In Eve Joseph's latest book, the poet is occupied with the idea of poetic imagination and how that often elusive thing can transform the mundane into the mysterious. In a book where fish are classified as bees and rivers are legally people, things are not always as they seem. As the title suggests, sometimes the act of taking something apart and building again from scratch allows a poem to find its true form. Dismantling contains new works of prose poetry, along with a series of centos – poems build entirely on the lines of other poets. Old voices engage with new ones. Tomas Tranströmer and Ocean Vuong speak about a great unsolved love while Audre Lorde walks with Ahmad Almallah and César Vallejo as the grass bends, then learns to stand again. Joseph's poems are about language; how lonely it is until time enters the poem and places it where it is meant to be.
