[REVIEW] What Is a Domicile, by Joanna Penn Cooper

domicile

Noctuary Press

66 pages, $14

 

Review by Lauren Gordon

 

In her debut full-length prose and poetry collection, What Is a Domicile, Joanna Penn Cooper asks, “Are we all sad walking mistake-filled balloons?” The prose is part documentary and part New York school, where the ephemera of an urban landscape is in juxtaposition against the slow passage of time.  The prose poems move from fall to spring like molasses; there is nothing frantic about the prescience of Cooper’s experiences moving, living in New York, being in a relationship, and becoming a mother.  “I wonder at everything,” she writes, and it’s true.

Cooper’s voice is static, even when her reflections are not so much passive as they are internal.   It lends to that remarkable documentary-feel as if the writing occurs in real-time with the reader audience.  In the poem “On the Delicate and Non-Delicate Movements of Weather and Time” she writes: “At 2 a.m. the humidifier sounds like crickets and then I know I should move to the country,” but later in the same poem:  “What do you expect?  One lifetime is very short, but it’s hard to realize when it’s happening.”  The autobiographical framing is where anxiety becomes formalized, where the “we” gets applied to the universal experience of being.  It’s a neat trick.  You don’t have to be a mother or live in Brooklyn to be able to relate. Continue reading

[REVIEW] Her Last Cup of Light, by Annmarie O’Connell

Last cup

Aldrich Press

31 pages, $14

 

Review by Lauren Gordon

 

AnnMarie O’Connell’s chapbook Her Last Cup of Light is an ode to the south side of Chicago.  Her voice is rooted in the spirit of the neighborhood and she traverses the landscape with her young son, while contemplating the birth of another son.  The poems are lyrical vignettes that home in on the people in the city, from mechanics to shut-ins.  A thin motif of nature emerges and almost becomes supernatural against the urban sprawl, which lends to strange ecstasy.  Even the titles of the poems are meant to be read as first lines, as if the poems occur in a rushed breath.

Anxiety is the engine powering the poetry, but in that same rushed breath, O’Connell is also offering a reader something surprising – hope.  There is a dead serious hopefulness in humanity that is wrought through deceptively simple language and imagery.  A good example of this is in the poem “The Man Who Lives in the Abandoned Garage”:

 

touches the baby’s cheek with his dirtiest hand.
With the other, he gives him a handful of grass.

The baby brings a single green-yellow blade to his lips.
The rest slip through his little fingers. Continue reading