Long Exposure follows a woman in the years after her son’s birth as she struggles with postpartum depression and a painful separation from her child’s father. Forced to reckon with her own childhood experiences, including the death of her brother to an accidental overdose, the speaker examines, as if through a camera lens, memories videotaped together. The book explores familial grief, addiction, and mental illness through language both surreal and plain, domesticated and haunted. These poems ask what it means to be an artist and a mother, outside of female friendships and romantic relationships. The poems, experienced as part fever dream, part damaged video footage, exist in a darkly overgrown and hypnotic landscape. Ultimately, the book is a portrait of a speaker locating many selves from long ago, resurrecting what images she can from the recovered video footage of her personal archive.
Praise for Long Exposure:
Elegant, cosmic, estranging, wild. In Julia Anna Morrison’s Long Exposure, we are both outside and inside, simultaneously internalizing the obsessive mind of a brilliant thinker, but also transforming along a winter highway, a swallowing lake, a hotel room on Earth. Morrison both alarms and enchants with her ability to make disassociating vivid. She never is where she really is, her mind and fantasy structures always wandering, escaping, time traveling. This is a poetic master class in disembodiment, all the while talking about scenes of domesticity and claustrophobic intimacies. It upsets the reader—as in, it will reorient you entirely. Brilliant.
—Megan Fernandes, author of I Do Everything I’m Told
This book contains a mesmerizing intimacy unlike anything I’ve ever read. With extraordinary lyricism, Julia Anna Morrison takes us into landscapes, histories, and moments that open and deepen endlessly, where time blooms and folds and “it starts to snow the / same snow from an unusually painful winter a million years ago.” There is a splendor and a candor to these poems that leaves me awestruck. Julia Anna Morrison is a visionary poet, and Long Exposure is a completely stunning debut.
—Chloe Honum, author of The Lantern Room
Reading Julia Anna Morrison is like reading poems written by wildflowers in the dead of night, buried in snow. With feverish precision and deep magic, Morrison’s Long Exposure sings the most inconsolable and gorgeous lullaby I’ve ever heard.
—Sabrina Orah Mark, author of Happily: A Personal History—with Fairy Tales
As fierce as it is tender, Long Exposure performs domestic sorcery. An Ovid of the interior, Morrison invites the subliminal to emerge sublime. The comings and goings of motherhood become as elemental as snow or light or consciousness, as enchanting as a storm or shadow or unconditional love passing across generations. In this otherworldly debut, childhoods bleed like seasons, and the longings of grief and eros transform the lived-in landscape. Rather than capturing a moment, Morrison frees the moment to move, to drift with us and against us: “We go back and forth. We halve each other.” Long Exposure will not leave you whole or healed; it will multiply you. Lucky us to be guests in Morrison’s universe, where “If you are missing, you exist.”
—Elizabeth Metzger, author of Lying In
While the shutter of Julia Anna Morrison’s lens stays open, three decisive figures wander the frame, each becoming a blur within the others and herself: a brother lost in childhood, a lover who didn’t stay, and the newborn son who focuses her ardent tenderness. Set in lackluster America, between shaken snow globe Iowa and lakeside Southern fields, this debut is often awake all night, claustrophobic and felt from afar, agitated by sex and boredom, by “desires I am not ready for.” Through anxiety and dream, nostalgia, hope, the poet joins her dead sibling’s hand to the hand of her “evergreen” boy. Morrison can be self-lacerating, obsessive, or matter-of-fact. Or plangent or soft, even fragile, saying her long goodbyes. “If it didn’t get killed in winter,” she avers, “it comes back with / color.” These are human poems, the kind that bleed.
—Andrew Zawacki, author of Unsun