booktrunks's review
4.0
I picked up this book because it was one of the Oregon Book Award winners, and I am always so excited to read local authors! Instrument was such a fascinating and impactful collection, and the pictures were truly so eerie and moving. This is a rather long collection, but I highly highly recommend to poetry lovers!
rjdd's review
5.0
This is an absolutely outstanding book of cross-genre work! I honestly can't hype this book up enough. And while it is on the longer side for a poetry collection, I found that I could not put it down. I intended to take a week to read it, but I ended up finishing it in two days because I couldn't stop reading it. The more I read, the more I wanted to read.
Strom's blending of poetry, prose, imagery, and collage are truly astonishing. The way she utilizes white space, and especially the way she uses punctuation (specifically brackets and slashes) are unlike anything else I've ever read. There's a sense of musicality, a rhythm, a beat, a pulse that reads across each page, speeding up and slowing down. And since there is such a musicality to the poems in this book, the experience of reading it evolves over time until it's not really reading it at all - it's hearing it, receiving it, feeling it.
Strom's use of language in this book isn't any less fascinating than her use of white space or punctuation. "The mothers inside of me are crying / there is no flag {flower} for their sorrow" (11). "I live in a body. Tumble into knowing, blinded by past knowings" (11). "how it is light / I wish to speak through" (12). There's a hauntedness to these lines, an almost gothic sense of place in time, place in experience, place in self, and place in memory.
Themes of gender, nature, the past/ancestry/heritage, and culture weave through the lines just as the lines weave through the page. "This is how you make the sky explode" (17). "This is how you circumnavigate the given settings" (17). "] to be born into a church to which you are inherently heathen" (21). And all of these themes weave into a single tapestry of language, image, and expression: a tapestry of what it means for the speaker to be themselves. "i had come towing anchors of selves" (38). "The past is an exhaustion. / The past is demarcation" (43). And while there is certainly an inward conversation taking place between the speaker and the page, there's also a conversation taking place between the page and the reader that moves beyond simple reading.
It's reflection, a mirroring, but it's a one-sided mirror. Sometimes it reflects the reader off the page, and sometimes it lets the reader look through the page into the internal workings of the speaker. And sometimes it does both simultaneously. "I've come to understand the body as a necessary country. / The placelessness this is (a) place in me / wages against" (87). "the insidious order / of things / mis-taken / ((i)) / flower / sometimes" (100). It's a continuous song written across time, space, and being.
It is, quite simply, a stunning piece of work. I highly recommend it.
Strom's blending of poetry, prose, imagery, and collage are truly astonishing. The way she utilizes white space, and especially the way she uses punctuation (specifically brackets and slashes) are unlike anything else I've ever read. There's a sense of musicality, a rhythm, a beat, a pulse that reads across each page, speeding up and slowing down. And since there is such a musicality to the poems in this book, the experience of reading it evolves over time until it's not really reading it at all - it's hearing it, receiving it, feeling it.
Strom's use of language in this book isn't any less fascinating than her use of white space or punctuation. "The mothers inside of me are crying / there is no flag {flower} for their sorrow" (11). "I live in a body. Tumble into knowing, blinded by past knowings" (11). "how it is light / I wish to speak through" (12). There's a hauntedness to these lines, an almost gothic sense of place in time, place in experience, place in self, and place in memory.
Themes of gender, nature, the past/ancestry/heritage, and culture weave through the lines just as the lines weave through the page. "This is how you make the sky explode" (17). "This is how you circumnavigate the given settings" (17). "] to be born into a church to which you are inherently heathen" (21). And all of these themes weave into a single tapestry of language, image, and expression: a tapestry of what it means for the speaker to be themselves. "i had come towing anchors of selves" (38). "The past is an exhaustion. / The past is demarcation" (43). And while there is certainly an inward conversation taking place between the speaker and the page, there's also a conversation taking place between the page and the reader that moves beyond simple reading.
It's reflection, a mirroring, but it's a one-sided mirror. Sometimes it reflects the reader off the page, and sometimes it lets the reader look through the page into the internal workings of the speaker. And sometimes it does both simultaneously. "I've come to understand the body as a necessary country. / The placelessness this is (a) place in me / wages against" (87). "the insidious order / of things / mis-taken / ((i)) / flower / sometimes" (100). It's a continuous song written across time, space, and being.
It is, quite simply, a stunning piece of work. I highly recommend it.
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