Theory of Impact

In Theory of Impact, Lisa Sullivan uncovers the long aftermath of her father's military service-its fear, tenderness, and bewildering intimacies-without accusation or explanation, even as other absences such as childlessness move quietly through the book, their contours felt in the life around them. The poems unfold through startling imagery and associations: a father draws maps in pencil, which he would "erase, erase, erase"; a shell lifted from the shore holds "its aperture dark." Only in the closing poems, when Sullivan encounters her father's Marine Corps letters once sent home, does another history emerge: mosquitoes, rifles mottled with rust, the rigid discipline of combat drills, and the place where men are taught to kill. The book's seemingly scattered histories converge, pressing inward, until what was lost reclaims its rightful place, returning to the speaker "again, part of me."

-Dzvinia Orlowsky, author of Those Absences Now Closest and Bad Harvest.