35 pages
Published 2021
Read March 12
Rating: 4 out of 5
Sometimes I think I’m a pretty good writer. I’ve been published a handful of really cool places. My stories and poems have gotten modest praise, a handful of Pushcart nominations, and even earned me a few hundred bucks over the years. Every now and then I waver, though, and feel that my writing lacks substance, misses the depth of ideas and language I truly wish I could explore.
This slender chapbook made me feel completely outclassed as a writer. It feels part oldschool zine, full of collages and drawings and found images, and part document from an unraveling reality. The book opens with instructions on how to tear it apart and reassemble it into a new whole ordered by the wind. What seems at first to be the fictional review of a fantastic poetry collection distorts and fractures into a poem itself; the writer of this fabulous collection swallows her parents backstage. A dictionary defines the verb form of goldenrod and adjective sense of jar. Women grow the teeth of musk deer and permit snow to inhabit their throat. Girls follow creatures into the forest in the dark. Language is full of perils here; folk tales are spun through keyholes. Fragments, a hoard of small secret words, repeat themselves in new orders and disorders: glass and sugar, pearl and blue.
Any one of these prose poems and strange hints of fabulism could be quoted at length and speak Weber’s brilliance better than any line I could write here: “Now she stands beneath the branches, breathing. Now the small white branches are like the shape of her lungs full of air.”
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