Well-crafted, sensitive poems that movingly convey liminal experiences.
This collection examines tradition, family, mahjong, and more in lyric poems.
Seyburn (English/California State Univ., Long Beach; Perfecta, 2014, etc.) has previously published many of this collection’s pieces in literary journals. The title refers to delivery services—generally for large, heavy objects—that stop at one’s front door. This concept connects to “Davenport,” one of several prose poems in this book, which begins: “When I asked the men to bring my couch inside, they shook their heads: threshold delivery, ma’am and I pictured them lovingly carrying my movable the way a bride once was hoisted.” The image of a couch being lifted recalls a Jewish bride being elevated in a chair amid celebration. From here, the poem, as if to take over from the deliverymen, lifts each image forward and links it with new ones. Finally, says the speaker, “I cannot run as fast now but have much better endurance,” suggesting what eventually lies over the threshold. This poem is in the first of the book’s three sections, which is often haunted by themes of night, memory, and loss, and the speaker’s mother is a recurring figure. Despite these serious associations, the poems also show sly wit, as when the speaker imagines her mom impatiently waiting in the afterlife’s anteroom: “Lend a mirror so she can put on / her face and bring a little artifice / with her.” The poem closes by considering the temporary nature of liminality and of crossing from life to death: “If you never had a foyer, // you’d imagine it / more grand than it was: really, it was / just a threshold, a place / to arrive, pause, abandon.” In the middle section, “Mah Jongg: An Homage,” the poet reflects on a game that’s popular with older Jewish women, examining mahjong’s images, rules, history, and lingo as well as the nature of luck. She links these elements to a problem that Jewish people have often been forced to confront throughout history: how to handle the cards that are dealt to you. These thoughtful, smart poems unveil layers of imagery and significance: “Every mahjj tile, symbolic. / Sometime you wish they, along with everything else, could mean less.” But the tiles don’t mean less, requiring constant vigilance: “The goal is to improve your hand. // The goal is self-improvement.” The final section’s poems again conjure the speaker’s mother as well as painful memories, psychic scars, and the need to speak out: “I do not forget, this is one / of my great gifts,” says one poem; in another, even “the angel of silence…wants to live aloud.” The urgency of this need comes out in several poems, as in the final piece, in which the speaker’s mom, Shirley, is given the closing lines: “no sound is dissonant…which tells of Life.” Fittingly, “Life” is the closing word of this collection—an affirmation that the poet earns by honestly engaging with the specifics of memory, both collective and personal.
Well-crafted, sensitive poems that movingly convey liminal experiences.Pub Date: May 15, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-63534-929-0
Page Count: 86
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Review Posted Online: July 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
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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