Field of Vision

From National Poetry Series Competition winner Stephanie Horvath, a haunting, dreamlike odyssey through the landscapes and ethos of America

In Field of Vision, we travel the landscape of human emotion—and the American landscape becomes emotion, as through deserts, forests, rivers, and coasts the speaker explores the intricacies of her experiences and interactions with nature. She raises her newborn son in a trailer in rural Vermont; in a desert she thinks of the life she left behind in Ohio; she moves to an island in Maine to work at an old motel with a lover. These moments capture, viscerally and intimately, the sense of the gothic in rural America—dark, damp dirt on one’s hands, a river that wends its way through fog, the decay of wet leaves on a forest floor, a desert over which vultures circle—moments of birth and life and death. Field of Vision captures the ancient history that weaves into each of our individual histories—of the earth, the animals, the fossils, the moments that comprise us all.