Overview

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountain's Four in Hand is both formal and experimental, ranging from lyric romantic and familial narratives to blank verses of reconfigured found text pulled from financial newsletter emails. Language and white space equally captivate with their sparsity and abundance as Mountain pursues the implications of national political identity with intersectional awareness. These poems interrogate our collective complicity in late-stage capitalism, drone warfare, the election of Donald Trump, environmental degradation, mental health crises, and the dawn of Covid-19 through the lens of gay poetic lineage, regionalism, and familial kinships structures. As in all lived experiences, treacheries and triumphs fade in and out of focus and intimacy, heartbreak, travel, eroticism, joy, and quotidian happenings offer character and momentum across non-linear narrative arcs. Through enthralling images, gripping storytelling, and world-building, Four in Handcarves out necessary space for lesbian gaze, speakership, and personhood. From the back corner of a vast, sprawling, yet gorgeous landscape of thought, Mountain's poems beckon us inside.

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9781950774869

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Reviews

Four in Hand applies the gentle pressure of imagination to the possible world. Intimacy and expansiveness, grounded in episodic grace and sensual generosity, fuel Alicia Mountain's work. Her words present us with beauty and allow us to revel in it, despite feeling 'held tight like too much hope.' We are shown emotional and environmental devastation, and given the music to reckon with the painful awareness that transforms best into action, repeated. Four in Hand is a blood rush, a mode of love in language crafted with care and immersion and insistence, harnessing the power of 'a swarm/keeping quiet when I want to howl.' --Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne Praise for High Ground Coward Alicia Mountain looks at every tiny thing very closely, and in doing that conveys the big picture of a vast inner life with marvelous clarity and depth. Her voice is intimate, brash, always precise, heartbreaking in both its vulnerability and its authority. These poems are carried away by both lust and intelligence. This poet understands desire: its expression lets loose while giving form. This book doesn't detour, it goes right to and through the overpowered, relentless heart of its speaker and the reader is struck through too, and good. High Ground Coward is a dazzling debut by a rare, true talent. -- Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize High Ground Coward is raw and intimate. Alicia Mountain looks at what she loves and that foreground blurs into a backdrop of practical constraints and injustices. The poems press at those boundaries where desire starts to interfere with the opportunities of others and cast an unsparing eye on the cost. This is a book of hard, shifting, dreamlike gems. -- Joanna Klink, author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy Alicia Mountain's debut collection of poetry High Ground Coward, winner of the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize, concerns itself with what it means to live in our world as a sensitive, observing person, one who desires and is desired, cares and is cared for, engages with the material of one's surroundings and is also alienated from it. The book opens with the line: My desires are berries because they are small and many and truly this book is full of little poems, little promises of exploding flavor and possible satiation. -- Emily Brown, Poetry Northwest Ultimately, High Ground Coward reads like a survival manual, a bulwark against a society that would flatten and silence queer women and deny the connections we forge. -- Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal At the heart of the collection is an insistence on personal, lived, quotidian experience. In her descriptions, she insists on dismantling the hierarchy between the sublime and the tangible, giving as much attention to a pair of underwear as she does to the lofty concept of love. In refusing to look away from the problems in everyday life, in the self, and in seeming moments of happiness, the poems are often harrowing. But a peculiar quality of her poems is that, even in such lacerating moments, they still pulse with an optimism. They entreat the reader to see the joy in everything, big or small. -- Justin Wymer, The Rumpus The result is a collection of poems that are frank and often funny and that fluctuate dizzyingly between reality and reflection, concrete ideas and whimsy. With a strong ear for beautiful language, Mountain at times indulges the reader with lovely, traditional, and/or abstract lines of description. But within a beat, she returns you to earth, with lines that can make you laugh out loud... -- Sarah Aswell, Missoula Independent

“Four in Hand applies the gentle pressure of imagination to the possible world. Intimacy and expansiveness, grounded in episodic grace and sensual generosity, fuel Alicia Mountain’s work. Her words present us with beauty and allow us to revel in it, despite feeling ‘held tight like too much hope.’ We are shown emotional and environmental devastation, and given the music to reckon with the painful awareness that transforms best into action, repeated. Four in Hand is a blood rush, a mode of love in language crafted with care and immersion and insistence, harnessing the power of ‘a swarm/keeping quiet when I want to howl.’” —Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne “In Alicia Mountain’s Four in Hand, the speaker tells us that the book is ‘a monument to touch,’ but more pointedly, it plays with an erotics of geography where thunder ‘spanks the hills,’ where one is encouraged to ‘drink the tidal push,’ where ‘tectonic shifts are underway.’ What is Mountain telling the reader about a storm that cannot be felt until the moment we feel ‘wrung out’ by its torrent? About a howl that cannot relieve what a beloved has buried within them? In these four sonnet crowns, each masterfully executed with their own distinct rhetorical and linguistic logics, Mountain enacts an alternative to catharsis; posits a kind of anti-catharsis. There is no rising action and then relief, instead Mountain interpolates what happens when the world does not change, but repeats, and insists on its tired holding patterns. Four in Hand doesn't simply tackle the failings of global health industries, the precarity of queer spaces, or how the language of risk and resilience end up recoding bodies through capital, it commands something else of ‘our sharp parts.’ It points us to an elsewhere of possibilities.”  —Megan Fernandes, author of Good Boys

Four in Hand applies the gentle pressure of imagination to the possible world. Intimacy and expansiveness, grounded in episodic grace and sensual generosity, fuel Alicia Mountain's work. Her words present us with beauty and allow us to revel in it, despite feeling 'held tight like too much hope.' We are shown emotional and environmental devastation, and given the music to reckon with the painful awareness that transforms best into action, repeated. Four in Hand is a blood rush, a mode of love in language crafted with care and immersion and insistence, harnessing the power of 'a swarm/keeping quiet when I want to howl.' -Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne

Author Information

Alicia Mountain's debut collection,High Ground Coward (Iowa), was selected by Brenda Shaughnessy to win the Iowa Poetry Prize. Her chapbook, Thin Fire (BOAAT Press), was selected by Natalie Diaz. Dr. Mountain was a Clemens Doctoral Fellow at the University of Denver and the 2020-21 Artist in Residence at the University of Central Oklahoma. Mountain serves on the Board of Directors for Foglifter Journal and is a Consulting Editor at the Kenyon Review. She is a lesbian poet, based in New York City where she teaches at Columbia University and in the Writer's Foundry MFA program at St. Joseph's College.

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