[REVIEW] Thieves in the Afterlife, by Kendra DeColo

82 pages, $15

Review by Corey Pentoney

I was drawn in to Kendra DeColo’s collection of poetry, Thieves in the Afterlife, as soon as I heard the title. Who could turn down a title like that? If I had to choose one word to describe this collection, it would have to be raw. Raw in every sense of the word. Raw emotion. Raw bodies. And, perhaps most importantly, raw language. In her own words, she makes “each breath/poignant, a rawness/cutting.” Thieves is racked full of lines that stop you in your tracks, and make reading a single poem difficult as you have to deny the urge—or not—to stop and relish the feeling of the line on your tongue and in your head. There are images that will leave you to your imagination:

In the dark he turns
to his wife one last time
and asks her to pull
his heart inside-out
like a sleeve.

There are lines to make you cringe:

When the silver hook
pulls through the flap of skin
between your legs, flushed the way a tongue
fills with blood when arrowed.

And there are lines that may leave you scratching your head:

You, rapture of knuckles along the mouth.
You suicide letter of glee, treble clef kiss, alphabet
of orgasms and mineral lungs

Whatever emotion she is attempting to achieve with each individual piece, DeColo pushes you into her world, filled with rich metaphors and raw imagery. But once you start, there is no escape. That being said, DeColo’s voice was almost like lightning in my veins from the very start, a punch in the gut from the get go with “Anthem,” a poem about lewd graffiti. Rarely does the author let go or ease back from the throttle. The pacing of the collection pushes you through briskly, broken only by those lines that force you to stop and savor. DeColo manages to do this without seeming forceful, but rather just through the power of her language. On the second read through, her voice took on a more lyrical quality for me, with faint echoes of the beat poets in the sounds and rhythms she creates:

You say you only have room
for sadness, smuggled over the border
for when you need to feel human again,
to remember the kiss of smoke and gin,
cursive of rain between a woman’s legs.

Sometimes I believe that the language itself carried the author away, which resulted in a few poems that lose themselves in a heap of metaphors that I couldn’t quite dig myself out of, particularly in the poem “Barnacle.” By the end of this particular poem, I felt as if I were covered in the creatures and didn’t have a knife to scrape them off with. But, I really do love the way DeColo blends her rhythm with the material she writes about. It maintains the driving pulse that fleshes out every single one of these poems, and underscores the raw emotion that will keep the reader coming back for more. And more. And more.

***

Corey Pentoney teaches English and Writing in the dark depths of the North Country. When he’s not busy grading papers, he enjoys the fine art of Belgian Waffle decorating, for which he has won several awards.