Difficult Fruit. Lauren K. Alleyne. 2014.
A collection of poems by a Trinidad/Tobago writer who emphasizes the losses . . . and hopes that women often experience. This is a set of poems I keep coming back to in 2014-15, to study their form, to experience their moods and textures, to struggle with the violence that the speaker reflects on and works through. I was privileged to meet Lauren at the national PCA/ACA conference in 2014 and hear her read from the collection. I am particularly interested in the disturbances in memory and time that are represented.

In Paradise. Peter Matthiessen. 2014.
A novel set in 1996, with several characters gathering at Auschwitz-Birkenau to bear witness to the dead, confront their own demons or escape from them, and generally grapple with the implications of the Holocaust within the human community. A Zen retreat at the death-camp complex is the setting for the novel, and the central character is an American journalist, D. Clements Olin, who comes to the retreat not to bear witness but to study a Polish writer who committed suicide after surviving Auschwitz. As always, Matthiessen’s prose takes my breath away. I will miss this writer, who died shortly after the publication of the novel. In Paradise invites us to reflect on our spiritual identities, our cultural responsibilities, and the gift of love that sustains us in the most horrific of times.

C. D. Wright Poetry.
C. D. Wright is one of my favorite poets, and through 2013-15 I have been re-reading Just Whistle: A Valentine, Deepstep Come Shining, One Big Self, and other poetry selections in her collection Steal Away.  Somehow I began reading what I would call Wright’s “Neo-Romantic Sublime Gothic” poetry in the context of David Shields’ Reality Hunger. Wright is especially adept at exposing the  indeterminacies of contemporary life through figures of the Sublime and Gothic, such as “July by lotuslight,” and “ghost hair nestled in streamers” (Deepstep). Shields in Reality Hunger reminds us that we’re still thrilled by that which is culturally familiar, when it is made to slip jarringly toward the new, beyond clichéd image/idea/language (82 #240). As I read Wright’s poetry aloud, I am thrilled by the disruption of the heightened diction of Gothic otherworldliness and by the rebuff to Sublime “intimations of immortality” through her raw diction, like “cane slashing through the grass” and the image of lightning striking a lake, causing a swan to explode as her “five cygnets sizzled on the surface” (Deepstep). Thus, raw lines of poetry are interlaced with Sublime Gothic language. Might we be thrilled by the mixing of the Gothic and the raw, by language that is made to fail in its approach to the Sublime?