Noctuary Press

[REVIEW] Apocryphal, by Lisa Marie Basile

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apocryphal

Noctuary Press

90 pages, $12.32

 

Review by Sarah Gonnet

 

The path through Lisa Marie Basile’s poetry is lit with pulsating pagan fairy lights. Her poems are sparsely populated with voices searching for the true identity of their lovers and fathers. Apocryphal is a beautiful mess of confused sexuality, hidden in perfectly crafted verse. In this collection Basile gives us a series of images, flashes of another world, and then allows the reader to fill in the gaps and see the whole universe themselves. This gives her poetry an extreme personal relevance.

Apocryphal is Basile’s second collection; she is kept busy outside of poetry as an editor for various publications and is also the founder of the feminist magazine Luna Luna.

Essentially Basile is a storyteller. In her warped but eerily realistic tales, themes of abuse and an Alien-style fear of pregnancy (“I become obsessively pregnant with you…& abort you”) are displayed alongside a more traditional sense of tortured sexuality. Yet at the same time her poems work together to form a collective voice. This collective voice gives the poems a similar atmosphere to Jeffery Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides. Except in Basile’s work the voices are almost all women. Women who live double lives: screaming in their vulnerability whilst also being powerful. This twists their collective vision into an intricate steampunk machine. Lines of thought and themes tick away in the background, while other themes are having their time in the foreground. Continue reading →

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

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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 →

F IN, by Carol Guess (A Review by j/j hastain)

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Noctuary Press

70 pgs./$14.00

 I enjoy moving into the space of a book with the feeling that I can trust what the writer has told me about it. Guess indicates that F  IN “began as a ghost story.” What is the difference between what something began as and what it becomes? And how will that becoming (which involves a “((ubiquitous) dead girl” (a becoming which can’t be controlled in the same way that indicating what a project’s beginning is can)) end up altering, terrorizing (“I’m going to have to hurt you”) or enabling me?

The figure on the cover of the book reaches one way but looks another. This is how a “heroine [with] agency and appetite” would have to proceed: moving many ways at once (“if I didn’t have a twin you wouldn’t be seeing her ghost”). I find myself wondering if a blackbird or a mother or a sister will emerge (“the dead come back; it’s just a matter of naming”) and bite this figure as she tries to finger her way to the gold locket, the hope for a golden egg.

What is the most honorable way for me to approach a self-named “erasure”? Knowing “compression is vital to [Guess’] aesthetic” is it honoring to simply enter the succinct yet spacious realm of these pages (some of which only have 5 words on a page) as one would an empty, deteriorating house? Is it an inverse-violation that my desire is to grab red crayon and draw shapes of liminal organs in the agoraphobic clenches of F  IN? Does intentionally filling an erasure rape its sparse confidence? I am sorry if it seems that I am obsessing over this; this is a real ethical dilemma for me. I am just not sure: am I really to “erase place” along with how this book began? Or is there something more I can add to its haunting noir?  Continue reading →