Cistern Latitudes

Cistern Latitudes: small descents into spaces and moments that once witnessed tectonic shifts in destiny that are now as silent and still as subterranean pools of water, clear and dark and carrying the truth that life and the world may have lost its way, that tragedy may linger in the corners of our past, but there are still latitudes and geographies out there that harbor safe, calm, and magical futures if we look for them.  

James H Duncan is the editor of Hobo Camp Review, a former editor at Writer's Digest, and the author of Proper Etiquette in the Slaughterhouse Line, Both Ways Home, We Are All Terminal But This Exit Is Mine, Vacancy, Nights Without Rain, and Tributaries, among other books of poetry and fiction. He resides in upstate New York but travels widely to review indie bookstores for his blog, The Bookshop Hunter. For more of his poetry and essays, visit www.jameshduncan.com.

"The poems in Cistern Latitudes are infused with the elements-rain, fading light, oceans, snow, damp wood-as they affect and reflect discordant human relationships, reminding us love might not last, but memories linger. There's a place where sunsets never quite go away and dawn doesn't come, a place on ruled paper, history scrawled in pencil in cursive. The subjects in the poems are half shadowed, half lit. Indoors yet exposed. Together yet disconnected. Half asleep. Trapped behind window glass. Struggling to rectify constructed human lives against a natural world they both adore and fear. Straining to sustain love knowing full well it is ephemeral, inconsequential. [T]he sun sets and keeps setting, a tidal wave of night crossing the globe...bringing exhaustion and loneliness to small rented rooms, bringing light pollution to endless downtowns, bringing 10,000 people to...an airport terminal, a jet stream of strangers using the same space to rest, to regroup, to move forward. The specters of stone, water, earth are ever-present-supporting unreliably from below, gurgling with discontented erosion. Are you there now?/am I? alone as the waves overlap?//ghosts conjoined by time and place,/the dacite rocks, igneous volcanic//as you were, as you forever are."-Kerry Trautman, author of Unknowable Things and Irregulars