Kelsey Reviews

Mathias Svalina:

Beginning of review:
"Kelsey produces a kind of knowledge that develops multiplicities through matrices of meaning rather than a monument built on unshakable blocks."

End of review:
"It is this feeling of assured solidity that ultimately is a part of our experience."


From Rebekah Sankey:

And there are times as readers where we're left in flight without a landing point to dream of. But Kelsey walks the line of lyric with intelligent senses and a tongue so sharp it is ultimately persuasive.



I found the reviews to be helpful and enjoyable in my continuing thoughts about "Knowldge, Forms, The Aviary." Svalina's first point about the development of "multiplicities through matrices of meaning" and Sankey's feeling of "being left in flight without a landing point" more relevant to my experience with the collection. And I enjoyed it for those reasons. I found Svalina's final point about "assured solidity" too hopeful in a reading of Kelsey's collection. I don't think that this "assured solidity" should be expected when embarking on "Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary."

Knowledge, Forms, The Aviary

Karla Kelsey uses Plato's "Theaetetus" to imagine a separate existence in thought. When reading her poems, I could imagine and feel the collecting of knowledge through life experience. Her poems made me question my use of knowledge and the power of thought. The metaphor that runs throughout the collection of the birds in the aviary creates a pivotal point from which to expand. The imagery that Kelsey uses starts at the point of the birds in the aviary but as she continues in her poems, I felt the poet freeing the birds from the aviary.

Reading this collection of poems was a somewhat freeing experience for me. It challenged my perception of the world around me and my thoughts about the world. It challenged the censorship of thought and the asphyxiating walls that confine our thoughts. Plato's "Theaetetus" sets the precedent for the book and allows the reader to enter a mindset that is prepared for the capturing and releasing of birds.

The metaphor that runs throughout the book contrasted in my mind as I read the collection. As I was reading, I longed to capture more beautiful birds to store in my metaphorical aviary but at the same time, I felt the same longing to release the birds and transcend from the scope of the aviary. Kelsey's use of varying structure is practical in this sense. She uses long breaks and empty space in several poems, while others are written in paragraph form. In "Containment and Fracture," on page 61, she says, "aviary birds of knowledge fly captive, saved from asphyxiation." This is a powerful contradiction in my mind as the birds are flying captive and as captives, they are saved from asphyxiation. The concept of captivated flying almost seems as though the birds of knowledge are slaves to the aviaries in which they are contained. I long for the asphyxiation of the free flying world when I read Kelsey's poems.

Fence: Jose Perez Beduya

In the context of Fence, and 21st century poetry, Jose Perez Beduya questions existence in his poems. Of the four poems in Fence, I found new perspectives of life and the significance of interconnectedness between people and things. In "Breathing Exercises" Beduya proposes the existence of non-existence. By questioning the undesirable things alongside desirable things in life and challenging their existence, Beduya illustrates how important and interconnected everything really is.

"No sleep.

No standing against
The horizon line.

No harm.

No knees.

No coming to an end.

No quickness.

...

No intentions.

No contrariness.

No colors coming alive only in rain.

No hypothetical states of affairs.

No forgiveness.

No echoes and echoes
Through the architraves."

Beduya uses the power of small intangible things like forgiveness and contrariness to illustrate how connected and powerful the existence of life is.

In "Sea of Tears," Beduya questions the ethics of religion and "The Absolute." He makes the absolute unabsolute and intangible. He questions the ideas of philosophers and their presence in our lives today.

In "Advances," I found Beduya's use of images and social discourse beautiful. He challenges the seeming unattractiveness of revolt and unconventional images by putting them out of context and comparing contrasting images.

"An inch per human

Milk and white vomit

A cascade of stripes in the museum

A rip waiting to happen
Down the turn-of-the-century dress"

I enjoyed how Beduya used uncomfortable images together in order to create a collective whole in the poem that questions what is beautiful and what is not. This use of imagery is powerful and tangible in my mind. Beduya uses unconventional imagery to empower his poetry.

Magee Criticism

I found these sentences from "Jacket" especially relative to how I felt reading Magee.

"Puffed up with dashes, these poems make a blowhard show of associational unity — but in fact, they depend utterly upon the reader, without whom they make no sense. The reader must lend the poems an aroused and polymorphous ear, in order to create their charm for hirself. "

At first, Magee is frustrating, incomprehensible, and has no sense of direction. Magee's poems require the reader to do more than wait for the meaning to appear in front of their eyes. Each poem suggests itself differently to individual readers as if each readers brain is a search engine in itself. Magee's poem are simply the keywords, and it is the readers duty to produce results.

Michael Magee

In "My Angie Dickenson," Michael Magee explores the possibility of unstructured structure. HIs collection of strategically placed diction and space creates a wide open array of poems. Magee's use of stanzas and lines gives the context of almost rigid structure in comparison to several other 21st century poets. His poems are outlined and spaced in a way that makes them seem that they must be read in a certain way. However, after second and third reading, the reader should find something new every single time.

In one poem, I actually found Magee commenting on structure as a whole in society. The first and last lines say,

"Faith is a prison dentist,
The most legitimate cop,
Studying a riding crop.
“Try it more pissed” — —
Goons taping a gurney
Roots from the Attorney.

...

What’s a democracy?
Some tepid Hind in the ebbs,
Licking heavenly true celebs,
As totally as a star — —
Ritalin for you kids,
And Zoloft for you are — —"

Magee shares his harsh thoughts about the social structures of religion, law, politics, and medicine. He uses language that paints an elliptical portrait of conventional society and undermines it with language like, "The most legitimate cop," "Goons taping a gurney," and "Some tepid Hind in the ebbs." Magee mocks structure by using it on broad, unconnected words that are left to the readers imagination to make coherent.

Magee is successful in using his poems to tease readers into imagining words in different contexts than they are conventionally seen. I was struck by Magee's poetry in the meaning that I would find in poems after several readings. In most if not all cases I left the poem with a different emotion than when I first read it.

Sleeping with the Dictionary

Harryette Mullen has composed a well thought out collection of poems in, "Sleeping with the Dictionary." Mullen uses playful language in strategic ways to create meaning in the meaningless. The somewhat childish jumble of words sparks the readers imagination. However, the childish language usually does not lead the reader through a childish maze and political and social conflicts often jump out unexpectedly. Mullen successfully illustrates a poetic environment that brings readers into a linguistic maze, but the end is often unexpected.

The diction of Mullen's poems often requires extra attention. In the poem, "Kirstenography," Mullen uses indirect language to tell her story as if she is hiding the meaning in a code. The third paragraph starts, "It shook a few ears until they cold talc to gather, tall yolks, shear sacreds, heave a conversion or a dish cushion." This use of language prompts the reader to either turn the page or keep rereading until meaning is found. If the reader chooses to search for meaning, the reward is even greater and the meaning is more meaningful. However, looking for something concrete in Mullen's poetry seems to be a lost cause. Mullen's poems do not have concrete solutions, but rather abstract queries.

The abstract and sometimes playful language, makes it difficult to reach a concrete meaning in Mullen's collection. However the poem, "X-ray Vision," gives an ironic commentary to her hard to reach poems.

"You don't need X-ray vision to see through me.
No super power's required dto penetrate my defense.

Without listening to your mother's rant
you can tell that my motives are transparent.

A sturdy intuition could give you
the strong impression that my logic is flimsy.

Before the flat lady sang the first note of the book,
you knew that my story was thin."

This poem lends commentary to the meaning of her collection as a whole. The last stanza is a powerfully thick statement. The story-teller tells as that the story in the book is thin and lacks meaning. It basically says that the book was over before it began. While this may seem to be the case because of the way that Mullen's poem go round and round in sometimes incoherent language, this poem ironically contrasts the seeming lack of meaning in "Sleeping with the Dictionary."

Reviewing Zirconia

I found Cole Swensen's review of Zirconia much more productive and relative to the meaning of Minnis' poetry. Swensen's commentary went much deeper into functionality of Minnis' poems while Arielle Greenberg just seemed to glaze the surface of Zirconia. Greenberg's description of the extended ellipses was troubling to me. I never felt the "wave of pinpricked text" or the effect of "part stutter part studded" as Greenberg describes and quite frankly I do not understand what she is trying to describe. Swensen's commentary on the "hyper" ellipses is much more understandable and relative to the poetry. Swensen states, "These ellipses also constitute an ambient hum, as murmuring voices in the background that both cause and complete those long blanks. They create a suspension, which in turn becomes suspense, paralleling the gentle menace that lurks throughout this book." This description of the ellipses makes much more sense in the context of Zirconia.

I also enjoyed Swensen's thoughts on the conflicting imagery presented in the collection. I felt the violence in several poems being swayed and pulled towards beauty with the use of language and unconventional structure in the ellipses. Swensen comments on the idea of Minnis' approach toward conventionality saying, "perhaps because she demands a true response of herself, not a conventionally acceptable one." This is one of the things I enjoyed most about Minnis, her sincerity and consequential unconventionality.

Swensen's idea about the role of direction in Zirconia was especially interesting. She comments on the recurring color red throughout the collection and how this stands for intensity. However, the direction of the intensity and the objects in which the intensity is manifested is often directionless. This is largely because of the use of the ellipses but also the way that the objects are presented. Swensen comments on how the objects are not tied down to metaphors or similes but rather left open to the discretion of the reader. This direction, or lack thereof, is a strong aesthetic component of Minnis' poetry. Instead of linking objects to images, the objects are left independent to resonate in the context of the reader.

Chelsey Minnis, Zirconia

Chelsey Minnis' collection of poems in Zirconia is colorful and emotional. Minnis jumps from one idea to the next without fluid transitions. However, the use of periods instead of empty space connect one idea to the next while simultaneously creating powerful separations to emphasize certain points. The language in Zirconia is often harsh, violent and sometimes grotesque. Disturbing images mingle with beautiful ones throughout the collection. This imagery can be found in the poem, Maroon, which starts,

.............my bloodsticky........................................wet......................................
.......................................................................................................................
..............................................................baby..................................................
........is..............an auburn...and.............bloody.......beauty..............................
............who.....................................................................................................
............shined........inside........................a slippery milky sac..........................


This illustration of the inner workings of natality is somewhat disturbing and grotesque, but at the same time, the language is beautiful and enticing to the reader. This use of language and imagery creates a strange balance in Zirconia and the scales are usually not even.

The structure of the poems in Zirconia is often challenging to follow but it is also enjoyable. The use of periods allows Minnis to emphasize certain words and images in a new and different way than other authors. I had to pause on several words and consider the meaning of the spaces in the collective whole of the poem. This new and different use of structure was enticing to me as a reader and was a powerful use of the space on the page.

However, in contrast to my last point, I especially enjoyed the poems, The Skull Ring, and The Aquamarine, which use simple paragraph form and no obvious pattern. These two poems illustrate the personality and emotions of the writer. I enjoyed how straight-forward and simple these poems were but at the same time, I felt as though the intended meaning was layered and pointed towards more than what was being said. For example, in The Aquamarine, the concept of being invisible in certain situations is an important point about social interaction and one's perceived place in society. The simple use of structure in these two poems makes them more accessible and emotionally powerful to me.

Bradfield Reviews and Q&A

The criticisms of Bradfield's poetry offer interesting insights. Jordan Davis' criticism begins with a precursor to his actual criticism of Bradfield's poetry in which he describes his form of criticism. At the end of this first paragraph, Davis states, "At best, this criticism is a Goldilocks affair of looking for the just right in a hunting lodge full of chairs and beds too big and too small." In a way, this is how I felt in reading Bradfield's collection, Approaching Ice. It was difficult to find a comfortable ground when dipping in between the present and the past to find meaning in the poems. Davis did have several criticisms about the use of language in Bradfield's first collection, Interpretive Work, but I did not find these criticisms to have much standing with relation to her most recent collection. I found that Davis a higher message of hope in Bradfield's poems. At the end of the review, he commends Bradfield's style and indicates that her approach to the ever-changing nature is needed the present day chaos.

In the second review, Jon Christensen focuses on Bradfield's attempt to "challenge the idea of queerness as not 'natural.'" I would have to read more of her first collection to relate to this point however I find this argument interesting in the larger context of Bradfield's poetry. As a naturalist, Bradfield's approach to queerness resonates strongly with me. Especially references to her poem, "Creation Myth" in which Bradfield refers to scientific explanations of female deer growing antlers. The mingling of queer poetry and naturalistic poetry is powerfully portrayed in Bradfield's poems. As she describes in her Q&A she tries to set the polar expeditions with the contemporary ideas of sexuality, race, gender and identity.

I watched a video on youtube in which Bradfield describes the significance of her poems. She discusses how sound is the major influence of her poems. How she hears something and she has to put it on paper. She also discusses how her work in naturalism creates the scope of her poems. I would love to know how sound and naturalism provide the inspiration for her poems. What kind of sounds ring that must be written down? How does Naturalism offer itself to be capture in words and in poems? Is it ever challenging to capture such a sublime force of nature into a single poem or collection of poems?

Approaching Ice

Bradfield uses structure and language to create a powerful collection of poems in Approaching Ice. Her narrative about Antarctic expeditions is structured in a way that takes the reader on an his or her own expedition. Bradfield uses specific language to relate the 21st century to the expeditions of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Contrary to other 21st century poets, Bradfield uses language that refers to the 21st century. In "On the Longing of Early Explorers," Bradfield relates the 21st century to the early explorers.

"Before satellites eyed the earth's whole surface

through the peephole of orbit...

They'd say in quaint accents and obscure

sentence structures-if only the unsullied could be discovered..."

This poem discusses how the planet has been used, discovered and ravaged. Bradfield refers to this concept several times in her poems. She uses the structure of her poems to highlight specific language that illustrates her point. She uses enjambment to give power to specific words or ideas. This concept is illustrated clearly in the poem, "Song of the Ice Breaker Prow." Bradfield places several harsh words at the end of her lines to emphasize her point about the expeditions into the Antarctic. All of the following words are used at the end of lines,

"breakers, fight, gored, force her, cracked, crashed, pushed, challengers, forced, ravager, deepening mark."

This use of language and structure emphasizes Bradfield's point about the Ice Breakers and how they illustrate the aggressive nature of the Antarctic expeditions. Also, the use of structure in Bradfield's collection as a whole creates a readable, understandable illustration of the expeditions.

We find Bradfield's emotional connection with her subject in the poem, "Wives of the Polar Explorers." This poem brings out the hidden emotional aspect of the expeditions. Bradfield's use of conflicting emotions and powerful language creates a meaningful collection of poems about more than just the antarctic expeditions.

Balancing the Antic Impulse and the Desire for Resonance

David Sewell's review of Young's poetry questions the balance of Young's poems. The concept of taking the serious seriously comes up a few times. This point criticizes Young's use of humor, pointing out that it takes away from the meaning of the poem and leaves less to resonate with the reader. While Young does use humor in his poetry, he strikes a balance with meaning creating poems that are enjoyable to read and resonate with the reader.

Sewell introduces Young's latest collection, Embryoyo, with this concept in mind. He writes that in Embryoyo, where Young is dealing with the concept of life and death, the "jokey-jokes are not as important or present in Young's poems. This could indicate a change in Young's style or an attempt to approach his poetry with a more serious tone. However, Sewell also comments that Young's poems are hard to follow, flying through the air like a bird and eventually reaching a certain point, but taking an adventure to get there. This struggle with some of Young's poems can add to the humor and overall significance of the poems. The opposing forces of the light-hearted humor, and the attempt to resonate with the reader create an enjoyable collection of poems.

This is the way I felt when reading Young's poems. While the poems were fun, they were not simply pictures to look at, they were more like games, trying to figure out the meaning and relate them to my life, therefore resonating with me. Young's poetry immediately grabbed me with his use of humor in discussing serious things. This did not mock his subjects, but rather strengthened my relation to his subjects. The ability to relate to Young's subjects is what created resonance and meaning in Young's poems for me.

Dean Young

Reading Dean Young after Flynn and Greenfield was like feeling the sun emerge after a horrific storm. In his poem, Acceptance Speech, Young writes,

"Poetry is the grinding of a multiplicity throwing off sparks, wrote Artaud and look what that got him toothlessness and Shock therapy."

and

"Do not spend a lot of time in a n asylum writing cruel poems if you can help it, one Artaud is enough."

The "grinding of multiplicity throwing of sparks," is how I feel about Flynn and Greenfields poems. The sparks of emotions derived from the grinding of pain results in a chaotic mess of words to illustrate emotion.

Young uses his poems to tell stories that the reader can identify with. The poems are not simply outpourings of emotion. They illustrate a certain idea or ideology but the illustration not completed by Young. The ideas that Young present are open to the reader's personal feelings toward the poems. This creates the elliptical feel of Young's poems. The poems never seemed to be completed on the paper. The reader is left to illustrate his or her own complete image of the ideas that Young presents. I found this in the poem, Elegy on Toy Piano.

Young starts,

"You don't need a pony

to connect you to the unseeable

or an airplane to connect you to the sky.

Necessary it is to love to live

and there are many manuals

but in all important ways

one is on one's own."

He finishes with,

"When something become ash,

there's nothing you can do to turn it back

About this, even diamonds do not lie."

Young makes a strong statement about what is necessary in life. While this statement about necessity is a solid one, it is left to the reader to play with. By making a bold point about the structure of life, Young deconstructs this very structure, leaving the reader with the lego blocks of life and prodding the reconstruction of something entirely new. This is why I loved Young's poems. They are playful and thought-provoking giving the reader a puzzle, and "this puzzle has 15 thousand solutions!"

Greenfield Reviews

McSweeney's review of Carnage in the Lovetrees was quite problematic to me. The review was contradictory to everything that I had thought about the book. McSweeney states at the end of her review, "Greenfield’s achievement in A Carnage in the Lovetrees is to have created a readable, saturated universe of thinking, writing, and memory, in which no term provides purchase on another." Particularly the readable and saturated memory disturbs me. I must agree that Greenfield creates a saturated universe of thinking and writing but to me, that universe was unreadable and seemed to lack any sort of comprehensive memory. It seems to me that Greenfield's created universe is meant to be disturbing and incoherent.

I was surprised by the class discussion in which other students said that Greenfields poetry was calming and peaceful. McSweeney however agrees with this point saying, "in the firm hands of this poet, we do begin to recognize, to breathe heavy air, to feel, as an overwrought phrase in another poem has it, "the quarterlight dawn." But Greenfield’s overwroughtness is not contemptible, as it might be in the hands of another poet. Indeed, it is often lovely, and also useful." I understand what she means by breathing the heavy air and feeling it like "'the quarterlight dawn,'" but this was not a comforting or satisfying dawn. It was more of an eery, anxious, uncomfortable and tense dawn. In fact, this "quarterlight dawn" which she refers to from "Two In a Series of Encryption" seems especially tense and uncomfortable. McSweeney refers to this specific poem as "beautiful," a word that seems to be avoided in Greenfield's poetry. Beautiful is not a word I would use to describe this poem. Something along the lines of painful would do a better job of describing it for me.

However, this is not to discredit Greenfield because I believe that he may have had this intent with his poems. Jerome mentioned that he thought Greenfield's poetry was unconventional and we were having a tough time pinning down what made it unconventional. McSweeney comments on this idea of what is conventional in poetry saying, "Another of Greenfield’s habits is the shoehorning of boundless abstraction into the syntactic space conventionally reserved for the concrete, and vice versa." This placing of abstract in the space of concrete and concrete in the abstract may have been what Charlotte was referring to in her comment about the use of space in Greenfield's poems and what Jerome was referring to about unconventionality.

I had to try very hard to think of something that Greenfield's poems reminded me of. Then I remembered Jeffrey Lewis, a quite "unconventional" musician. His song, Texas, can be understood as a confessional poem of his relationship with his brother. It could be a pleasing song to some, but like Greenfield, the concept of the song is more enjoyable than the music itself.

Lyrics: http://lyrics.wikia.com/Jeffrey_Lewis:Texas

Video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qx8vdcdHQrg

Carnage

Greenfield's collection of poems in A Carnage in the Love Trees tells a challenging depressing story. The poems are glimpses into a dark clouded world. While in some sense I felt sorry for Nick Flynn when I read his poetry, I did not feel this with Greenfield's poems. My emotions toward Greenfield's poetry was more upset and discontented. The loathing that carries on throughout all the poems becomes somewhat tired to me. I found this particularly in "Elegy For the Swing," "The Invention of the Drawing," "Conversion at Play," "Lament for the Mule," and in some sense all of the poems. The poems, while written in present tense, seem to be caught in the past. Greenfield laments over losses and makes the reader lament as well.


One thing I appreciate about Greenfield's poems is his use of physical structure. Some poems are crammed into a single spaced pargraph without any significant breaks while others are spread out all over the page and many pages. This use of structure creates a visual representation of what is being presented. For example, the poem "T" is written in one single paragraph. To me, this presents the image of a single story that takes place in one significant moment or collection of moments. There is no need to break apart this collection of moments because collectively, it presents Greenfield's desired image. Greenfield structures the poem, "Burn the Family Tree," much differently. This poem spans six pages and spaces the lines in no specific order. Some groups of lines are singled out and therefore assumed to have greater importance, power or meaning in the poem. He also uses extra spacing in between certain words on page 21 contributing to the emotion of the poem. Greenfield's use of structure is useful and powerful in conveying his message.


The poem, "Elegy for the Swing," was especially challenging for me to connect with and this line in particular stuck with me,

"The grievous device of the aesthete makes even the incest
beauteous, or censored from the composition" (15).

The aesthetic nature of the swing and its connection with the tree has always been a beautiful image to me. When I read this poem and this line, it made me upset and challenged my relationship with the swing which has always been a happy one. This feeling of being upset with Greenfield's poems was consistent with my reading of his poems. I'm not sure what to directly pin that feeling too. Greenfield's poems are a challenging expression of emotion to me.

Flynn Reviews and Confessional Poetry

In reading the reviews of Flynn I was struck by the contrasting arguments about his poetry. The overarching argument, which relates to the question I failed to address in my previous post, is where does the power and emotion in Flynn's poems come from. Calvin Bedient argues that Flynn's poetry lacks power because it is all in the past and poetry in the present. I believe that Bedient is missing the power of the poems by reading the poems as a narrative of Flynn's traumatic past. While Flynn is, in a way, telling the story of his past relations with his mother and father, the power comes from the unveiling of emotion and trauma. As Tony Hoagland states,

"The book's gift is not the sensationalism of the tale, but the delicate kiltered skill with which the poems collage anecdote and metaphor into allegory."

The sense of an "allegory" brings Flynn's accounts from the past to the present accentuating their metaphorical and symbolic power rather than the simply literal meaning of the poems. Flynn's story may be far in the past, however his emotions and the symbolic nature of his poems can be felt in the present.

Bedient refers to Flynn's poem, "Man dancing with a paper cup." Specifically the line stating, "a church bell ringing resonates long after the ear ceases to perceive it." Bedient states that the ringing church bell is inconsequential to the present and therefore lacks power. However, I believe that the power in the church bell can be tangible to the reader and therefore felt in the present. This symbolism and emotion brings Flynn's story to the present, where it possesses power and relevance to the lives of its readers.


In thinking about confessional poetry, the song King of Carrot Flowers pt. 1, by Neutral Milk Hotel came to mind. A boy describes the story of growing up with a girl and the traumatic experiences that they dealt with. Does this song/poem have power or is it just a story about the past? Does the music and/or the video give it more power than it might have simply as a poem? I'm still not sure... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tDdyKklEHyY&feature=related

Some Ether

Nick Flynn creates tangible emotions in his auto-biographical poems. Flynn brings the concept of his mother and father to life through the use of his poems. Life and Death, and Flynn's personal relations with these ideas, seems to be the major concept of Some Ether. The poem's are powerful because of their use of imagery. While the objects that Flynn describes are not physically tangible, the mental image is clear and powerful. The reader can feel the tension in ongoing relationship with his parents. Although they have both died, Flynn continues to connect with them through his poetry. This tension-filled emotional relationship gives power and meaning to the objects that Flynn describes.


As we discussed in class, Flynn's poems beg the question, "who cares?" Why should I, the reader, care about Flynn's emotions? Is it because I was given the assignment to read the poems and therefore care about how Flynn feels about his mother's suicide. Flynn's expression of emotion has to relate to me for me to care about it. By illustrating the images of his relationship to his mother and father, Flynn connects to the reader and the reader can relate to Flynn's emotions. In the poem, Curse, I was especially moved by the idea of release.



Curse

Let the willows drop their branches, heavy with ice,
let the sound be a whipcrack across the fields.

Let each tree be felled, let them dynamite the stumps.

From now on you will have to keep moving, from now on
you will carry everything you own.

You will sleep beneath a payphone, dream of a room, a field.

Let the field burn clean, let your children beat the flames
with brooms.

You will feign sleep as the conductor passes.

The names of your children will break up in your mind.

Let the stones jam the plough, let the barn fall.

Let the paint leech into the well. (55)



The title of the poem, Curse, is illustrative of Flynn's relationship to his father and his father's release from family and life.
The poem, Prayer, follows up with this idea and Flynn's relationship with his mother.



Prayer

Who are you talking to? she asks, the room empty. (57)


This illustrates the tension between Flynn and his mother, and the ongoing impact of this relationship on Flynn. These emotions are made tangible by Flynn's use of imagery and relationships. This tension can be felt by the reader and this is what gives Flynn's poems power and emotion to me.

Climbing the Huge Oak in my Grandmother's Yard

Butane in my veins
Instead of blood
Provides nutrients to the forest that grows inside of me
Burning butane puts holes in my veins
These openings provide opportunities for new plant growth
And a cooler, bigger forest

When the forest grows too big it proceeds to emerge out of my face
So I shave my face with some mace in the dark
It hurts but is the only thing that can stop the butane enriched trees
Including bromelaids, mosses, ferns, nitrogen fixing lichens and the rare species of cocaine nose-jobs.

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