Now up at DIAGRAM is my review of Rachel Moritz and Juliet Patterson’s Elementary Rituals/Dirge, two chapbooks brought together with an unusual binding. Stitched dos-à-dos, these works share a back board while their front covers fall on opposite sides of the book. I wrote about Moritz here on this website and Patterson here. Their work, then and now, is formally innovative and lyric in its intensity:
The dos-à-dos bindings has its origins in the prayer book, and Elementary Rituals/Dirge has the reverent quiet and scope of a devotional. Here is a prayer book for despair in which one death speaks to another over a natural bridge: a moment in which two deaths occur, a connection of chance and mortality.