Heather Minette’s “Half-Light” unstrands the ends of experience: the moment, the memory and the space in between. They exist together in her grief that spans the collection of poems and metamorphose into intentionally half-illuminated meditations. Her poems are dewy with privacy, the light before the sun has risen in full. The opening line becomes a metaphor for the poet and reader relationship. She, too, is the kaleidoscope and while reading we believe, “I still see her sometimes / in fragments.”
And if kaleidoscopes distort, her work, too, kaleidoscopes the light of fiction and reality, exposing the true topography of memory. She shows it as “momentary hope,” but also as pain, as absence, as passively omnipresent. With each poem, memory places a different role. Half-new, half what it was before.
While walking in the half-light of her reflections, she instructs readers how to understand her. Her poem, “A Silent Promise,” seems…
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the first thing an ant does is close its eyes. of the three people who identify your body, all are god. no one was meant to write.
footprint
a gift
oh if bird
could nightmare
nothing goes through puberty quite like the hands of children who keep track of god
–
for every cutter born in an Ohio treehouse,
–
an infant becomes attracted
–
I got a splinter. someone gave me a goldfish
–
for what image have you taken root
isacoustic* volume fourth is now available:
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contributors: Marjorie Thomsen . Robert Knox . Robyn Brooks . G.B. Ryan . Lana Bella . stephanie roberts . Asante Keron Hamid . M. Carmen Lane . Lee Nash . Arushi Singh . Devon Balwit . Grace Marie Grafton . Holly Lyn Walrath . Chris Shorne . Clara Burghelea . Lydia Renfro . Michelle Bermudez . Laura Del Col Brown . Jenny Sadre-Orafai . Susannah Nevison and Molly McCully Brown . Rus Khomutoff . Stephanie L. Harper . Rita Anderson . Rosemarie Dombrowski . Rebecca Ruth Gould . Margarita Serafimova . Nicole Melchionda . Lauren Brazeal . Chella Courington . Natalie Mulford . Carl Boon . Barbara Fant . I.V. Katen . Peter Twal . Dana Alsamsam . Triin Paja . Kerry Trautman . Rax King
Airy Nothings, by R. Keith, Dink Press (2018)
~review by George Salis~
In the beginning of R. Keith’s Airy Nothings, with the opening poem “Dummy Letters,” the reader is ejected into a void of subliminal word associations strung together by velocity and ethereal filaments: “luminescent limb/ logically numb […] womb conscience/ ascend champagne […] chemist techniques/ chlorine hymns […] pneumonia ghost/ whether knot […] psychic columns/ kneel chaos.” The common dark matter here is that which is invisible to the ears, but not to the eyes. As Keith explains in the acknowledgments, the poem contains words with at least one silent letter. It’s a list that would make a hyper-dimensional Italo Calvino drool (while also scratching his head).
“Maxim Shuffles,” as the poem’s title suggests, is a rearrangement of proverbs. There’s a translucence in which the reader wades through a mental estuary of the familiar and the…
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it’s not the scarecrow-
it’s the paralysis
the agreeable loneliness
of dog
and the detail
I don’t
go into-
binoculars
and the neck
of christ-
kingsoftrain 