Karina Borowicz‘s collection Proof (Codhill Press, 2014) in three parts is a slow emerging, a crawling toward understanding. In a way that only the patience of adulthood looking back on adolescence can muster, a child’s coming to consciousness is revered — and this poet is patient. This poet will sit in waiting for the precise moment to rip the sheet off the marble block to reveal a labor of love.

Every child is born he says

knowing the language of trees–

for so long our unformed ear

is pressed to the wall of eternity

The poems move from tactile to ephemeral as the speaker redefines herself through the reflections of a new culture. In her inventory of discovery, we see the menacing undertone of adolescence. With awareness comes the understanding the natural world. With the awareness of the natural world comes an understanding of violence.

Finally, the poet confronts linear time to offer up to the reader the possibility that we are existing on all planes (past, present, and future), simultaneously. We are always informed by the events of our past and we are always gripping our toes on the cliff of the next moment. What we leave behind on the earth is proof that we lived.

This is the place where and how many

times I passed by here and of course the old

handless statue whose cool features

are the exact word for the situation, this

constant reaching

with no hope of touch

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