About Couch's Every Lash

This collection’s title-as in tether, strike, eyelash, welt-is a nod to the fluidity of language and the foolish penchant we have for naming things, including ourselves. The poems refuse to navigate, choosing instead to face head-on the snares of gender, patriarchy, and parenting. In the closing environmental poems of farewell, the speaker regains communion with nature through the aging body.

“Poem by poem, line by line, and word by word, Every Lash sings of our complex human entanglements with places, the past and all the other creatures we meet on the road. Earthy and soulful, funny and fierce, I needed these poems. We all do.” –Jenny Browne, Texas Poet Laureate, author of Dear Stranger and judge.

from “Like a Grassfire”

Nebraska’s grasslands on fire like obedient children,
and I watch from the highway lullabyed in the murmuring
burn: a barely detectable tremor in the shoulder,
the winds finally bored were still. Not so bad,
not like California. There were trees yet.\