In the sequence of poems comprising Annie Guthrie’s first book, the quest for the meaning of human consciousness and its tangled subjectivity is drawn as a slow-building narrative of the mystic experience. The journey enacted is that of the self as character, who encounters insurmountable mysteries in a breaking selfhood. A dossier of contemplative exploration, THE GOOD DARK chronicles an immersive search in three acts: Unwitting, Chorus, and Body: stations through which the character must pass, and where she is accumulatively confessed, compounded and erased.

Annie Guthrie is a writer and jeweler living in Tucson. She has a metalsmithing studio at Splinter Brothers Warehouse and can be found through her website, www.annieguthrie.net. She teaches at the University of Arizona Poetry Center and also mentors select students wishing to apprentice in poetry or to further their art projects through her courses in “Oracular Writing.”