A jumbled volume of poetry that explores mental illness.
A debut collection of stream-of-consciousness poetry focuses on a fractured narrator.
An unnamed narrator struggles with mental illness in this account of time spent in and out of a psychiatric institution. Readers know little about the narrator, whose “consciousness broke” at some point. This narrator appears to be “Homeless / Crazy / Nuts,” lives in a city, was raised by an overly solicitous mother, became involved in a love triangle, and was restrained in a care facility. The narrator’s days are filled with activities like walking, a bike project, and drama and cognitive behavioral therapy. Much of the text is spent in the narrator’s head, which is a beehive of nonsensical thoughts. A series of bizarre “visions” involve Allen Ginsberg, a French baguette, and Jack Kerouac. “You got six vaginas,” the narrator writes in a letter to Ginsberg. The narrator also reflects on how society emphasizes earning and spending money, obeying boundaries, and creating a nuclear family, a trajectory the character seems to find restrictive. “My heart is polluted with life,” the narrator asserts near the end of the book. “How to get out of the train?” The best poem in the book, “Bearpit Story,” vividly tells of a night spent in an old double-decker bus with a ragtag group in the 1960s. Stefaniec also captures the experience of mental illness in visceral and artistic ways in lines like “my head is empty basket for bunch of flowers” and “I swim in a stew / I bite my nails sucking blood to the bone / Forgotten writing, sculptures made of words / Nest build of hungry thoughts.” But too many of her lines, like “I clench rim around each other,” are obtuse. The disorganized collection is also riddled with spelling and punctuation errors. One poem, “black birds sit on black cordes [sic] of electric cables,” contains four mistakes: “intervalls,” “meddows,” “knitt,” “travellers heads.”
A jumbled volume of poetry that explores mental illness.Pub Date: May 31, 2018
ISBN: 978-1-5434-9070-1
Page Count: 104
Publisher: Xlibris
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2018
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Broadly appealing. Poetry enthusiasts will delight at Held’s formal ingenuity, while those who normally shudder and run at...
Held, George
AFTER SHAKESPEARE: Selected Sonnets ?ervená Barva Press (86 pp.) $15.00 paperback 2011 ISBN: 978-0-9831041-9-3 (paperback) A deft collection, tragic and whimsical, that pushes back the conceptual and formal boundaries of the sonnet. With a conceit borrowed from the Elizabethan stage (and page), Held (Phased, 2008, etc.) opens this varied and limber compilation with a four-poem “Prologue” that works to introduce the project at hand, to prebuttally question its own merits and, finally, to defend its worth in modest terms. Demonstrating the formalist’s penchant for order, he organizes the remaining fifty-eight sonnets into three thematically and rhetorically precise divisions—“Giving Place,” “Apostrophes” and “Finding My Way”—while ranging over topics as varied as aging, the Kennedy family curse, tick-borne Lyme disease, the loss of faith, nostalgic whiffs of adolescent lust and the apocalypse. Held evokes a world delineated by violent tragedy. In “How Dad Died,” he writes of “the hole over / his right ear just beginning to crust, / his Smith & Wesson cradled on his chest”; [17] in “Chuck,” a college freshman, at the very moment of all-too-rare transcendent happiness, is decapitated in a car wreck; [62] and “Walt” is found “at 33, Colt .45 / By your outstretched hand, your head crowned by blood.” [64] His response is to decoct the most essential and powerfully defiant and fully-embodied moments, to call back to life the Walt who “at 10, in a lightning storm, / . . . . . / Faced the downpour and thunder with a scream: / “Fuck you, God! Kill me now, I double dare you!” [64] His subjects rarely go gentle, and like his own slant-rhymed, sight-rhymed, sprung-rhythm verses, their best moments come when they break the rules. This defiance shines in his paean to the painter Alice Neel: “Never one to kneel / To what the age demands, ‘This is my mien / At 80,’ you declare; ‘I have no regrets!’” [14]. A few poems would not be missed if cut, such as the pun-choked “Miss Lucid” or the weakly-developed satirical “New Fears,” but these are few and do little to affect the quality of an outstanding collection.
Broadly appealing. Poetry enthusiasts will delight at Held’s formal ingenuity, while those who normally shudder and run at hearing the very word sonnet will question those connotations when they encounter the form reimagined and reinvigorated by Held’s lively pen.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-9831041-9-3
Page Count: 71
Publisher: Cervená Barva Press
Review Posted Online: July 17, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Readers shouldn’t expect Sylvia Plath, but those who like “confessional” writing may be inspired by McCandless’ spirit.
McCandless offers a mosaic of musings in her first collection of poetry and prose.
Fans of verse will find variety here, as this thin volume runs the gamut from prose pieces that read like journal entries (“Toilet Paper Legacy” describes a grandmother’s insistence on using only three sheets) to short witticisms (“If I am alone, / At Least I Can Say / I am In / Good Company”) to free verse poems such as “Candlefire,” which celebrates the beauty of living in the moment. There are also forced, end-stop rhyming poems; e.g., “Through A Glass Darkly” compares life’s “new vision” to wiping rain from a dark window: “Clarity, the new-found vista, / Warms the heart and heals the mind. / New—familiar?—well come is the / Long-sought pathway, now defined.” This introductory poem works well with the book’s theme of overcoming life’s struggles (McCandless suffers from fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome). Unfortunately, the work is rife with clichés; for example, in “CloudScapes,” the clouds are “endless plains of fluffy cotton.” The book’s format presents another weakness. Fonts and type faces differ; “The Thread” is presented in very small print—which may be difficult for low-vision readers to see. McCandless’ writing does have some surprising and dark moments. In the prose piece “Doubt,” the narrator is told that her father admitted to raping her when she was 2 years old. Though there are some whimsical glimpses at nature, the overall effort feels like a catharsis, with painful struggles wrapped in hope and good humor. For example, “Coping Strategies” contains an infectiously tongue-in-cheek list of ways to survive difficulties: “Tread water until you’re saved by the bell. It helps to mix your metaphors, / it gives you options.” When comparing life to a messy room in “Voice of Experience,” the narrator begins with a chuckle: “While standing at the center / Of a room in disarray, / One cannot help but wonder / How the hell it got that way.”
Readers shouldn’t expect Sylvia Plath, but those who like “confessional” writing may be inspired by McCandless’ spirit.Pub Date: Feb. 25, 2013
ISBN: 978-1481707305
Page Count: 114
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Sept. 19, 2013
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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