Kathleen Graber’s The River Twice troubles the distinction between past and present. Rather than eschew the idea of time altogether, Graber’s collection reimagines time—perhaps as a cyclical rather than linear motion, but more likely as an all-encompassing surrounding material, like air or water.
In its contradictions and awareness of those contradictions, in its ability to project back a vision of the world in which it occurs while holding it just far enough away that it might be possible to love ourselves in it, Earth astonishes.
Refusing to be confined by the limits of narrative genre and form, she nevertheless exploits the advantages thereby offered to tell her story of how she manages (or at times perhaps fails) to find her way to writing poetry: “above your head that would be great witches would talk to you without anybody pleased all gold explaining it fit so well I had to destroy the double precious eliminate all the space around a poem so it doesn’t seem great but it is.” The result makes for a challenging yet nonetheless quite inviting reading experience. This is writing where anything might happen.
While these poems share approaches, their larger effect is to sketch the history of civilization that is buried in language.
Green is a careful student of human strength and frailty, aware of the dichotomies always at play in the life cycle, and in the clash of the natural world with technology.
In a startling and invigorating way, each of the following poems is another party game enmeshed with violence and darkness: the violence of language twisted beautifully like a balloon poodle and darkness revealed as illuminate like the bumper of a car leaving sparks after a hit and run.
The speaker mourns his mother while she lives and after she dies; he writes about other human losses, intimate and societal like those who perished in the 9/11 terrorist attacks; and he profoundly depicts environmental losses, species-specific and planetary.
The gorgeous cover strikes the first note of the theme: a traditional mountain landscape with steep inclines nestled in a white fog with a couple of trees breaking the lines and reminding us we are a mix of our roots, dug into the earth, and our branches reaching into mystery and the eternal.
Ever, the body risked is one dissolving, while the body through which the reader sees is, itself, nearly altogether dissolved. Those moments in which Falci’s own voice and persona peek through the pages, however, sing all the brighter—in these bits of self-reflection, the poet considers his own hand, the limits of his eyes and voice in the curation of these collected words.
These poems take on the historical and current oppression of Black Americans, particularly Black women—including slavery, lynching, blackface, cultural appropriation, and gentrification. Not a short list.