How can we memorialize our dead? How can that memorialization rend the veil between the living and the dead? In Cord Swell, a debut volume, brittny ray crowell sifts through decades of obituaries, journals, and other ephemera to exhume the intimate remnants of her grandmother and other family members in her hometown of Texarkana, Texas. Drawing on a familial archive that contains nearly sixty years of material, she preserves her relatives' stories and voices in poetic form. This remarkable collection tirelessly seeks to reveal, redress, and interpret the past. In the absence of physical traces, the poems in Cord Swell become altars, thin spaces where crowell communes with loved ones through shared memory and ancestral lore.

"Eclipse"
i'm gonna collect every word
you ever spoke & put them in a box
somewhere then one day let them fly
like a chorus of moths landing on brown
tree branches