[REVIEW] Down, by Sarah Dowling

Down

Coach House Books

86 pages, $17.95

 

By Klara du Plessis

 

Attempting to tidy the bedroom, down escapes from the pillow. Imagine this feather floating gracefully, not quite ascending, but taking its time to land. Sarah Dowling’s third collection of poems, Down, appears deceptively light at a first glance, then a sequence of “Bury It” poems emerge and proliferate. Constructing a dichotomy between light, light-hearted and popular, and dark, introspective and difficult, everything goes “well / well” in these pages, “but the only problem is / the burial m-hm.”

Dowling appropriates diverse sources from both popular culture and academic circles – lyrics from Aaliyah and The Temptations, a Frank O’Hara poem, articles and interviews on fine arts and rhetoric. She then manipulates this material, chopping, rearranging, repeating and rendering it unrecognizable, so that the resulting verse is neither a series of found poems nor erasures. As a poetic black box, Dowling inputs text that is readily available to the public and transforms it into a highly private vocabulary with which to express herself. Take the poem “Starlight tours,” for example:

, though a and him He who     The ‘midnight on

cold         in had was bitterly         , ride’ bitterly

winter was   fresh taken cold lonely cold

bloodied field

out night night nights (48)

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[REVIEW] Kern, by derek beaulieu

blue

Les Figues Press

89 pages, $17.00

 

Review by Klara du Plessis

 

Especially as a child, I was obsessed with the spelling of my name, the interchangeability of K and C in English; I often introduced myself as “Klara with a K,” attempting to pin down my orthographic identity. Flipping through derek beaulieu’s new book Kern a first time, I land upon a visual poem featuring the letter K, some commas, arrows and a question mark.

question

 

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