Inspired by the Greek myth of Alcestis, this poetry collection brings to life myriad voices who venture beyond the known world and exist between realities.

In Greek mythology, Alcestis descends to the mysterious kingdom of death in her beloved’s place. In The Alcestis Machine, Carolyn Oliver’s second poetry collection, loss and queer desire echo across the multiverse. “In another life, I’m a . . .” sea witch or swineherd, vampire or troubadour, florist or fossil or museum guard, Oliver writes. These parallel personas inhabit space stations and medieval villages, excavate the Devonian seabed, and plumb a subterranean Anthropocene. In possible futures and imagined pasts, they might encounter “all wrong turns and broken signs” or carry “a suitcase full of stars.”

Oliver’s poems are animated by lush, unsettling verse and forms both traditional and experimental. The Alcestis Machine demonstrates how very present absence can be and how desire knows no boundaries. In neighborhood subdivisions or the vast reaches of space, it’s impossible to know “whose time is slipping / again.” Anyone “could come loose / from gravity’s shine.”

Blueshift
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Winter
Frost Heaves
Space Age
The Woman with the Suitcase Full of Stars
Glass Hours
Manifestation
Figure Swimming Alone
This Splenda Packet Advises Me, “Be the ENERGY You Want to Attract”
Trajectories
The Baltimore Monet
Strange Attractor
Letter to the Apprentice Jeweler
Nyctinasty
Salt Marsh
Flowers for the Virgin
Celestial Bodies
Self-Portrait as Illumination
Memphis Facula: Shot List for Improvised Documentary
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The Archaeoetymologist Recovers Bliss from the Riverbed
Deep Learning
The Builder
Walking Alone
Lux Hours
Letter to the woman weighing lemons at the grocery store
Poppies
Equilibrium
Spirit Level
Coming Back from the Wedding
Love Poem in High Humidity
Mercy
Devonian
Sunrise House
De Profundis
In the Distance
Night Flight
The Alcestis Machine
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Mast Year

Notes
Acknowledgments