from The Boghole & the Beldame

A previously unpublished selection, Joanna Ruocco's The Boghole and the Beldame is a pastoral hallucination—more spell than story—that harks back to the waking/walking life of an archetypal dreamer. Afoot in the muck of language, Ruocco paints a thicket in which every shimmering growth baffles the landscape. The characters—creatures, figures, names—in The Boghole and the Beldame lean against time, pluck it for quills, wring its veins for blue, and blush black. Ruocco knows language like the tongue knows teeth. Here is a gateway to the everywhere of your ancestral sleep.