Amanda Roth reviews Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed (above/ground) on the dead (g)end(er) blog;

a review of Paige Ackerson-Kiely’s Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed (above/ground press, 2011) by writer and dg associate Amanda Roth (see the original post here). Thanks, Amanda!

Book About a Candle Burning in a Shed is just that, but also so much more.

Paige Ackerson-Kiely, currently of Vermont, has authored the poetry collections My Love is a Dead Arctic Explorer (Ahsahta Press, forthcoming), and In No One’s Land (Ahsahta, 2007)—which won the Sawtooth Poetry Prize—and a limited edition art folio/collaboration, This Landscape (Argos Books, 2010).

Ackerson-Kiely’s first chapbook from above/ground press is a collection of prose poems which combine to produce a memoir dealing with the death of a girl in a small town, and an authority figure’s pursuit of justice amongst internal struggles of his own. It is with fervor and beauty that the author weaves together individual scenes to provide a unique display the whole storyline.

The immediacy of the title bleeds through the pages of this chapbook, displaying context with a certain severity:

Thicket of weeds upon which her body ballooned. Dark dirty water I had to drink once. / There was nothing else around that I could see.

And yet, there are touches of the sporadic and perplexing tendencies of an overactive mind. This inner conflict is a reoccurring theme throughout the collection.

You’re cold again. Her delicate finger pointing to the hall that touches me some nights until I shivered. You’re so far away. You’re an iceberg in the ocean and you will melt and be forgotten.

The intensity of the narrator’s thoughts is overwhelming and enthralling. It is only by understanding each piece of the puzzle arranged by Ackerson-Kiely in this collection of poems that the audience is able to witness the greater narrative within.

Cassie Leigh reviews Rae Armantrout's Custom (above/ground) on the dead (g)end(er) blog;

St. Catharine's, Ontario writer Cassie Leigh was good enough to review Rae Armantrout's Custom (above/ground press). See the original review here.

Language is a tricky thing. It can be used to tell us with a point-blank simplicity how things really are, or it can be used to envelope the truth in irony and elegant words that force a deeper look into what is between the lines. Rae Armantrout, part of the first generation of Language poets on the West Coast and 2010 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, finds a way to give us both in her chapbook Custom.

At first read, Armantrout’s presentation is simple and graceful. The words fall into perfect place in the four poems (pulled from the scheduled 2013 release of a manuscript titled Just Saying), and we are lulled by the methodic and flowing nature of her poetic voice. There is something just below the surface, though, that begs for interpretation. Something past the beauty in her words calls out with a darker irony. I found myself reading and rereading these four poems, overwhelmed with what came out of each different examination.

Specifically, Armantrout’s title poem ‘Custom’ uses the everyday speech that she is best known for, but we are presented with a deeper question that is loosely hidden behind the simplicity. We are given an airport, a hotel, a plaid duvet and constant movement from terminal to terminal – and they are all regular, simple proclamations that sit on the surface of her words, in plain view. But with her last lines, Armantrout states that,

We are almost money. / We can wait at high speed.

The image of moving between terminals becomes the representation of people as nothing more than a transaction for big corporations, and any personality that could be represented from person to person fades away as quickly as the stripes of an old, plaid duvet.

The language of Rae Armantrout’s Custom remains vast and open. I find that there are so many layers to her writing that there will always be more that you can pull out from the grace of her words. From a simplicity to a complexity that begs for fight or flight, the journey that she takes you on in four short poems is overwhelming, subversive, and completely worth the trip.