Dog Physics
poems by
Marcia L. Hurlow
40 pages, $13 (+ shipping)
Release Date: October 24, 2024
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Marcia L. Hurlow has published six previous collections of poetry. Her individual poems have appeared in Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poetry East, Poetry South, Poetry Wales, Chicago Review, Baltimore Review, Kairos, River Styx, Zone 3, and After Happy Hours, among others. She and her husband, Gregory Stump, live in Lenexa, Kansas, with their 110-pound lapdog, Lucky.
Marcia Hurlow’s Dog Physics delights with its swerves of imagery and leaps of connection – like a “gray metal/file cabinet” with “drawers full/of secret clouds and bright sticks.” Deeply attentive to the natural world, filled with musicality, Hurlow’s poems face up to losses, personal and global, with a clear eye. Dogs dance through these poems, jubilant with the luck of ordinary days, “pushed off-balance by wild good fortune” – retrieving joy against “the coming horror.” ~Leatha Kendrick
Dog Physics centers on observations that Lucky makes possible to the speaker, but these are so much more than dog poems. I was impressed with the interconnectivity between loss and rebirth. The poems continually return to nature as a way to find renewal—and Lucky is an extension of that sense of wilding. They also address climate change without being dogmatic. (Pun intended.) Frankly, the poems are both realistic and uplifting. ~Charlotte Pence
In Marcia Hurlow’s new collection, poems emerge from a specificity of the moment, which contains, as all moments do, the eternity in which they are etched. As a result, her poems achieve two winning effects: they wear their authenticity naturally, and they provide an inviting clarity so that we as readers will feel them, in poem after poem, as our own experience. Her work, grounded in the midwestern Americana of her subject matter, is what we seek in good poetry: workmanship, imaginative energy, precision, luminous images, and a striving spirit. ~David Rigsbee
Autumn Dog Poem
The day is a gray metal
file cabinet, drawers full
of secret clouds and bright sticks.
My dog hates this fall weather.
She curls up like cumulus
and sleeps until the storm
leaves town. Her eyes flutter,
paws twitch as she dreams
the young twigs of bushes
keen to the sticks, brittle
from sunny days. The story
is of a small dog running
in a field, of retrieval.
Cryptids
Lucky has stopped barking at the squirrels.
The sun just risen over the horizon,
he’s not running across the field
after the barn swallows who dove at him,
minutes ago, herding him away from their nests.
Lucky has disappeared into the woods,
silent except for the scrape and snap
of cottonwood saplings, bird song, insects.
I imagine he roams with a figure,
tall and slight as the young trees, as tender
as the sun filtered by the August leaves.
They brush together like two old friends
who love the twist of weeds where the deer
folded themselves to sleep, the tree bark
smoothed by their waking muscles. The violets
and sunflowers flourished here in June,
and now the friends listen to moles harvest
the roots and sort the seeds. Lucky grazes
his muzzle over the lingering dew.
A moth rises and the figure startles.
Having communed for half the morning,
one friend now lifts to his perch atop
a sycamore and dissolves into light.
Lucky, my lanky spotted pup, returns,
joined only by his sharp, black shadow.
Two-minute Ice Storm
Up from the west, hail slices
through the dusk-dark morning.
Our front porch collects pellets.
The kitchen window dings
like a lid over popcorn.
Still harder, the hail could slice
onto the table, shred
the floor. In would fly grackles
and cowbirds, all bloody
from slamming wall to wall.
Their unbirdlike squeals uncoil
like lightning before they swirl
out the back door on gusts
of rain from a purpled sky,
welcome as sunshine. Leaves
from the water maple, ripped
to the ground, arc back their tips
into grass as if in relief.
We sweep the heavy hail
off the porch. Two thrush dip
their beaks into icy weeds.
