Selected by Mary Jo Bang as the 2019 Oversound Chapbook Prize Winner

Echoing the 24 frames per second that create the perception of movement in film, Excursion’s 24 poems ask how to push forward what’s static. Set between two times and spaces—a couple in a hotel room, and a brother and a sister on a boat—these poems explore the tension contained in the double meaning of the word “excursion”: the fixity of a route and the possibility of departing from it.

“Excursion constructs a brilliant cinematic vessel out of the limits of a room, the grip of a camera, the displacement of language, the multiplicities lost in translation, the relief of an ocean without anchors. It is challenging and haunted in its reach.”

—ALINA STEFANESCU, Gasher Journal

Excerpt:  

There’s a direct relationship between my brother and the sea
water, body
he springs, he splashes.
I’m beached on the seashore
if I bring my foot closer
the water recedes
what thing is there
between all things and me.