The mythological narrative works as a framework here because of its inherent mystery—the kind of unknowability that emerges over centuries—as well as its looming cultural influence, interweaving through the ways in which we understand ourselves and each other, even today.
The concept of a theory becomes a rich, generative shape with its own kind of ontology or weather. Even if there is a kind of danger and lack of clarity in the midst of blood and fog, there’s also a beauty to how it becomes self-sustaining.
Interiors and the fullness thereof feel at the heart of this book, a gorgeous kind of phenomenology that questions pronouns, desire, categories, queerness, and how a mind moves through the world as body. Or, rather, the body is the interface of the mind. The speakers of the poems of The Year of the Femme feel at once ghostly and embodied, interior and exterior found at the ecotone of dailiness, thistle, lipstick.
Strong images from the botanical, geological, mammalian, and environmental worlds sensuously create lines of emotional force in the poems.
Photo by Alexander Fink When my great-uncle died, his children held the wake in the old house, the house he had grown up in, inherited, and condemned in his will. He wanted his house’s story to end when his did. This was a selfishness I understood. I’d read somewhere that no structure is ever really […]
Photo by chessboard35 Teeth, glamorous teeth. Whiter than white: glint. How can you call a color a word? Flimsy netting of the exuberant verb of it— all swan and longing and snow. But we were talking about teeth, how I stole one from my first-grade class, decomposing in a dirt-colored glass of Coke next to […]
Photo by Theo Crazzolara Girl A, always Girl A, dives headlong into her own skin as she steps into a vehicle of light, skin rushing to catch up, closing enclosing her, in within the steps the box she carves out the vertical column of space that is hers, shadow edging close into the vertical column […]
Photo by Stephen Kruso In summer, its trees blaze with color, their fingers spilling over the tenants. There is a smoker, our fixture, his cough a deep chime. One, two. His second-floor watch is consistent but punctuated. There are children, creatures of the afternoon, DayGlo bicycles lurching forward with half-flat white tires. Sometimes, I come […]
Ratcliffe’s words carry in them the promise that, somewhere in this sustained observation, there is an inroad to knowing.
Ancient stories of transformation are again transformed by Rekdal’s telling, and it’s impossible to read their contemporized violence without the lens the #metoo movement has given us. For Rekdal, transformation is not simply progression, but fragmentation, and Nightingale stays honest to this truth.