Imagine Not Drowning
Kelli Allen
(C & R Press, 2016)
available here:
~
review by Barton Smock
~
Kelli Allen rescues nothing in her book ~Imagine Not Drowning~. Instead, she makes an acolyte of stillness. There is lightning, here, and there are glyph-obsessed waters. Allen says ‘we keep vigil for signifiers’ (from Ghosting), and it feels final, feels already saved. Why follow? What does a named creature understand? I can tell you Allen makes one feel a name is still being said somewhere in a book signed by its readers. The language in this collection goes where it’s called, some borderless upward, some nest made for mouth. This poet can on one hand etch ‘direction only makes us brave the first time’ (from Bravery, you said, is not what it used to be) while on the other tattooing ‘every night is a lifelong sentence about home’ (from Reformation). These are good hands to be in. As a poet, Allen knows the body as a map without a country. She outlines, yes, but knows one need not be dust and is a lover of those stomachs full of eaten chalk. Her disorientations are precise.
In the poem (We name the totems with every morning), Allen writes ‘…If I dive deep into the ocean / and find a camel, everything I know / will cease to matter’. I was wrong. She rescues that camel.
sorrow the mudwrestler of my drought
whose tooth fairy
does
impressions
can we erase
what silence
films
a dog
a smaller
prison
we worship
not god
but the expression
on his face
as he recalls
being washed
in his mother’s
kitchen sink
I want
in the cookie-cutter’s
dream
to find out
I’m pregnant
/ what do you feed
absence
/ in most kitchens, the microwave
is above
the oven
/ tornado
it does not
put
a bedpan
in a projection
booth
/ before it is born, the mouth of the hole is open
I bring with me
to put
on the moon
my webbed
foot /
father for soap has been known to use a magnifying glass
brother he bend a tooth
in the temple
of the spoon
sister she is fixing a screen door
when her child’s fish
moves
its bruise
NOTE:
I have a privately self-published chapbook {BASILISK} that I am making available for free from now through the end of March by request only. if interested, one can provide me with a physical mailing address via message here or to bartonsmock@yahoo.com
as my brothers tie me to the world, the mailing of the chapbook will also include a short work by one NC Smock, one of said brothers. it is here:
OR, I have in hand 10 copies of the same chapbook, signed, as well as 4 copies of my Dink Press chapbook [infant*cinema], signed, that can also be requested in the above manner.
infant*cinema:
http://dinkpress.bigcartel.com/product/infant-cinema-by-barton-smock
review for infant*cinema:
https://foragepoetry.com/2016/12/02/review-of-infantcinema-by-barton-smock-emma-hall/
a cricket turns into a frog
the worm it works
for peephole
oh sound, attracted to nothing
what on a raft am I rubbing
whose suicide
is this, whose bloodbath
footwear
drivers of the haunted tank
on his belly to piss on his tail, man dreams of getting laid in the birthplace of tunnel vision
/ my son he keeps showing me how to find the same animal
died of different
things
