Dark, jagged, and compelling poems.
A debut volume of experimental poetry offers tantalizing mysteries.
When Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel planned their touchstone avant-garde film, Un Chien Andalou, they tried to avoid building any logical connections between scenes. Chance and dream would hold the film together—not reason. And any meanings would be purely fortuitous. One can’t help thinking of Dalí and Buñuel when reading Grinslade’s daring new collection of verse. Though the author has been on Earth for just three short decades, his poetry harks back to the heady days of early modernism and that iconoclastic movement’s experiments with form and style. As such, the poet’s work often has the feel of a collage, or of stray scraps of fabric woven together into a ragged blanket. His opening poem, “Moments Before Dying,” is a good example; it begins: “This time you will learn / it hides its knives between / reality and my trust in all / nevermind the bullets / here’s the new machine web / they’ll be wiring our heads/necks / to covet our innermost visions.” A Mary Oliver poem, this is not. In this representative piece, Grinslade asks so many more questions than he answers: What hides its knives? Shouldn’t readers mind the bullets after all? What happened to the old machine web, and who plans to wire “our heads/necks”? Yet the result of this accumulation of mysteries is simultaneously confounding and thrilling. For Grinslade, like Dalí and Buñuel before him, hides a careful design in the appearance of randomness. The first line of his fine work “Crypture”—“Visions presented in spurts like a faint pulse”—supplies a key to that design: The author’s images arrive in “spurts,” but the fleeting thrum of a heartbeat lies underneath, providing both structure and rhythm. And readers will find that there is a dark joy to be had in probing these mystifying, bracing, and thoroughly satisfying poems with their calloused fingers, searching for evasive signs of life.
Dark, jagged, and compelling poems.Pub Date: April 20, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-09-532696-1
Page Count: 133
Publisher: Self
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.
A collection speaks in part to the poet’s Mexican-American heritage.
In these multifaceted poems, Mexico-born, Houston-raised Salazar (Of Dreams and Thorns, 2017) explores general human themes like love and war in addition to specific experiences as a person of color. The book begins with a sensual meditation on desire, featuring luscious descriptions of a lover, from lips “moist like youth” to the body’s “softest velvet” slopes. The poems shift to odes to cultural icons like the Tejano star Selena and Mexican-German painter Frida Kahlo as well as occasion pieces honoring his brother’s 40th birthday and a friend’s mother’s memorial service. The author hits his stride when he delves into identity. In “I Am Not Brown,” he contemplates the societal implications of skin tone and his inability to fit into the rigid category of Caucasian or Latino. “For white and black and brown alike / Are slaves to history’s brush strokes,” he writes. “Grateful for the Work,” perhaps Salazar’s loveliest poem, catalogs the day of a laborer, starting with an early morning awakening and following him as he toils in 100-degree heat, enjoys tacos from his lunch pail, buys beverages from a child’s lemonade stand, and returns home to an equally hard-working wife. The author then makes an abrupt turn toward Syria in a series of poems that condemn that country’s president, Bashar Hafez al-Assad. They serve as a rallying cry for Syrians and grieve for the murdered masses. Salazar’s closing poem, “Sons of Bitches,” is a clunky rant about a 20-year-old immigrant shot in the head by a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol agent. The gratuitous violence and political theologizing are ill at ease with the intimate, personal experiences that preceded them, such as the fablelike “A Mexican is Made of This,” in which Salazar beautifully describes the “rainbows, bronze, backbone, butterflies” that his people embody.
A volume of poetry that shines when focused on the author’s experiences of race and culture.Pub Date: Aug. 1, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-9991496-3-8
Page Count: 166
Publisher: Bronze Diamond Productions
Review Posted Online: Sept. 27, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.
Diehl’s debut poetry collection showcases the arduous search for human connection and self-understanding.
In free verse poems that combine strong metaphors with prosaic passages, the poet wanders along a lifelong path of self-knowledge. She first describes it as a “pilgrimage…to accept what’s been deemed unworthy inside us,” and the trail leads to important insights. In a plainly stated yet necessary reminder, the author asserts that being human, despite the loneliness one may encounter, “is not a solitary pursuit.” Above all else, the book voices a desire for transparency in the self and in others. In “Clear Stream,” moving water illuminates objects within it, even as mystery waits at the bottom, and the water’s clarity corresponds to the speaker’s offering of his- or herself to view: “Here I am. // Come see me if you want.” Sometimes the tumble of words in these short stanzas suggests a pouring forth of injury: “It’s the show-stopping blow of loss upending a heart pain over pain till capacity for love regulates its beating.” Readers will understand a back story involving love and loss, difficulty in communication, sadness, and acceptance of children growing up. The poems gain strength from well-chosen accompanying images, including sketches and paintings by Dimenichi and colorful works by Jamaican-born painter Powell that enrich the verbal landscape. Several full-page images by each artist appear, suggesting a thematic connection or amplifying an emotion in a given poem. A richly textured, grand illustration of a tree by Dimenichi, for example, appears alongside a poem that celebrates the inspiration of such towering entities. A poem concerned with self-reflection joins a Powell painting of floating, twinned female forms. The figures seem to both depict and satisfy the speaker’s need to be seen, with their emphasis on mirror images, body doubles, and echoes of shapes. Even the windshield of a car can be a “two way mirror” behind which the driver is “invisible to life outside.” An explicitly female body is glimpsed in the sketches, and the warm, dreamlike compositions give it substance.
Poems and images that ask readers to appreciate a searching body for its beauty and grace.Pub Date: July 1, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-304-13091-4
Page Count: 58
Publisher: Lulu
Review Posted Online: May 18, 2016
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2016
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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