simplyb's review against another edition
3.0
The beginning of the book reads like a profile in form and structure. Literally. With its words cleverly distributed among the page. I'm perhaps not sophisticated enough with my poetry, but I found it more distracting than contributory, and the poems would waft out of reach. But it picked up about halfway through with a couple of great long poems about marriage and its course, about the place women have in love and relationships, about the pull of life and convention. She has a nice sense of words and flow without erudition. And it had just enough darkness without being totally pessimistic. Nice collection, but did not blow me away.
leerazer's review against another edition
5.0
In Hindsight's Ballad: I'd Go Back & Fix Me, If I Was My Own Daughter, the poem's subject is a 16 year old girl newly arrived to the small town with her minister parent. Her sexuality quickly becomes the focus of the town's men, and she is raped after drinking too much one night.
Another girl who falls victim to violence is Pretty Polly, which is fun to read as a Nick Cave spoken word piece that would fit in on his Murder Ballads album.
I see you in black jeans with two holes torn out the knees & a three-stringed halter that shows what a scantThe girl afterwards finds the old plantation headstone of a slave's grave, and imagines him ghostly resurrected to avenge her, and himself.
mile you believe you could walk on your smarts. What you don't know: No one wants you
drunk to hear you recite the high school mercy speech from Merchant of Venice & that dirt road carved through one
pitchblack mile of swampgrass will not lead you to the Julliard your aunt & mother put
money in your savings for - but to a shack small as a four-walled dock & about as stable.
Maybe it is just a stone & you are not a god-The form of this section of the poem I cannot recreate here, but the text curves back and forth in imitation of the Mississippi that the town rests on, helping to propel the rhythm of the poem and its words with its wonderful sideways rhymes: human and Newellton, why and side.
but one dead human. Were you alone like me
in Newellton - wanting a plot of land to own
where no one would correct, with a whip, what
crop you planted in crooked rows? With someone
to trust your secrets to, who would not ask why?
But make a balm for you & say I'm on your side.
Another girl who falls victim to violence is Pretty Polly, which is fun to read as a Nick Cave spoken word piece that would fit in on his Murder Ballads album.
Who made the banjo sad and wrong?In Mules Springer makes the generational cycle of poverty, hurt and violence her subject.
Who made the luckless girl & hell bound boy?
Who made the ballad? The one, I mean,
where lovers gallop down the mountain brush as though in love-
where hooves break ground to blood earth scent.
Who gave the boy swift words to woo the girl from home
& the girl too pretty to leave alone?
[...]
All night Willie's dug
on Polly's grave with a silver spade & every creek they cross
makes one last splash.
When they told us Don't speak until spoken to, we grewThere's humorous fatalism in Don't Let Your Mouth Write a Check Your Butt Can't Cash, in which the poem's speaker laments his lack of ability to provide for his partner.
ears the size of corn.
When they forced us to eat everything we swallowed
their hurt whole.
When they hit us for drawing on the wall we painted
doors that opened behind curtains.
For generations they lived like this. Wanting badly to
save us - not knowing how.
& all the while we found love in unlikely places: In
the ravaged church of our bodies & our faces,
refracted in their long faces.
& if not a concert, I'd give you knowledge - of the physical attributes that make raptorsCalvary Letter is an ode to the ability of the poor Southerners that are the subject here to endure.
such excellent hunters. From the eyesight of eagles to the silent flight of owls. But that,
too, went fowl - at the aviary, falcons died mid flight -
so all the way back to the hotel we swerved to miss the bodies of falling birds.
Then the hotel burned.
That shell of our house in Calvary, Georgia no longer reminds me of the porch -
old couch & crush of blackberries,
empty-paned windows, cracked board of Lady Day's voice thrown into the musk-dirt yard where we danced -
anymore than it reminds me of the kitchen rats & wire baskets of food hung from the ceiling, or the jerry-rigged,
outdoor shower where we stood in mud to get clean -
[...]
What it does remind me of - that Calvary house -
is how many gallons of water could soak your wings - how many pounds of nails I could hold in my beak & still not break.
carolinemeow's review
not leaving a rating because i was honestly so intensely sleep deprived and spaced out when i read this i don't think i can really give a good review, but there's tons of good shit here. love the cover, reminds me of remedios varo. great southern gothic vibes, i'm really into it, just wasn't coherent enough reading this to grasp its own coherency
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