living must bury by Josie Sigler
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
Gotta say that I loved the “Contents” in this book. What is usually a list of titles and page numbers, Sigler weaves into a whopper of a poem. I’m a sucker for prayerish poems and “Contents” was one of the best I’ve read to date. So why not 5 stars, you ask? Hmmm. More difficult question. I liked the book a lot. The poems are sort of lyric catalogs of personal and public violence (feral children, wife beating, prisoners of war). I loved moments like in “O You With a Spine”:
O Panhandler, O Heart, don’t testify , You will certainly outweigh
a feather, O,Your mouth is a feather , O Feather, I have not stolen
/ bread, I have not, O Sunspot, O Crocodile,
O Shepard, O,
O
I also liked the odd listing mechanism she employs like in “those who frequent carnivals”:
Now a summer buried 8 years in, gangplank,
worm-hole, games beneath the covers,Those who play tennis with spatulas & balloons
But the obvious problem is the tendency of the prayerful to tip over into melodrama. Often Sigler insists on telling too much of a story and this over-telling sort of erases the keenness of her perceptions/imagination. I wish the book had been a little more rowdy and less linear, but overall a pretty interesting read.
