Magnificent Desolation - Softcover

Heather Cox is the founding editor of Ghost Ocean Magazine and the handmade chapbook press Tree Light Books. Her poetry has been published in Barrelhouse, Bodega, Indiana Review, The Pinch, Pinwheel, RHINO, and elsewhere, while her interviews and reviews have been published in Chicago Review of Books, Ghost Ocean, Mid-American Review, and Toad Suck Review. She is the author of two other chapbooks, Mole People (BatCat Press) and Echolocation (dancing girl press). An Arkansas native, Heather spent the better half of the last decade living in Chicago, where she was awarded a Luminarts Cultural Foundation of Chicago fellowship. She now lives in northern Colorado with her wife and their two dogs and can be found online at looklookhere.tumblr.com.

InMagnificent Desolation, the speaker and theircompanionfind themselves plagued with fever dreams, dust, meteorites, and theabsence of atmosphere (in more ways than one). Make no mistake, this book is a love letter-a love letter to the cosmos, flush with breathtaking imagery, but also a love letter to heartbreak, to the unbearable silence at the end of love. Heather Cox crafts that heartbreak amidst sublime wonder and with a captivating and tension-filled loneliness. These poems will lift you as high as theMoon, and drop you back down to Earth just as quickly, with a single perfect word. Heather Cox proves, poem by poem, line by line, that sometimes desolation can be magnificent, that even heartbreak, in the right hands, can be beautiful. -Timothy Moore, City Lit Books Heather Cox opens Magnificent Desolation with "We Were Tired of Living on Earth," but these poems prove the opposite-a celebration basking in the beauty of this third planet. Poets are always dragging the moon into poems, but Cox takes us there. We, as readers, live on the moon. I refuse to believe that these poems are metaphors-I need to believe that Cox has transported up there in the black. How do we ever know what we had till we've left it, milling around up there in the moon-dust? -Joshua Young, author of The Holy Ghost People"