Wandering In All Directions of This Earth

by Loisa Fenichell ’23

Published by Ghost Peach Press (2023)

“The sentences in Loisa Fenichell’s aptly named Wandering in all directions of this earth enact a journey at once outward and inward, an odyssey through urban and bucolic spaces, across dreamlike bridges “that lead to more bridges,” backward and forward in time, and deeper into the fathomless self. A leg that begins in darkest extremity might pirouette into technicolor whimsy; grief and loneliness give way to a richness of language; and privation and pain find magical answers via metaphor’s deranging escape route from the harshness of the real: “I fainted / and convulsed, so found myself a small red boat, / like the booths of a diner, in which to sail away.” If poetic quicksilver lightens her path, the poet is likewise haunted by the fear that nothing (and no one, not even the self) stays or stabilizes long enough to set root in completely and call one’s own. The truth of this exuberant, crushing book is that only the fixity of the written page—analogous to that of its photographs—offers us evidence of who we (or another) might be or have been, and of what it feels or felt like to be here, alive on this earth, if only for a time.” - Timothy Donnelly, author of Chariot, The Problem of the Many, and others