Sometimes the awards get it right: Lightsey Darst won the Minnesota Book Award for this stunningly original collection, and does she deserve it. She left me shaken.
For me, the key to Darst's drama lies in her complex, writhing rhythms. She reminds me of the interplay between Charlie Ellerbee and Bern Nix on some of Ornette Coleman's mid-70's Prime Time Band albums—as with them, I can never tell where the rhythms will go, and they almost invariably go in an interesting and sometimes shocking place.
Notice the following line breaks:
"We argue abortion, slaphand and sing, but it's real
this slashed-face time. Don't think we're nothing but children" (19, italics in original)
"If you open it little parasite little tick
digs in, cyst
drains loose &
inside you a hazelnut skull grows" (37)
" A girl is a woman
is a rack to be hung with gashed sky, take it off me you say" (41)
"I said You must be the killer by your clear blue eyes—
so sit with me" (47)
"I am not the good sister.
I am a peach queen, I am welcoming you" (49)
"I wanted bones to cry out of me from the earth—
*
on all sides, thin bones
that were mine only—
*
girl-bones that knew my hand." (54)
" At twenty what won't she do. These splinters
her fears, these hairs her dreams. I give you all there is." (65)
" how old were you, when the winged shadow
flashed between you and desire, and one organ
that never ceased began pumping?" (80)
Part of me thinks I should just leave it at these quotations; the skill seems so obvious. Time and again Darst manages a rhythmic and thematic seeming misdirection that arrives nowhere but home. And it kind of hurts. And it kind of thrills. We are in the realm of Gothic gone fragmented poetry.
Slash and puncture, rip pop those guitars Ellerbee and Nix.
This rhythmic complexity, to me, underlies and makes possible how creepy this book is. It emanates from the sensibility of middle school girls—and the obsessions with violence, death, and sex that many of them have.
It is the age of cutting.
And this sex is rarely erotic—one exception would be the poem "Trail"—but frank, dirty, and brutal. It's the sex of teenagers who do not know what they are doing and hurt each other physically and emotionally.
Sometimes, Darst's line breaks record a literal break.
Strangely, this is not a downer of a book. In spite of the obsessive focus on serial murders, particularly of women and girls, Darst seems to revel in the wildness and horror of it all. In fact, as the book unfolds the later poems become more and more like the wicked underside of fairy tales in their raw vitality. I couldn't look away. Because life was right here.
This book might sizzle you.
_____________________________
For years Lightsey Darst has been a great friend of literature and dance in the Twin Cities. According to this interview, she sees poetry and art as collaborative—as do I. On Monday, March 26 at 7:30 she will be giving a presentation on multimedia and performance poetry at Bull Run Cafe in Minneapolis, at the corner of 34th and Lyndale. All are welcome.
Sample poems from Find the Girl.
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