Review by James H Duncan
From page one it is obvious Iris intends to cut to the bone,
no waiting, and she’ll draw as much blood as it takes to see the reflection of
our struggling straining reality, of our love and lies and sexual frustrations
and boundaries, as well as the layered veils that make up our relationships
with one another. As she makes clear in the first poem, “you don’t say,” there
are things we give up in sex, and things we’ll never relinquish:
(when
i learned about my
virginity
and that someone
was
going to take it
from
me, i cut my hymen
with
a pocket knife i found
in
the dirt at the park.)
I actually flinched when I first read that, but how many
women flinch (at the very least) when that moment is ripped from them by
another, likely a very inconsequential other in any other way. It’s suddenly,
to this reader, a commanding moment of empowerment. We’re one poem in and Appelquist
is kicking down the door.
Yet these poems aren’t just a series of defiant moments, but
rather a pendulum of emotions and narratives, some fiercely declarative and
others lost and woeful with desperation and occasional flair of surrealism, or
perhaps hyper-realism, or some other fancy label for the poet’s ability to solder
multiple ideas and linear disappointments into one concise line, stanza, poem,
to take up residence in other perspectives and genders and frustrations with
rapid fire transmissions. The flow feels borderline relentless, like watching a
friend drive faster and faster around curves at night and you know she’s had
too many to drink and you know how dangerous it is but something inside keeps
you quiet as you watch with eyes getting wider and wider, trusting, almost
encouraging by your willingness to continue with silent awe.
everywhere
desperate for identity and a
vernacular
peace with which to moll the hours
countless
staggered hanging by right angles
off
into space finally and never sticking
to
anything all the sweet nothings and
epic
failures our crimes our fealties our
whole
deal everywhere is sent off to
a
somewhere else altogether…
A stanza from “home is”, taken from a poem that seems to
hold the center of what the collection says to me (at least), that we’re all
desperate for some identity and peace that can guide us through the mess, that
can serve as our rock, that nobody can take away…a hard thing to find, as it
seems anyone can take anything away, especially when love and time and sex and
trust are involved. Love and sex and this chaos we find ourselves in, it’s all
so tenuous and painful and addicting, and at some point we find ourselves
drinking alone and flip through our identities and peaceful moments and
treasured loves and sexual desires like they were old Christmas and birthday
cards, things that held such weight in one moment in time, but now feel so
useless. These poems kept bringing up that emotion in me, kept questioning my
own wants and needs and histories and identities. It’s a harrow thing to sit
alone and think about night after night, but as Appelquist says in
“macro/micro”:
there
is a comfort being
miniscule
infinitely closer
to
nothing than everything it’s
a
comfort that our horrors are
an
insignificant malady
of
this organism Earth
Appelquist’s poems inflict as many emotional questions as
they present, and are fevered with desire, doubt, and an exalting rush of empowering
fire—a fire so hot we burn down to ash and lose all form, control, and
understanding of what the hell just happened to us.
Nice Feelings by Iris Appelquist is an exceptional collection of poems available through Spartan
Press.
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