Relief [9781956046717]

Overview

Winner of the Kathryn A. Morton Prize in Poetry, selected by Diane Seuss, Relief by Victoria Kornick is a genre-bending collection of female friendship & desire

Relief chronicles the relationship between the speaker, who is a printmaker, and her best friend, Eileen. The friends become one another’s guides and, at times, protectors as they explore muddy shorelines and dark fields, strangers’ swimming pools and early encounters with boys. Then, as a teenager, Eileen has a devastating accident for which the speaker blames herself.

In printmaking, an image flips to become its opposite, and a scarred line creates a beautiful print. So, too, do these poems consider the aftermath of an event, the nature of cause and effect, and the way opposites can depend on each other. As the two friends grow up, they learn about art, go to parties, and stay one another’s confidants. But at the foundation of their dynamic remains the speaker’s longstanding guilt.

When the speaker becomes entangled in an affair—the affair’s repercussions alter the course of her life and her relationship with Eileen. In dazzling poetry and lyric prose, Kornick’s page-turning debut explores the complexities of a friendship that spans three decades. Reversals, repetition, and the language of the print studio shape the collection, as the speaker navigates the mirroring of a girlhood friendship and the impressions left by desire.