If maps are documents of distance, then Nick Courtright’s
Elegy for the Builder’s Wife is an atlas. Each poem in the collection can complete a chronicle the surveyor’s work cannot — the territories of fog, how trees can become landmarks, the continents chipped from paint. Courtright, navigating the same terrain as Lorca, finds icons of longing, passion, and sacrifice in the liminal spaces, and in the process, he charts what, for the mapmaker, is impossible — the incomplete, the rended, and the influence of time on everything, still or in motion.
Nick Courtright, an Ohio native, lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a music critic and interviewer for the Austinist, and teaches at Southwestern and St. Edward’s Universities. His poetry is forthcoming or has recently appeared in The Southern Review, Boston Review, The Kenyon Review Online, and Beloit Poetry Journal, among numerous others, while his Levis Prize-finalist manuscript,
Likely Fates, is currently seeking a publisher. In his real life, he recently entered fatherhood.
About Blue Hour Press
Blue Hour Press is dedicated to bridging the gap between the beauty and tradition of print with the accessibility and possibility of the web, releasing digital chapbooks that are satisfying, respectable, and innovative. The press publishes eight to ten collections a year, exclusively online, by renowned and emerging poets like John Gallaher, Emily Kendal Frey, Andrew Zawacki, and Alexis Orgera. The aim is to provide compelling, visually arresting books, for free, to anyone.
Elegy for the Builder's Wife by Nick Courtright (direct e-read link)
poetry collection
e-chapbook, 38 pages, free read
released February 23rd, 2010
