Spectra
Ashley Toliver. Coffee House, $16.95 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-1-56689-526-2
In her radiant debut, Toliver carefully explores domesticity, medical trauma, and the profound limitations of having a body. Divided into three sections, the book opens with revelatory images of light that spark a phenomenological query into the nature of perception: “Once, I heard a father tell his older daughter,/ you are a clear pool where light plays.” The first section, “Housekeeping,” consists of a series of prose poems that carry tensions of domestic interiority and destructive urges: “I still don’t know what kind of woman/ I am. But as the flame nears the fingers/ that trust the match, as close as the skin/ can stand it to singe, I call this the nerve/ to find out,” Toliver writes. A narrative handrail appears in “Ideal Machine,” where a surgery is treated with grace and tender images evolve out of loss: “dear optic nerve dear crushed penny// in the dark I watch explosions.” The satisfying, titular closing section looks outward at the glory of nature and human familiars. Toliver writes, “it is dusk on earth I see/ myself through you// in the last pew/ of the lit horizon/ in the wide-open field of the now.” Testing the bounds of relationships and identity, Toliver displays her linguistic gifts in poems that resist egotism and startle with their intimacy. (Sept.)
Details
Reviewed on: 08/20/2018
Genre: Fiction
Open Ebook - 978-1-56689-534-7