Mystic, Georgia

Abstract

Mystic, Georgia interrogates connections to nature, society, imagination, and the self. Telling a story of childhood set in the village for which the collection is named, the first part examines family, identity, and memory. The second part explores landscape and witnesses the transformation of childhood's "strange voice" to the "song" of adulthood, and the ensuing part deepens this transformation, contemplating the strangeness of poetic acts. In the fourth part, attention turns to the complexities of society and a disquieting materiality. The collection culminates in a journey out of self-doubt and into the nature of want. Night and dark, storytelling, and the moment's ephemerality are deeply figured motifs in Mystic, Georgia, which strives for a coherent vision of an intractably blurred world.