A striking volume of dark and symbolic poems about pain and longing.
A debut collection of poetry investigates moments of vulnerability in a hellish landscape.
Reading Dorach’s poems, one has a sense of walking through a wasteland after some great cataclysm. “I have seen too much,” begins “Bones.” “Too many parted lips, / the bed, / the homeless wandering / And the shrill reckoning of a too-desperate peace.” Wandering and seeing may be the least of the traumas in this volume, which features all manner of corruption, torture, disease, and betrayal. “Remember The Days” starts “Don’t I remember the days when I cheated death? / I hung balanced like a slave on the edge of the devil’s sword. / I bled gallons into the pit / Screaming halt to a half-crazed lunatic.” The landscape is something out of Dante or Bosch, a fallen world populated with magicians, travelers, roving armies, pigs, snakes, and demons (and, more colloquially, “morons” and “whores”). Though the actual trespasses are never plainly enumerated, readers will get the sense that Dorach is presenting a vision of their own world. The penultimate poem, “Spiral Wound,” opens with this dark creation myth: “The universe bled, and then we came, / spitting, puking, and trying all new things. / Making ourselves low and mad, / this is what the spirals made.” The volume is a long one at over 200 pages, though the poems themselves are rarely more than a dozen lines each. The poet displays an incantatory economy of language, as in “I Am,” which reads in full: “I am a bandaged demon. / Tell me what is right.” Dorach’s currency is symbolism and surrealism, and some readers will likely have trouble grasping these mercurial images. But for those who are not turned off by the esoteric or apocalyptic, there is much here that is arresting. The author offers a possible ars poetica at the beginning of “Eleven Pictures”: “A paper beast appears before my eyes and I dwell on its wisdom, / laying paper on paper and torturing shapes into a sane-vision existence.” As readers move through this menagerie of paper beasts, wisdom and sanity may prove elusive, but a sense of the world’s madness will make itself plain.
A striking volume of dark and symbolic poems about pain and longing.Pub Date: June 19, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5255-4066-0
Page Count: 240
Publisher: FriesenPress
Review Posted Online: Oct. 21, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.
Keridan’s poetry testifies to the pain of love and loss—and to the possibility of healing in the aftermath.
The literary critic Geoffrey Hartman once wrote that literature—and poetry, in particular—can help us “read the wound” of trauma. That is, it can allow one to express and explain one’s deepest hurts when everyday language fails. Keridan appears to have a similar understanding of poetry. She writes in “Foreword,” the opening work of her debut collection, that “pain frequently uses words as an escape route / (oh, how I know).” Many words—and a great deal of pain—escape in this volume, but the result is healing: “the ending is happy / the beginning was horrific / so let’s start there.” The book, then, tracks the process of recovery in the wake of suffering, and often, this suffering is brought on by romantic relationships gone wrong. An early untitled poem opens, “I die a little / taking pieces of me to feed the fire / that keeps him warm / you don’t notice that it’s a slow death / when you’re disappearing little by little.” The author’s imagery here—of the self fueling the dying fire of love—is simultaneously subtle and wrenching. But the poem’s message, amplified elsewhere in the book, is clear: We go wrong if we destructively give ourselves over to others, and healing comes only when we turn our energies back to our own good. Later poems, therefore, reveal that self-definition often equals strength. The process is painful but salutary; when “you’re left unprotected / surrounded by chaos with nothing you / can depend on / except yourself / and that’s when you gather the pieces / of the life you lost / and use them to build the life you want.” The “life you want” is an elusive goal, and the author knows that the path to self-definition is fraught with peril—but her collection may give strength to those who walk it.
Therapeutic, moving verse from a promising new talent.Pub Date: Nov. 2, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-72770-538-6
Page Count: 196
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: Jan. 9, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.
A slim volume of largely gay-themed writings with pessimistic overtones.
Poe (Simple Simon, 2013, etc.) divides this collection of six short stories and 34 poems into five sections: “Art,” “Death,” “Relationship,” “Being,” and “Reflection.” Significantly, a figurative death at the age of 7 appears in two different poems, in which the author uses the phrase “a pretended life” to refer to the idea of hiding one’s true nature and performing socially enforced gender roles. This is a well-worn trope, but it will be powerful and resonant for many who have struggled with a stigmatized identity. In a similar vein, “Imaginary Tom” presents the remnants of a faded relationship: “Now we are imaginary friends, different in each other’s thoughts, / I the burden you seek to discard, / you the lover I created from the mist of longing.” Once in a while, short story passages practically leap off of the page, such as this evocative description of a seedy establishment in Lincoln, Nebraska: “It was a dimly lit bar that smelled of rodent piss, with barstools that danced on uneven legs and made the patrons wonder if they were drunker than they thought.” In “Valéry’s Ride,” Poe examines the familial duties that often fall to unmarried and childless people, keeping them from forming meaningful bonds with others. In this story, after the double whammy of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita hits Louisiana, Valéry’s extended family needs him more than ever; readers will likely root for the gay protagonist as he makes the difficult decision to strike out on his own. Not all of Poe’s main characters are gay; the heterosexual title character in “Mrs. Calumet’s Workspace,” for instance, pursues employment in order to escape the confines of her home and a passionless marriage. Working as a bookkeeper, she attempts to carve out a space for herself, symbolized by changes in her work area. Still, this story echoes the recurring theme of lives unlived due to forces often beyond one’s control.
Downbeat but often engaging poems and stories.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-5168-3693-2
Page Count: 120
Publisher: CreateSpace
Review Posted Online: March 5, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
