Rebecca Loudon

I read Ms Loudon's book start to finish and here's what I noticed:
* Her writing is outrageous. And I mean that as a compliment.
* The first half of the book, leading up to the title poem-sequence, is dark and sexy to the point of claustrophobia. Like flesh-gobbets draped, rotting and raining on a beautiful nude.
* Also, each of the poems has the feel of a crime study. Little crimes. Small dioramas and dissections. Yes. Dark and delicious.
* Regarding the poems after the 'Cadaver Dogs' poem-sequence — a poem I know I will read over again and again — it's like a switch is flipped and the light comes on but the feel is all swimmy and strange, as if under fluorescents, alienating and disconcerting, and any minute a creature with huge black irises will suddenly come out from behind the office closet door.
* I read sections from 'Cadaver Dogs' out to my S.O. and it felt good in my mouth. Yum. 'I'm eating poetry.'

(ganked from my blog)… (lisätietoja)

In some ways this is an odd little book, wider than it is tall to accommodate the postcard-proportioned cover image; the funky size does more than just serve the cover art, though, as it lets you know before you even open the book that this is not going to be your standard "pretty much like any other collection" poetry book. The book’s format gets the reader’s attention, but it is up to the poetry itself to sustain that attention, and that it does, with moments like this one from “The Harmonium Machine”:

There is a lump on the back of her head.
Is it the hole she spent an entire summer
falling through? On Tuesday a magnolia
blossom wriggled in her hand, pink
and wet. It is, he assures her, a fever,
a handsome kind of sickness.

She stands in the shower with a bottle
of olive oil, combing glue from her hair,
half her head covered in zebra stripes,
no idea how they got there, wears a pill-
box hat to cover them and fabulous shoes
missing a toe, no hooves, thank God,
grateful to finally have a popular disease.

These are fever-dream poems, poems in which fire and unanticipated body parts pop in and out where you least expect them. More than once I found my expectations about voice, language, and content subverted, in a good way. Books that do this usually make me pick up a pen and start writing, and this one was no exception -- in fact, I suspect this will be one of those books that I'll turn to when I feel stuck, so it can shake the words loose for me.

(Published in Galatea Resurrects 5)… (lisätietoja)