“[H}e has outlived // everything but the taste / of his sons’ hair when gently / he kisses them incessantly // at the altar of their sleep.” In a new poem from Adam Tavel, Goya’s savage image of Saturn inhales decades of violence.
“repurposed rubble erect / for these dirt counties’ / mad whelps reluctantly / the pity funds trickle.” Adam Tavel reconstructs the horrors of the Wicomico County Almshouse, twice obscured.
Starting from a six-sentence obituary that ran in 1855, Adam Tavel crafts a riveting sequence of letters and monologues invoking suicide, infidelity, race, and the “bent trumpet of grief” that echoes over generations.