Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.
In a literary landscape littered with ponderous rhymes and too-confessional verse, it is a joy to come across a strong collection of light poetry, works that flit across the world’s brighter surfaces while only occasionally sneaking beneath to peek at darker depths.
Fontinel-Gibran’s slick, slim new collection is a mostly gratifying sequence of what one might call diversionary poetry that delights even as it defies the genre’s subtle pull toward more doleful themes. The sense that this is a happier verse experiment is confirmed early, in adjacent works entitled “The Blue Law” and “Officially Desserted.” The first is a celebration and origin story of the ice cream sundae. The second is simply an unbroken, page-long list of sweets, from Bananas Foster to Burnt Sugar Marzipan to Coconut Glamour Cake—mouthwatering. Other poems take up or touch upon the joys of gustation, among them “Fringe Benefits,” “The Danes’ Delight” and “Make the Coffee!” Yet Fontinel-Gibran by no means confines herself to culinary themes. “Don’t You Remember; How to Play Flag Football?” sings the joys of gym class: “Even girls play football in gymnasium class; dreaming of wearing one day perhaps an amber football mum on Homecoming night.” “Geoffrey Gopher Would!” playfully laments the rodent tearing up the front yard: “There were just, no way to convey to him, to stop digging up those fucking mounds.” In most of these pieces, Fontinel-Gibran writes in line-less prose poetry, a daring choice, the only drawback being that it sometimes lets the author slip into purple language, as in “The Lonely Number”: “It’s true, by way of separating out from all other organisms, physical objects and realities, the enlightened being grows into a specified, philosophical, regular ‘unit’ on an everyday basis, that ultimately reveals itself through being at peace and in harmony with all other aspects of existence.” This abstraction threatens to fall away into drivel. But there’s more fun than philosophizing in this volume, and it’s well worth the read.
Fontinel-Gibran has earned her poetic license.Pub Date: April 14, 2014
ISBN: 978-1496902818
Page Count: 142
Publisher: AuthorHouse
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
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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