kylefwill's review
3.0
"We lived overlooking the cemetery. It was the summer of the Paris bombings. I walked him among the graves for what seemed hours but were clouds drifting across marble."
monasterymonochrome's review
5.0
The centerpiece of this collection is "On Earth," a 45-page abecedarian on loss and mourning and death and life after death, and, simply put, it's probably one of the most affecting pieces of poetry I've ever read. It's an outpouring of anguish in the form of a trance-like, ritualistic litany; an attempt to make logic and order out of illogical and disorderly things; an encompassing index of a life's worth of memory and experience. It's categorization as coping mechanism, cataloging everything in a desperate attempt to find the one thing that will answer the unanswerable questions. It's a poet's talents distilled into one staggering masterwork, full of heart-stopping admissions ("present though most often invisible," "why do I seem no longer alive," "without personal history or desire for selfhood"), haunting descriptions ("against a winter pine, eating a sparrow;" "bone-clicking applause of the winter trees;" "light issuing from the wind's open wounds"), and gorgeous turns of phrase ("born with a map of calamity in her palm," "it is as if space were touching itself through us," "the name I am becoming"). It all adds up to a hypnotic, emotionally-numbing experience that's actually strangely calming in its immeasurable grief.
It's surrounded by less ambitious but no less impactful poems that maintain this quality of dreamy and serene watercolor blurriness, despite the fact that their subjects - alongside death, war and mental illness feature most prominently - are unarguably upsetting. As the speaker of these poems calmly narrates the darkness surrounding her through a veil of fog, as though sedated, this strange sensation also carries over to the reader. My other favorites were probably the two additional long-ish poems, "Blue Hour" and "Nocturne," but, really, everything here is excellent and will stick in my memory for a long time.
It's surrounded by less ambitious but no less impactful poems that maintain this quality of dreamy and serene watercolor blurriness, despite the fact that their subjects - alongside death, war and mental illness feature most prominently - are unarguably upsetting. As the speaker of these poems calmly narrates the darkness surrounding her through a veil of fog, as though sedated, this strange sensation also carries over to the reader. My other favorites were probably the two additional long-ish poems, "Blue Hour" and "Nocturne," but, really, everything here is excellent and will stick in my memory for a long time.
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