Gods of Water and Air

Rachel Dacus evokes painting and mythology with equal parts grace and lyricism in her new collection, linking her father's struggle with Alzheimer's with Claude Monet, and the mostly kind (but sometimes cataclysmic) landscapes of Northern California with world politics and her own search for spirituality. Dacus' book will invite you to journey with her through adventures in art museums, pie baking, and eagle-spotting. ~ Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess and...
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Rachel Dacus evokes painting and mythology with equal parts grace and lyricism in her new collection, linking her father's struggle with Alzheimer's with Claude Monet, and the mostly kind (but sometimes cataclysmic) landscapes of Northern California with world politics and her own search for spirituality. Dacus' book will invite you to journey with her through adventures in art museums, pie baking, and eagle-spotting.
~ Jeannine Hall Gailey, author of Becoming the Villainess and She Returns to the Floating World
In Gods of Water and Air, Rachel Dacus turns a painterly eye onto both the nooks and crannies of our world - "hints of rose madder in the cerulean," a palm tree's "rigid, rattling arguments" - and "the blue immensity" that holds us all. Though she uses metaphor in nearly every poem, Dacus is secretly a literalist, searching for the thing itself, what cannot be represented, what is "not yet spoiled." This book will show you, over and over, that true freedom, to an artist's daughter, is "Never to be framed."
~ Molly Fisk, author of The More Difficult Beauty
In this richly textured and shockingly luminous collection, Rachel Dacus directs her steady gaze on art's meticulous and sometimes maddening labor, on the deep grief and explosive beauty of a daughter's attachment to her fading father, and on love's latent withering and re-blossoming. Each poem in this collection is masterfully written, brimming with observation's ardor. She asks us questions that are to be savored. She begs us to grasp time, rein it in, and let it go: Be a net./Catch the world by letting the knots slip. Ultimately, her poems are esctatic intersections/explorations of time, space, and memory.
~ Deema Shehabi, author of Thirteen Departures from the Moon