EXCURSIONS
“Exquisite, artfully unadorned, and attentive, Ceridwen Hall’s Excursions casts a meditative light on place and the language that takes us there. We step into the current of a stream and a poem, watch players perform on an ocean cliff, the waves both audience and cast, and listen to the inner voice of our reading eye. In this, we’re reminded “language is never mine to traverse, but ours”; reading a collaborative process. So too might we leisurely tour Hall’s lucid, natural imagery and share in her invitation to see anew.”
—Jacqueline Balderrama, Author of Now in Color
“Exquisite, artfully unadorned, and attentive, Ceridwen Hall’s Excursions casts a meditative light on place and the language that takes us there. We step into the current of a stream and a poem, watch players perform on an ocean cliff, the waves both audience and cast, and listen to the inner voice of our reading eye. In this, we’re reminded “language is never mine to traverse, but ours”; reading a collaborative process. So too might we leisurely tour Hall’s lucid, natural imagery and share in her invitation to see anew.”
—Jacqueline Balderrama, Author of Now in Color
“Exquisite, artfully unadorned, and attentive, Ceridwen Hall’s Excursions casts a meditative light on place and the language that takes us there. We step into the current of a stream and a poem, watch players perform on an ocean cliff, the waves both audience and cast, and listen to the inner voice of our reading eye. In this, we’re reminded “language is never mine to traverse, but ours”; reading a collaborative process. So too might we leisurely tour Hall’s lucid, natural imagery and share in her invitation to see anew.”
—Jacqueline Balderrama, Author of Now in Color
Ceridwen Hall’s Excursions reminds us of the casual, causal, and linear inevitability of navigation. That is: “we know a trail in reverse is a separate venture, not an untelling.” It’s this focus on the untelling’s compound adjective that both marks and remarks in this brilliant new collection. Part movement, part page-bound by the melos of its prosaic prosody, part travelogue where the words all point beyond “mere description,” we find echoes of Hannah Arendt and relative comparisons of provincial hillsides here as Hall masterfully traverses the rapids of time and place and place again. And we’re honored to be “a passenger / consuming distance,” recognizing our “specter of loss” in all that we continue to pass, and all that continues to pass.
-Matthew Minicucci, author of Small Gods, winner of the 2019 Stafford/Hall Oregon Book Award