No Grave Can Hold My Body Down
by Aaron McCollough
Ahsahta Press, 2011
$17.50

No Grave Can Hold My Body Down is a grass fed and finished cow freshly slaughtered. That is to say it’s the best beef one could ask for. That is to say it’s of the best traditions of poetry one could ask for. McCollough sites the grass’s uncut hair of graves, leaves his good shirt by “a clearing / within the clearing // of the little lawn,” and begs I to gain solid ground:

as in I will always be I

in this head or out of it jesus my head is full of waters

my american head I must not park on dry grass or leaves

have I always believed or was I converted―towards

what conversations await what customs

McCollough’s poetry does what I love most about poetry: tells me go get yourself a fucking poem and be it. It tells me “say the passing beauties to the root of my tongue.”

—A. Minetta Gould