Crawlers

by Nathalie Anderson

Poetry. "The poems in Nathalie Anderson's CRAWLERS explore family, in its traditional sense and as a metaphor for the relationships of the world at large, mining dark and complicated truths. Anderson's imagery is densely beautiful, disarmingly rich. Hers is an expansive and generous poetry—desperately moving, meticulously crafted."—Denise Duhamel

Genres: Poetry

81 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2006

Reviews

[Tristan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well, isn't this exciting, first book of the new year and it's a five star read. Crawlers is positively fantastic, singing its tales of family and growth and sadness with impossible melodies:

They say she has to barter, and so she barters,
tight-fisted, smirk-mouthed, sly eyed. Disdain:
shop girls shake it out like gilded cloth, avert
embarrassed faces. Disdain: the carvers
curl it off like shavings, sweep away their
polished smiles. Disdain: she winces from herself.

(from part three of "Baggage") Each poem fills its space with gorgeous sound and intense feeling. For an example, here is Part 5 of "Spider Bite" the first poem in the book:

I remember it like it was yesterday:
three children sent to an empty room, and

I mean empty--not a piece of paper,
not a chair, the rough-dyed carpet so raw

it scorched us through our shorts--left to ourselves
to play. So obvious, yet imagine

the shock of saying the words out loud: "Not
happy," the youngest of us open-mouthed,

open-eyed, as if the world at last made
sense.

In this collection, Anderson explores the family--all kinds of families--and the societies in which they exist. Often she draws from her own childhood, from her personal family, but just as often she is talking about the world family, or a family of friends, or the family of a person who could be her but doesn't have to be. Crawlers deals with the nitty-gritty of life, the things that crawl on us, get under our skin; the broken families pretending to be whole, the whole ones waiting to break, the cracks in the world and the bugs and demons that seem to claw their ways up out of them. "Black Hole" is the story of every pain that isn't said, the injustices that aren't righted, the fear and indifference that can sneak in so easily. And yet, Anderson does not despair. In "Floating Gardens" she offers origin stories, hope tempered with failure, hopelessness with success. In "My South", she issues a challenge: "list out / everything you want that child to learn, / today, tomorrow--all the ways you can / imagine for these women to be good." I could continue to work through each poem indefinitely--there seems to be an endless supply of beauty and meaning to uncover in this collection, an absolutely perfect way to start my reading year.

[Bernadette · Rating 5 out of 5]

Many of these poems will set you on edge. These are poems that aren't afraid to scare the reader. Highly crafted, mesmerizing. True to the title, Anderson's poems get under your skin and make you watch where you step.

It's refreshing to see poems that fully explore an emotional intensity instead of flashing a handful of clever images at you and then pulling out before the poet really has to "think" about what they are trying to say with those images.

[Sarah Wells · Rating 2 out of 5]

So far, I appreciate Anderson's eloquence. The few poems I've read have a musical quality - reading them isn't painful.