Small Altars

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Poems that bend time and fragment narrative. On the surface, Small Altars appears to narrate the story of two brothers, offering a singular portrayal of grief, loss, and the quiet violence inherent in adolescence. Gardiner considers the powerlessness of his narrator as he comes of age against a backdrop of comic books, piano lessons, and family secrets. At the same time, Small Altars explores--through form, style, and technique--precisely how memory works. By eschewing the impulse to rely strictly on chronology as a structural device, Gardiner instead creates a provocative fragmentation of time, meaning, and narrative. He interrogates our use of story to lend unity and cohesion to what are essentially discontinuous experiences, to find meaning in loss, grief, and their indelible aftermath.