Iain Haley Pollock's poems cover the ground from a woman late to
catfish supper to an ancient queen who howls, "Sea, you is ugly,"
from the creaking of slave ships launched from Lancaster to gunfire
on a contemporary Philadelphia street. Such lyric moments find
grounding in stories woven through this book--in one story line, a
boy with a black mother and white father wishes he could shed his
white skin or carve into what lies beneath: "I flung my almost
white self / into my mother's embrace--that brown / embrace I hoped
would swallow me whole / and spit back a boy four shades darker."
Another thread follows a marriage and a woman intertwined with
hunger and the blues, a woman who hears a whale song in a
refrigerator's hum, who cries hard like the lonely barking of a
fox.
Even when these poems soften, they can't be complacent about
good fortune: for all the maple seedpods and snow fluttering down
"here," the poems are always aware of wreckage and car bombs
"there," and they keep conscious of the mustard gas of old wars and
the losses of recent ones. Punctuated with lives that end early,
such as those of Hart Crane and Mikey Clark, a high-school
classmate who once swiped the Communion wine, Pollock's collection
earns its vitality and romance without closing its eyes to violence
and sorrow.
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