PUNT holds an elsewhere’s gently exorcized quotidian. Pieces of a parallel day full of promise, disassembled for the ecstasy of reinvention. The lights dim, your shift never ends, and one box waits within another “Where the waterslides bow / in pursuit of summer.”
PUNT is the debut chapbook by Wisconsin-based poet Anada Werner.
Anada Werner is a freelance conduit to the spirit of the Midwest. Punt marks her second occasion in print, the first having belonged to a single blue ribbon poem in the third grade.
What better buoy above an afternoon slump, in this clenched world, than “a heavy lemon that rolls off of / God’s counter and hangs / in the blue for you.” I can think of no greater imperative for the lost day than this now possible symmetry of commands, to stay wide open, fetch the stick snapped back. No realer capital than “fists around nickels” that Anada Werner is so quick to vanish behind an earful, unfurl. Be as lending. Punt your mind out the window and wait for it—the boomeranged unidiomatic catch, ecstatic patience of this come-around buzz at the door.
Jed Munson
Chapbook
Hand-bound. 56 pp, 5 x 6 in
Publication Date: May 01 2024
Distribution: Asterism Books (US)