The Star in the Branches by James Peake Manuel Vilas These poems are simultaneously defined

These poems are simultaneously defined by both Woolf’s choices with language as well as my own

Bearings sings of love too

this disturbing sequence summons lost children and dark desires

the in-between worlds that this poet claims as her territory

Both questioning and celebrating our desire to persist despite

The Star in the Branches by James Peake Manuel Vilas These poems are simultaneously definedThe Star in the Branches, James Peake's second collection, is an intense and heartfelt examination of memory, how it pains and consoles, deepens and shrinks, is both equal to, and less than, the objects and people who come to reside there. At either end of the book are the disappearances of loved ones: a parent succumbing to dementia, and a school friend lost to more voluntary forms of forgetting. Elsewhere are poems of erotic love, big city