Pink Reef

by Robert Fernandez

Poetry. In PINK REEF, Robert Fernandez expands on the elegant nightmare of his acclaimed first collection, WE ARE PHARAOH, and cuts even deeper into the heart of modernity. His imagination has arrived from the future.

Genres: Poetry

96 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2013

Reviews

[Joe Milazzo]

Visionary work. Not sure I can say more than such right now. Tropical, both Blakean and Clare-esque, Objectivist but in such a way as to dissolve -- or shatter -- the relationships between words and their prototypical signifieds (an egg in these pages is not that familiar breakfast table ellipsoid); all I can do now is trail off...

[Benjamin Niespodziany]

An incantation, a séance, a curse, a spell. Descending a spiral staircase to the underworld. One hell of a book-length sequence.

[Craig Werner]

The rating's basically a statement of aesthetic incompatibility. Fernandez writes in a style that reminds me a bit of the early surrealists--discontinuous imagery, phrasing that circles back to begin again incessantly, testing the rhythms of thought. But there's nothing in either the imagery or what I glimpse behind the surface flow that compels me. There's a recurring obsession with the body as meat with odd flashes of a light that may or may not be spirit emerging from time to time. The impetus doesn't feel fake to me, but it doesn't speak to me. Sample lines:

I offer him
a strip of
my back,
a strip
of my bloodied
bleeding.

[Melissa]

I recall being resistant to and then liking these poems -- I think in the beginning they felt sort of distant and unreachable to me, but I really love the gall, the forms, the repetition. I am thinking of disease and the body and a willingness to name things, as I see it in this book. So well-crafted. I am impressed by what he pulls off.

"I will follow
after the bright
seeds of marrow are
shaken from the thigh
& the thigh placed
on a stick in
the faceless gallery"