A baroque, sensual tour de force that elevates art above all else.
An intense, sumptuous prose-poetry exploration of inspiration, sacrifice and art.
With uninhibited brush strokes, Gale’s impassioned debut offers an extended, self-reflexive allegory of artistic abnegation and creation. The author marries the characterization of prose to the sensuality and linguistic precision of poetry in a form she dubs a “poemella.” She introduces Patrice, a perpetually young but weary 500-year-old muse, to Louis, an artist stripped bare by loss. His family and friends were lost in the Holocaust, while he was secretly carried to freedom in a coffin, alive. Over the course of 10 years, Louis paints Patrice two dozen times, and their relationship is an evolving but always volatile combination of love and war. Patrice has spent centuries defined and limited by the male gaze, ever the nude on the red velvet couch; she’s not unlike the “captive ships slaved to the berth…waiting and waiting to unleash their bodies from land.” In Louis, she finds an artist who promises, “I will do anything you ask. All artists give up something when / they paint. I will give you everything, everything, everything.” Tired of passivity, she demands increasingly more of Louis—“We should sacrifice something of yours that causes you anguish,” she suggests—while also giving him more than she’s ever given to any other painter. Like Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, Patrice desires immortality and release simultaneously, while Louis “[s]ecretly…mourn[s] his impotence / his inability to create without destruction.” In similarly Wilde-an fashion, Patrice doles out wisdom epigrammatically—“Nothing in art is to be despised” or “Only the unauthentic is ugly in art. If you continue to deceive / yourself, then you deceive art”—while Louis’ painting becomes more surreal. Much like her heroine, Gale strings “her words / with fine needle and thread, each letter a pearl, each line of her T a cross / between reality and fiction.” In Gale’s case, the pearls sometime hang chokingly thick, and the decadence of her imagery occasionally gives way to sickeningly sweet decay. It’s often exhausting but also oddly appropriate to the project’s intense, inward-looking aestheticism.
A baroque, sensual tour de force that elevates art above all else.Pub Date: March 16, 2014
ISBN: 978-0986059001
Page Count: 174
Publisher: PK & Alex Co.
Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2014
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
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