ISSN: 1941-4137
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
POETRY THAT ENACTS THE ARTISTIC AND CREATIVE PURITY OF GLASS
Kenning JP García is the author of OF (What Place Meant) and Furthermore. Xe is a diarist.
The Way You Made: Review of Your Easy Engorgement Forces My Wretch by Maggie May Ethridge
Your Easy Engorgement Forces My Wretch
by Maggie May Ethridge
Walk on Press 2020
Abjection or acceptance? Body horror or just bodies? Change happens and creation occurs but nothing was lost. To be destroyed is not an option. There is always a "was" in "is" as well as in "will be."
Maggie May Ethridge's Your Easy Engorgement Forces My Wretch (Walk on Press 2020) speaks to babies perhaps both with a sense of one's own birth and growth as well as a birthing and another's growing.
In moves or moments such as this, Etheridge blends a then and now into a fantastical carnival or alchemical world built for observation / examination:
"two fetus with downy breasts / vagina hearts cored like artichokes."
This microchap works a lot of angles of introspection, retrospection, and inspection. Yet, for all the body there is also mind and this is not a Cartesian dualism in verse. If anything it understands a totality of self and selves. Gaze is troubled for the sake of transformation. The viewing is a caretaking. The "never had a chance" of one poem is countered with the coda of the entire series which works out of "twisted eye on me, twisted eye on the tundra cross your palm / this is the storm…" and into its finality which is actually a repetition. Only said twice but two times is enough to take the hint / make the point.
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Glass: A Journal of Poetry is published monthly by Glass Poetry Press.
All contents © the author.
All contents © the author.
