blud
فرمت کتاب
ebook
تاریخ انتشار
2018
نویسنده
Rachel McKibbensناشر
Copper Canyon Pressشابک
9781619321786
کتاب های مرتبط
- اطلاعات
- نقد و بررسی
- دیدگاه کاربران
نقد و بررسی
September 18, 2017
Poet and activist McKibbens (Into the Dark & Emptying Field), a slam poetry veteran, exorcises painful memories and traumas in her third collection. Declarative and direct, McKibbens confronts difficult experiences head-on: “Obedience in the wrong house is a kind of plague,// survivor’s guilt a sleight of hand.” The poems feature razor-sharp imagery, and McKibbens exhibits an ear attuned to sonic texture. For example, readers can hear the hiss in “Just electrified violence/ All fists, piss & safety pins, an unwed teenage mother with no address.” The most complicated and sinister poems in the collection involve McKibbens’s mother, who haunts the poet’s memory and makes her question her own role as a mother. She wonders what of her mother has she inherited and what can be physically expelled: “It would take a gun to birth her./ O bullet, O midwife!/ Draw the lunatic out,/ throw that voice/ slanted with madness into/ the cemetery air.” In her eerie, visionary poem “Dead Radio Apostle,” McKibbens expels her mother by giving birth to her: “She blinks me/ into focus & the room/ is bewitched,/ a museum of blood/ & silence.” Through all the violence in McKibbens’s work, there comes, if not hope, clarity of mind: “Loss is never/ just loss.// I want/ your blood/ to have/ sharpened/ from it.”
Starred review from October 1, 2017
In her bewitching third collection, activist, educator, and poetry-slam legend McKibbens (Into the Dark & Emptying Field, 2013) confronts the two-sided burden of blood, spotlighting both the traumas we inherit and those we pass down. Drawing from Mexican proverbs, harrowing family histories, and her own childhood, McKibbens explores violence and love, mental illness and motherhood. The pulsing ghost town is a consideration of the poet's relationship with her unbeloved mother: I eat / abandoned houses / to keep her fed, / give her spoiled milk / until her teeth go dead. In oath (blud litany) McKibbens crafts a dazzling testament to anyone whose name is the song / of a dark water muse calling you down. In a series of poems probing suicidal ideation, the first time, the second time, and the last time, McKibbens brings herself blazing back to life. In fact, throughout the entire collection, McKibbens breathes brilliant life into language, forging lush, rhythmic poems that are both fiercely urgent and tightly controlled, dark and flickering with fairy-tale-like magic. In una oracion (bruja's soliloquy), the speaker asks, What more / unconquerable revolt is there than that / of a resurrected woman? And the reader knows, with smoldering certainty, there isn't one. Stunning, unflinching, fearless.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)
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