Life keeps hurtling forward, bursting forth. It’s spring in California, the jasmine’s come in and the streaky roses. It’s been raining hard all morning; just now it stopped abruptly. Lyn writes in My Life, “she observed that detail minutely, as if it were botanical. As if words could unite an ardent intellect with the external material world.” This is Lyn, vitally observing, drawing it all into relation, the mind and the world, botanical, passionate. Making words hold life, making words as life. “Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality,” she writes.
Aliens, Jesuses, bacteria
Kenna O'Rourke
Kenna O’Rourke reviews three poetry collections from the past two years: Proof Something Happened by Tony Trigilio, Spooks by Stella Wong, and Palm-Lined with Potience by Basie Allen. About Palm-Lined with Patience: Small round symbols and sweeping dotted lines appear throughout Basie Allen’s debut collection, tracing out palm readings or perhaps just guiding the eye to the poems’ juiciest inscrutable moments. Allen indicates that some pages should be torn out or flipped to be read fully, mirroring an activist’s disruption tactics: “I am not ashamed of inconvenience / and I promise to ruin everything,” he writes in one of several poems condemning NYC gentrifiers’ destruction of neighborhoods.