Greg Bem reviews Valerie Coulton's small bed & field guide (2017)

Our pal Greg Bem was good enough to provide the first review for Valerie Coulton's small bed & field guide (2017) at Goodreads. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

Valerie Coulton's language is shockingly clear and found within the fringes of the contemporary. From the digital landscapes to the contours of intimacy, Coulton's chronicles, appearing serial and diaristic, charm, mesmerize, and paralyze the readership. The two poems in this book, "small bed," and "field guide," read very similarly, divided into four columns upon the page-spread. The fragments (the stanzas) within each are blinks of Coulton's very personal reality. Though there is joy and pain, comfort and suffering, within these pages, the tone is fairly optimistic and reads as a sort of triumph-through-documentation. I found the book truly marvelous to read, especially displacing having never read Coulton's work before.