In this, his tenth volume of poetry, Andrew Mossin extends the work of his earlier books, North & East: Daybooks and Black Trees, in an extended serial meditation on and through the figure of Walt Whitman. Variable in line and form, this book-length poem re-establishes connections to the phenomenal world while posing questions about the relationship of our embodied selves to the subjectivities each of us inhabits.  As Joseph Donahue wrote of Black Trees, “the simplest fact quietly stated advances a cosmic drama, one where light, shadow, wind from the east west, birds, intimations of personal devastation, and eruptions of sacred memory, compose the cadence of the day, any day in the world of these poems, its skies wavering with whatever’s coming next.”


"Invoking Mnemosyne, the Greek goddess of memory, the poem that is Whitman at the Bardo worries—is troubled through and by—the intermedial site of death-in-life, of life that has not yet moved into death but exists as claimant and petitioner, shadow and light. As we read in Tibetan Book of the Dead: 

Alas, now as the intermediate state of the time of death arises before me, 
Renouncing all attachment, yearning and subjective apprehension in every respect, 
I must undistractedly enter the path, one which the oral teachings are clearly understood, 
And eject my own awareness into the uncreated expanse of space. 
Immediately upon separation from this compounded body of flesh and blood, 
I must know this body to be like a transient illusion. 
                                      Translated by Gyurme Dorje"

Andrew Mossin is a poet, scholar, and creative non-fictionist whose poetry books include The Veil (Singing Horse Press), Exile's Recital (Spuyten Duyvil), Whitman at the Bardo (Spuyten Duyvil) and A Common World (The Bodily Press).  His scholarship includes a collection of essays, Male Subjectivity and Poetic Form in "New American" Poetry (Palgrave) and Thinking with the Poem: Essays on the Poetry and Poetics of Rachel Blau DuPlessis (University of New Mexico Press). A Son from the Mountains, his memoir of adoption and family trauma, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2021. He is currently collaborating with Monica F. Jacobe on a book-length study of the visual artist and photographer, Willaim Christenberry.  Mossin is an Associate Professor of Instruction in the Intellectual Heritage Program at Temple University in Philadelphia. He lives in Doylestown, PA.