"Given is the record of a haunting, a clear-eyed love song to the notion of home, a frame stilled on the highwater mark after the flood. Through finely wrought lyric poems that swell and break with movement, Duncan articulates the speaker's longing for family and place 'despite the dying world.' Indeed, the world of Given grapples with a precarious future: hurricanes Sandy and Irene loom large in the town's memory, and the present, where the 'seasons unseason, ' are marked by mass die-offs and the threat of subsummation. And just as the world reckons with the catastrophes of the Anthropocene, so too does the speaker attend to staggering personal loss. Yet the collection trembles with a skeptical but persistent hope. Duncan shows us the town she chooses, though 'neighbors head inland, / leaving the keys in the door.' Here the bay, the uncles; there the Wawa, the 'streets with names / that were self-explanatory: Harbor Way. Shore Concourse.' The speaker asks, 'What if my body is not an apocalypse?' Asks, 'What if my body is not a misunderstanding / with the changing earth?' Given argues, granularly, tenderly, that home and place are worth remembering, worth returning to, that roots, however ephemeral, can ground us in the swirling tides of grief."–Donika Kelly, author of The Renunciations
