RaveThe Poetry ProjectThe experience of reading Jameson Fitzpatrick’s absorbing new poetry collection, Pricks in the Tapestry, feels like tracing a map of exquisite points—the parts of us that are most tender when pressed. Fitzpatrick’s poems regard the sites and sources of hurt, desire, and disturbance with evocative candor. The collection moves through intensely intimate scenes and themes: sex with various lovers in various stages of knowing, coming-of-age memories, discussions of mental health and trauma, emotional upheaval, personal and collective grief, immoderation of all kinds. The poems cast a revealing light onto these experiences—not to pathologize certain behaviors or situations, but to consider them with a wry and introspective sensitivity ... What particularly struck me about Pricks in the Tapestry is how Fitzpatrick’s speakers let everything happen to them—this life, in all its terror and beauty— and arrive here to tell us about it with aching precision. These poems pricked my own exquisite points, in the way that our deepest loves and most brutal hurts (sometimes one and the same) so often do.
