Tacoma Narrows

Mitchell Parry reflects on the nature of disasters, both public and private, in his debut collection. The title poem is a meditation on the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, a catastrophe that reminds us that ?we live in the depths of a fluid / world.? Tacoma Narrows also explores tragedy on a more personal scale ? the deaths, divorces, and other griefs that affect us all. Set in locales as diverse as England, Yugoslavia, Greece, and the small Outer Gulf Islands of British Columbia, these haunting lyrics express the experience of ?still learning to let lost things stay lost.? Parry con-siders how we weather the storms, the ?currents, turmoil, vortices? of life, finding, at last, a possibility of hope in the creation of real and imaginary communities.