Advance Praise for ACID RAIN EPITHALAMIUM
acid rain - Rain containing acids that form in the atmosphere when industrial gas emissions combine with water.
epithalamium - A nuptial song, or poem in honor of the bride and bridegroom.
Might a divorce, like a wedding, require ceremony, witnesses, vows taken? The poems of Acid Rain Epithalamium become songs for the dissolving of an important bond out of which the speaker reemerges forever changed, fragmented into a choir of selves. One self explores pleasure inside her queerness; another one seeks a starker and more sustaining relationship with the divine; another traces the precious and precarious interconnections between the self and other living beings: plant, animal, and mineral. Watch how the poet unravels the wedding dress to thread a vivid fabric using the warp and weft of the poem. With a "word turned hurricane" the reader witnesses a new vow taken with the ancient art.
- Carolina Ebeid, author of You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior
Acid Rain Epithalamium is a rich, layered text that showcases a range of formal and thematic work. Within the poems are reversals, questionings, tentativeness as the speaker grieves losses-but there's a strength of voice underneath those hesitancies that is explosive, espouses commitment to an unmapped future, and is ready to be set free.
- Khadijah Queen, author of Anodyne
With this exquisite debut collection from Becca Downs, we join the poet as she
navigates divorce, climate change, and the many parallels in these transformations, as
in the title piece:
this isn't the rain we asked for
but it is the rain we've made
love to dropped to one
knee bound ourselves for life
this could be a celebration
windborn praise songs
crawling toward mountaintops
Marked with gorgeous explorations in form, the poet uses the page as her canvas to
examine the before and the after, and to stare deeply down the middle. Throughout the
collection, Downs' voice emerges with strength, tenderness, rich with emotional
gravitas. Her deft, delicate hand and elegant poems are powerful, wrestling with
compelling narratives around inherited beliefs and choices while creating a new path
forward to a life and a world that is worthy of poignant and exacting poetry.
- Suzi Q. Smith, author of Gospel of Bones
