Smote

December 7, 2015
Kimbrell (My Psychic) pushes his readers to the limit in his frenetic and unceasingly visceral third collection. The title hints at how Kimbrell's audience will feel upon finishing the book, replete as it is with violence and despair. The poems build upon one another like a "stairwell that smells like motor oil and beer,/ Aqua Velva, cigars and critter piss." Readers must endure the mixing of the rancid with the nostalgic to better understand the distant, removed perspective of the book's speaker, who proceeds through an existential recounting of memories. It is as if the book understands its own lack of quiet and is comfortable in the chaos. There's little real respite, and this constant motion is both the book's strength and weakness. Readers are brought along so that they "might rise and stroll/ into a cancer free and nearly Baptist sunset/ with a happiness neither of us expected,/ nor, in truth, felt we deserved." At the same time, they never really get to inhabit the poems as they are shuttled through memory and crisis; "there's no end to cruelty." For Kimbrell, the past is never really captured, only violently relived through memory. Similarly, Kimbrell's poems will doubtless come crashing back as unexpected, haunting nodes of language.