H_NGM_N Books

$14.95/102 pgs.

The first thing that I encountered when starting to read Caroline Cabrera’s new book of poetry, Flood Bloom, out from H_NGM_N Books, was the honeycombing that acts as endpaper and splits the book in half. The walls of a honeycomb seem like they could be a productive organic and partially decomposing frame for what’s happening through the book. The stuff of memory is being collected chewed up, and regurgitated into form. What’s left is a fortifying byproduct and a well-crafted casing. A hive itself and bees actually arrive early on and with them come the speaker’s worry that the collective is mucked with an “f”:

The people in town are afraid of bees    we are in a hive   my
big concern is colony collapse disorder        everything leaves

(“Movement” – 4)

We are left, but thankfully not alone and the longing that’s semi-present throughout the book is productive precisely because all is not terribly lost. Things are just a bit foggy, and this is OK.

Cabrera deftly plays around with perceptive angles and the occasional use of “we” helps define the speaker more sharply. The author relies on declarative statements, often repeating sentence beginnings, but the effect of this repetition and construction is insistence that we as readers follow her very stable eye, and what that eye sees even though it changes as it’s seen.

I see boats, the wakes they make.

I see ghosts of clouds moving beneath me,

(“Flight Language” – 20)

The lessons presented to and through this speaker are mutable, imbued with the press and pressure: of family, of varied relationships, and the distortion that memory renders. But they’re lessons that we all have our own windows into, which makes these poems easy to enter, but not simple. Continue reading →