Three Poems
Her rhymes are multifarious and carry out wildly different operations. They have been compared to those of Browning for their occasional boldness and performative insincerity.
Lunch Portraits
Debora Kuan’s wonderful Lunch Portraits inverts and subverts this ideology of hunger, constructing poems that deploy tongue-in-cheek surrealist absurdity, biting social satire, and lyrical longing, revealing the psychological consequences of our pervasive “terror and loathing” of female hunger and sexuality.
From “Like Nebraska”
He’s told her / How a clutch of baby mice / Fell from the rafters of this room— / The highest point for miles, / Nails in the eaves melted / Flat from past lightning— / The mice still harboring / Their blushed shadow of birth.
Root
God made her / his vessel. No. // God made of her / a vessel. No. // The river poured / into her as if a vessel.
Like Life
In my home, / where I was born but don’t belong, a man / cut off the golden foot of the conquistador / atop his horse, a wound bleeding back / through four hundred years of breathing / beings holding history in cellular / formations…
Smell of Wet Earth like the Inside of My Hands
I want the wild azalea above, to speak / one good sentence in my life worthy of / carving into a pine, one of those waiting / in an elementary school playground where / they still want the kids to have a tree so / they paved right up to the bark on that one.
Evening
Rackin’s language is rich with wordplay, double meanings and subtle cross-references that never distract us from her pure lyricism and unflinching insights.
Losers Dream On
The entries shift wildly from the domestic to the cosmic (and back again), so that the “gush of time” never lands far from the banality of “salted cashews.”
I left nothing inside on purpose
…Those moments when what we want to say diverges from what we’re supposed to, are perhaps only as awkward as those in which the two match a little too accurately for comfort.
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Across the book, Mutschlecner cradles his layered world “in words that are naked,” in a coherent poetic integrity, with images that melt authentically into the folds of his ideas.