Barton Smock's Reviews > Thaw

To love snow is to admire water. Is to vanish twice. What touch Chelsea Dingman’s Thaw has gives disappearance a third act. The language here returns the ear and forms distance to the shape left by the soundless siren of the world’s slowest ambulance. Fathers leave early to chew the root of abandonment. Brothers clone themselves to play hide and seek. And mothers remain to curtain call skin. These poems story themselves in the staying power of travelogue, and are meticulous in their scrapbooking of absence. What’s more, with Dingman as both acolyte and guide, they invite loss to confront those its taken.