The Return Message: Poems

　　"What if you — abandoned yourself?" asks Tessa Rumsey in The Return Message. This question generates the book's poems into being, as Rumsey conjures moments of creation, destruction, and rebirth through instances as incongruous - yet ultimately interconnected - as the construction of a glass house in the south of France, an aging rock star's jaded advice to a teen pop queen, and the metamorphosis of pregnancy." Poems end, unfold, and double inside domestic spaces and modernist architecture, media walls and imported cloud forests, fountains at Versailles and Japanese wisteria gardens. In a realm where there can be no "official version" or true extinction, Rumsey's end-stops and diptychs seek to enact the eternal return of spring, when everything begins again through loss and regeneration.