MORGAN (A LYRIC)

ISBN: 978-1-938900-40-2
Publication date: Spring 2022
92 pages, 5.3” x 7”
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SYNOPSIS

Morgan (a Lyric) accumulates impressions of the complex emotional landscape of a relationship in which one of the lovers is facing early death through cystic fibrosis. Rather than a more traditional memoir that results in an epiphany, the memoir is fashioned from brief narrative episodes, patterned sentence collages, and notes on cognition and perception. Shifting repeatedly in time and location—from a hospital dialysis unit to sex in a parked car to a romantic writers’ Baja retreat to an ICU following lung transplant—a portrait builds of a love lived under the intensifying pressure of mortality.

EXCERPT

On the way to the hospital, over and over I imagine the smell, the human damp of sleep, of his girlfriend’s wrinkled pink teddy when they kissed in his doorway.

You were a dog in another life, he says. I think you’re still part dog.

Rumpled pillows: evidence of brief encounters with nothingness.

After the child’s memorial, a friend’s father said he’d never seen anything so beautiful as his son’s unmade bed that morning.

So who’s the patient here? the resident asks. The two of us in jeans and T-shirts, sitting in chairs and plucking cards from a pile on the bed between.

And you, he asks of me, are you his father?

The conductor’s first baton beat is to count the silence.

On 3 Northeast, I note how small, how young, the other cystic fibrosis patients appear, like underfed children. Pale, masked, gloved, in blue hospital gowns, pushing IV poles on wheels, their arms and legs little more than poles themselves.

To touch a boundary, to feel a limit.

PRAISE

For as much as we mourn after a loss, Morgan (a Lyric) is an elegy for a lover in the extended and slow acts of tenderness, pain, and joy that leads up to the eventual loss, specifically of the late poet Morgan Lucas Schuldt. Boyer Rickel has written one long breath, an inhale and exhale as an offering to his lover whose lungs were failing. In a collage of flaws, gaps, and moments of heightened awareness, time is both suspended, yet speeding forward at an ever ravaging pace. Nothing can prepare us for our lover’s departure, witnessing their decline, the effervescence of each moment is exploded to sublime proportions. And yet the softness of touch, “inhaling as I kiss his neck,” the tendrils of care, “why do you do this…why do you take care of me,” is a testament to the brief yet bright angles of love that make a simple moment replete with endless joy. I treasure this book. I, too, mourn for Morgan though I never knew him. It makes me hold those near me closer.

—Marcello Hernandez Castillo
2020 Gold Line Press Nonfiction Chapbook Contest Judge

Author of CHILDREN OF THE LAND

AUTHOR

Boyer Rickel’s previous publications include two book-length poetry collections, remanence (Parlor Press) and arreboles (Wesleyan), a memoir-in-essays, Taboo (Wisconsin), as well as three poetry chapbooks, Tempo Rubato (Green Linden Press), Musick’s Hand-maid and reliquary (both from Seven Kitchens Press). In addition to poetry fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and Arizona Commission on the Arts, his lyric essays have recently received awards from Prairie Schooner and Tupelo Quarterly. He taught in the University of Arizona Creative Writing Program for twenty years.

DESIGNER

Book design by Sandra Rosales.