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Mortar
Uneasy and vigilantly aware of the mire of awareness, these poems wrest from daily encounters of city life a contentious consciousness that can open, albeit explosively to each next instant. Just as the title connotes both the short smoothbore gun used by the military to wreak havoc and the organic material made from cement, sand, lime, and water that bonds the bricks of a cityscape together, this collection of poetry offers both the emergency of society’s destructive failings and the sometimes vexed sometimes confoundingly transformative emergence of intimacy between self and other. The fragments that construct these poems court grammar and turn from it, their slipperiness befits both the anxiety and ambivalence— the pleasure and the trap—of attempting to name the known, the knowable, and then to find oneself snared in the constructs that such knowing compels one to inhabit.
- GenresPoetry
80 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2013
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 11, 2014
Just a quick note, her name is Sara (no h). So if someone with "librarian" status on their account could fix that, that would be fantastic. Thanks :)
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I don't often read poetry, especially when said poetry is not part of a Shakespeare class or Brit Lit II (or--gasp--one *shudders*), so I never know what to expect when I crack open a book of poetry.
This one was definitely unexpected. The last poems I read (thanks to Stephanie!) were mostly prose-poems and more like fancy paragraphs (I meant that to be a nice thing, not a criticism, I'm not good at this sorry).
What I really enjoyed about Mortar was how the words were arranged with each other. (That sounds so much stupider than I meant it to...) Once I acclimated to the style, it was fun to go from link to link, thinking about the allusions and the references and what was being said. One poem talked about the SF Zoo incident one Christmas Eve when Tatiana the tiger (totally rightfully) mauled a kid. (I feel terrible that death/mauling occurred but if you bait a tiger...come on. What did he expect?). Another referenced more San Francisco things (hence my "location location location" tag), and so I enjoyed seeing fragments of my area spoken about.
I love words. One of my favorite plays is The Skriker by Caryl Churchill. It's a play that lots of theatre students angrily throw aside because of how utterly insane the language is in that play, but that's what I love best about it. Reading Mortar felt like that (so I had fun).
--
I don't often read poetry, especially when said poetry is not part of a Shakespeare class or Brit Lit II (or--gasp--one *shudders*), so I never know what to expect when I crack open a book of poetry.
This one was definitely unexpected. The last poems I read (thanks to Stephanie!) were mostly prose-poems and more like fancy paragraphs (I meant that to be a nice thing, not a criticism, I'm not good at this sorry).
What I really enjoyed about Mortar was how the words were arranged with each other. (That sounds so much stupider than I meant it to...) Once I acclimated to the style, it was fun to go from link to link, thinking about the allusions and the references and what was being said. One poem talked about the SF Zoo incident one Christmas Eve when Tatiana the tiger (totally rightfully) mauled a kid. (I feel terrible that death/mauling occurred but if you bait a tiger...come on. What did he expect?). Another referenced more San Francisco things (hence my "location location location" tag), and so I enjoyed seeing fragments of my area spoken about.
I love words. One of my favorite plays is The Skriker by Caryl Churchill. It's a play that lots of theatre students angrily throw aside because of how utterly insane the language is in that play, but that's what I love best about it. Reading Mortar felt like that (so I had fun).
Displaying 1 of 1 review