The Lamb With The Talking Scroll

Courtney Bush

What began as a simple fascination with a single image from one of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus spiraled into a personal quest to find a real grail via dreams, frogs, physics, gauntlet feelings, and a haunted Fisher Price farm animal sounds wheel. In her fourth full-length collection, poet and filmmaker Courtney Bush puts forth a poetic tour de force in her unrelenting search for the divine in the quotidian.

'“Fate is real or it just wouldn’t exist.” In her fourth book in three years, Courtney Bush tunes herself to a new frequency, subordinating sense to language in an effort to receive something truer than either. The headlong, highly pressurized lines of her talking scrolls (a form of her own invention) read like transmissions from without—and yet, in them, one can still catch the strain of something familiar, heard in a new way. Here, Bush has distinguished herself as a poet capable of metabolizing the flotsam and jetsam of experience into poems of remarkable, and often surprising, insight. "What am I supposed to do with this garbage" one poem asks; "like every sacred thing I / borrow from pre-existing / sacred things," another begins, as if in response.' – Jameson Fitzpatrick

'Courtney Bush writes for those who don’t hate lucid feeling, who don’t fear honest experience, who are humbled in the presence of children. She enchants the word to say itself and makes the poem that can think. Reading The Lamb With the Talking Scroll, I feel invited to a register of faith concerned less with divinity or immortality and more with the kind of living that continues while holding death.' – Laura Henriksen