Four in Hand

(Paperback)

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Description

Comprised of four heroic crowns of sonnets, Alicia Mountains 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.

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 Mountains 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 Mountains 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

Author Bio

Alicia Mountains 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 Writers Foundry MFA program at St. Josephs College.