Standing in the Flock of Connections

Poems that skitter between life and death, “sleep and hurry,” at their heart a kind of tender panic. By turns funny, frank, mysterious, and heartbreaking, Standing in the Flock of Connections, Heather Cadsby’s fifth collection of poetry, is one hundred proof associative thought. These poems testify to the human mind’s capacity to “do”—taking into account all of the performative, causal, athletic, and sexual connotations of that verb. Many of them come in on an overheard conversation or monologue—mid-fight, mid-stride—and the absent details and specifics often function to open up a space for things to become other things, for the flock of connections to swarm. / I love a pentagram. You can draw that thing / all day freehand, sloppy. Five-star / hotels, movies, generals. Throw it around / like it was a love number, which it is. / Cut an apple horizontally, there it is. / Draw one inside its centre pentagon and so on / nesting smaller forever. Till you call it quits / and start singing Holy etc. / (from “Sunday geometer”)