February 7, 2024 / barton smock
words toward Skyler Osborne’s ‘Rejoicer’ (Driftwood Press, 2023)
REJOICER
poems, Skyler Osborne
Driftwood Press 2023
Fuck you, Skyler Osborne. Just not kidding. Your dreamhouse chainsaw, zoo of the void. Fuck your shadow with nowhere to be and any of the future undead who’ve already checked out in the space that takes up the body. Just not not kidding. Rejoicer is a toothache quaking with joy. I don’t know what midwestern means, but I know what midwestern stands against. And this verse is a protection spell made historic by aftermath. The poems themselves become poems somewhere in the middle and any reader will probably have to restart to get any kind of closure. That’s how good the imagery is and how doomed its predictions. Its locality gives tomorrow an imperfect now and its look forward weighs itself in animals filled with the animals too slowly named. My gravedigger dies forever and I sing. I can’t love my teeth. Can’t pull joy from the air. But I can love this unshaken work. And I do rejoice.
~
reflection by Barton Smock
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