In writing "A Rupture in the Interiors", I sourced text from books about silk and the evolution of human skin, interweaving my own language drawn from personal challenges with skin and hair. Centering the experience of a female figure, the poems themselves are all centered. This chapter opener poem uses only language from the rest of poems in the chapter, stripping the images down to their most basic and visceral.
Valerie Witte on "AND THE MANY SHAPES OF CLAWS" |
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"On Jean Valentine's Light Me Down"
"I find in Jean's new poems a refreshing childlike quality alongside lifelong gratitude, welcoming us into the midst of play with an intuitive sense of belonging: 'Old life, / I'm glad, all my rubbed life, I was found, / I was written on a wall in air.' I think of Jean, like a pilgrim, trespassing (or did she receive permission?) on Dickinson's grave on a snowy day to make the rubbing that hung on her wall."
via LOS ANGELES REVIEW OF BOOKS |
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What Sparks Poetry:
Juliana Spahr on "Gentle Now Don't Add to Heartache"
"Humans do not show up until the eighth section of sixteen. The chant is enumerative, but not merely enumerative. In the list of flora and fauna that the Kumulipo includes, humans come after birds, bats, and fish and before octopus, coral, and eel. I know of almost no examples of a poem with such an ecosystem, such a hope, such a possibility, such a reminder. And if I had to start to try to figure out what poetry is in this moment of ecological crisis, I might start there." |
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