Termination Dust: Poems

Mishler's first collection is rooted in Alaska's rough beauty, tracing the dividing lines between worlds and seasons (termination dust is what Alaskans call the first mountain snowfall that prefigures winter). As the speaker would be taught "to be indistinguishable/ from what I touch," she fleshes out the separations: between the imagination and what intrudes, the poles of gender (in one poem, the female speaker is mistaken for a man), or the gulf between the living and the dead. There are intermittent glimpses of the internal life of a child named Silas, a boy who likes pink and keeps a secret doll: "Silas woke and found hoof prints on the carpet;/ his dreams had run and climbed/ everywhere." Separate existences collide, like the bird that crashes into a window and forgets "first/ that it could fly, then/ that it couldn't." Each human drama is inextricable from the Alaskan landscape: one poem takes us on a ride through silt and chill wind in a car whose window is missing ("tiny/ rocks hailing in on us until we bent/ double"), and we see "a glacier calve—it was a marvelous catastrophe."