Publishers Weekly
01/23/2023
Mountain (High Ground Coward) delivers a work of raptured lust in this skillful consideration of romantic vulnerability: “This is no return ticket between us...// Walk the highest hill until you see that/ what you buried can’t be driven out of me.” As a member of the LGBTQ community, that vulnerability includes the realities of discrimination (“there is no making public/ how we push and pull in dark corners./ The beehive whispers when it sees our/ hands touch)” as well as potential violence (“Redblooded and blueblood and violet./ Pulse and pierced dance floor hearts.”). In a poem allotting one word per line, Mountain evokes the seismic plummet of climate stability and the weight of individual responsibility: “ruin/ mounting/ with/ each/ storm/ if/ this/ must/ be/ elegy/ it/ has/ been/ earned.” She seamlessly weaves narratives through the work’s four heroic crowns of sonnets, which are full of lush language, understated quips, and sonically stirring phrases. “This book is a monument to touch,/ even with its hands in its pockets,” she promises. And, indeed, these sprawling, inviting pages deliver by revealing Mountain’s intimate and dynamic voice. (Apr.)
From the Publisher
Praise for High Ground Coward
“Alicia Mountain looks at every tiny thing very closely, and in doing that conveys the big picture of a vast inner life with marvelous clarity and depth. Her voice is intimate, brash, always precise, heartbreaking in both its vulnerability and its authority. These poems are carried away by both lust and intelligence. This poet understands desire: its expression lets loose while giving form. This book doesn’t detour, it goes right to and through the overpowered, relentless heart of its speaker and the reader is struck through too, and good. High Ground Coward is a dazzling debut by a rare, true talent.”
— Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize
“High Ground Coward is raw and intimate. Alicia Mountain looks at what she loves and that foreground blurs into a backdrop of practical constraints and injustices. The poems press at those boundaries where desire starts to interfere with the opportunities of others and cast an unsparing eye on the cost. This is a book of hard, shifting, dreamlike gems.”
— Joanna Klink, author of Excerpts from a Secret Prophecy
"Alicia Mountain’s debut collection of poetry High Ground Coward, winner of the 2017 Iowa Poetry Prize, concerns itself with what it means to live in our world as a sensitive, observing person, one who desires and is desired, cares and is cared for, engages with the material of one’s surroundings and is also alienated from it. The book opens with the line: “My desires are berries because they are small and many” and truly this book is full of little poems, little promises of exploding flavor and possible satiation."
— Emily Brown, Poetry Northwest
"Ultimately, High Ground Coward reads like a survival manual, a bulwark against a society that would flatten and silence queer women and deny the connections we forge."
— Luiza Flynn-Goodlett, The Adroit Journal
“At the heart of the collection is an insistence on personal, lived, quotidian experience. In her descriptions, she insists on dismantling the hierarchy between the sublime and the tangible, giving as much attention to a pair of underwear as she does to the lofty concept of love. In refusing to look away from the problems in everyday life, in the self, and in seeming moments of happiness, the poems are often harrowing. But a peculiar quality of her poems is that, even in such lacerating moments, they still pulse with an optimism. They entreat the reader to see the joy in everything, big or small.”
— Justin Wymer, The Rumpus
"The result is a collection of poems that are frank and often funny and that fluctuate dizzyingly between reality and reflection, concrete ideas and whimsy. With a strong ear for beautiful language, Mountain at times indulges the reader with lovely, traditional, and/or abstract lines of description. But within a beat, she returns you to earth, with lines that can make you laugh out loud..."
— Sarah Aswell, Missoula Independent
