by Shannon Vare Christine
Cracking open this volume feels like entering a labyrinth where each eclectic poem leads the reader down a path of otherworldly landscapes. Winding recurring images and extended metaphors containing watery allusions to fishing, harbors, shores, tides, drowning, and baptisms exist alongside wordplay and apocalyptic visions. Clearly, water can hold the power to condemn, as well as redeem, while the speaker and characters ponder their choices, “Ghostly / consolation for not / living always hides / in the background waiting.” The speaker asserts that writing and knowledge can only bear witness to the present time with ideas fleeting as fast as they appear. Yet one is never quite certain whether the speaker is connected to or at odds with nature, as restless energy pools within each poem, builds to a swell, and then subsides, or remains there in its wake. The reader left to sift through and decipher multilayered interpretations.
These poems take their time to reveal and refract as they are “cracked poetry, out of focus.” The reader must jigsaw crisp succinct lines in short stanzas, in order to distill the metaphors of experience contained within as “each line travels alone / into the morning.” Sonically appealing turns of phrase are “black-backed gulls shadowboxing / across the docks and shivered / by prismatic sun slipping.” There is an invisible opponent fighting the speaker, one which the speaker cannot quite defeat nor deceive. Deftly executed enjambment creates a tidal rhythm which carries the reader forward, forces them to grapple with the sorrow and longing at hand. Extended metaphors of seascapes and bones are “beach found pieces” captured and catalogued, as a poetic still life of sorts emerges.
This piecing together continues with a push and pull between highly structured yet loosely flowing poems and those that steadily build in narrative force. Mythic places spring to life and catapult readers into The Greater Past and The Great Below as “Something deeper than fear comes back / after that: a snuffling, as of an illegal hog / tracking dirt-rich truffles / on a forbidden estate.” Then the reader is transported through a fantastical rendering of the slow storms of a relationship dissolving “from our lost islands of thought” through the “waste away winds” as “the last steaming gator slips / from the sandbar / for home.” Earlier in the volume, the speaker wrestles with what is left unsaid, “You were not you at all, / I guessed, as leaf shades / migrated through leaves / and hung in treetops.” Light and time often distorts or destroys moods and connections, and so too the morning light reveals to the speaker, “Suddenly / last night feels like / illusion, outlived by a wish.” The poem continues on like an unsolvable riddle bending inward upon its mobius reflection. All the while, readers are navigating through and bouncing back, stopping to reread along the way.
Massimilla’s work here taps into the mythic modern, an epic in its own right, told in four parts.
Metaphorically close in proximity to the near present, yet they also recall a distant past and prognosticate an even more uncertain future. One that exists after “the first flood of plague and panic, / the rupture and pulse of protest, / another fierce comet burst / over the metropolis.” Somehow scenes such as these feel simultaneously present and likewise melancholically nostalgic. This fierce collection reminds readers that survival is only one part of the natural life cycle and the trials and tribulations of tomorrow might resurface around the next bend and the next.
Shannon Vare Christine is a poet, teacher, and critic living in Bucks County, PA. Her poems have been featured in various anthologies and publications. Additionally her poetry reviews and literary criticism have been published or are forthcoming in The Lit Pub, Cider Press Review, and Sage and Cigarettes. Archived writing can be found at www.shannonvarechristine.com and on Instagram @smvarewrites.
