River Styx, Solstice, TriQuarterly, Tupelo Quarterly, Vinyl, and elsewhere. A Cave Canem and Callaloo Fellow, she is also a 2016 recipient of the Poetry Foundation’s Ruth Lilly and Dorothy Sargent Rosenberg Fellowship. Learn more at her website.
Character Building
Author’s Note:
I wrote this poem after a neighborhood walk with my dog, during which he had wandered away from me to sniff the carcass of a decomposing bird. With the dog and I staring at the bird in the grass, I wondered or rather tried to understand how the baby bird had died. I was curious about my need to give the dead bird meaning. This poem grapples with this desire for an underlying truth, even if the truth is constructed in a self-serving/self-soothing fashion. Borrowing the line, “Say that the River turns, and turn the River” from Gwendolyn Brooks’ “The Sermon on the Warpland,” this poem interrogates a faith in language to change or manipulate the course of events in relationship to our understanding of the life cycle. The poem explores the way the power of language itself functions as a historical belief system or architecture of identity. Ultimately, it begs the questions: What does it mean to build character or grow into a life? How much control does one have regarding their future? What losses can we withstand?
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