Insistent poetry that demands our attention—and gets it.
Muldoon’s debut is years in the making, and it feels like a veteran effort.
There’s a particular passage in Muldoon’s “Flavours” that sheds light on his poetic process: “To the top of that big hill / Take another triangular pill / Seasoning done, with some dill / Grow them on your windowsill / Tell me now; have you had your fill? / Or are you just gunning for that Phil / I’m always one to kill time / I’m just a worker at the mill.” As “hill” gives way to “pill” gives way to “dill”—and on and on—it slowly dawns on us: Muldoon isn’t trying to use rhyme; he’s trying to exhaust it. Which is just another way of saying that the poet’s default mode is excess. Many of the poems here are, like “Flavours,” characterized less by careful structure than by drive, by a brimming energy that propels the reader from line to line. So while Muldoon cites as influences Shakespeare, Tennyson, and cummings, his real poetic father is Allen Ginsberg, who defined the breathless style in the mid-20th century. This collection is the result of a process of enthusiastic culling. Muldoon explains that when he began compiling the volume, he had over 3,000 poems to choose from. Scores and scores fell by the wayside until just 90-odd pages of verse remain. Muldoon selected the pieces here for their quality, presumably, not for any particular theme, so the result ranges widely, touching on love, sex, despair, poverty, etc. The poet himself argues that the need to “be here now” (a tip of the hat to the ’60s guru Ram Dass?) is one of the volume’s repeating concerns, and we hear such presentism in poems like “Interpretation Xenon”: “When you live, you learn / When you love, you adorn… / When is it time, for now? / Now, then again, now.” Though it pops up only sporadically, Muldoon’s interest in the now lends his poems a sense of refreshing urgency.
Insistent poetry that demands our attention—and gets it.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2016
ISBN: 978-1-4917-9592-7
Page Count: 92
Publisher: iUniverse
Review Posted Online: Feb. 20, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2017
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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