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Wet Reckless
In this poetic memoir of a rough and tumble life, from her backwoods childhood without boundaries to a California urban adulthood filled with triumphs and disasters, Cassandra Dallett spares no details in a poetry memoir that reads like the love child of Charles Bukowski and Elizabeth Bishop. These are stories of an outsider, a perpetual misfit, offering a ceasefire in the war she wages with herself. Cassandra Dallett 's work has appeared in Slip Stream , Sparkle and Blink , Rusty Truck , Hip Mama , and the Criminal Class Review , among other publications. She currently occupies Oakland, California.
- GenresPoetry
128 pages, Paperback
First published May 13, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
September 22, 2019
When you go to the poetry slam you already know what’s gonna happen. It pretty much always happens. There’s always that one sexy lady who saunters into the room confidently lookin’ damn good, takes the stage with a wink, reads a kick-ass sexy sex poem sexily, with a truckload of sass and confidence, and then strolls out with the prize. I’m not complaining, mind you, it’s just that sexily performed sex poetry is a natural born crowd-pleaser.
I have done Cassandra Dallett a disservice: having seen her perform several times—thankfully not in a slam situation, which always makes me uncomfortable, turning literary performances into a bit of a freak show and, horror of horrors, a competition (although I do get how the format can and does often spice up an evening that could otherwise crawl along painfully when the writers are so into their printed words that they never look up from the page, forget that they are performing, and drone on indefinitely) I kinda thought that she was one of those slam prize-taking women. She’s unabashedly sexy and confident, but she’s not only a prize-snatcher playing an audience, she’s a smart, thoughtful writer trying to make it in a man’s world. Wet Reckless proves that her poems are not at all mere performative flash, but rather pure gold: they are thoughtful, technically excellent, and, for me at least, actually work a little better on the page than they do live.
I savored this collection. I read it slowly, giving the poems time to spread out before me and form wholes greater than their parts. The verse really worked its magic on me, weaving a tale of the poet’s life in its several stages. To read Wet Reckless is to put the pieces that you get at a reading together into a narrative, to better marvel at the technical complexities of the poems, to revel in their revelations, which whip by too fast in performance, and which disattention can short change. Although Cassandra’s performances are also good, reading her book was much, much better.
The first time I heard her read (Beast Crawl 2013) I told a friend who already knew Cassandra and her work how much I had enjoyed it and she said, “Yeah, her work is very...raw.” Later I joked with Cassandra herself that this is bound to be the operative adjective for her critics and how it, too, short changes the thoughtfulness and revelatory qualities of her poems. Sure, she’s in the great tradition of the confessional poets, the Sextons and Plaths, who eschew literary references, allusions, and formulas to lay their experiences out in a direct line from their personal memories and impressions, their ruminations and revelations, rather than constructing a theme in a pre-decided-upon frame. Ah, but the human mind can’t help itself. Even here we find structure and narrative. The book’s opening epigrammatic poem “I come from” lays out four of the collection’s five sections: Mud Pond, Fillmore, Richmond, Oakland: the geographical sites that act as categories or ages in the poet’s life as charted in the book. Left out is section IV, the longest of the collection, which focuses on the erotic life of the poet and it’s fallout: the sexy poems, in others words. But even there, the fallout, the consequences of romantic entanglements, are examined more closely than the flash and burn of hot passion in the great slam style.
The key word, I guess is “thoughtful”—I think I used it three times already. Wet Reckless is a slow rumination on events that performance can cheat out of a poem, where a dirty or outrageous word sounds so much louder than a melancholy reflection, the key detail, or thoughtful revelation. For that you need a book from which you can look up and reflect yourself on the moment described and the poem’s means of presentation, its interpretation of the event, and the process of rendering that is such a part of a poem’s beauty. I'm so glad I got to read the work and that this book exists. This isn’t only a collection of some of Dallett’s best poems, it’s a great book, a holistic object made of stellar fragments of an interesting life because rendered through a consciousness, not just tossed out with pleasing bells and whistles to win the meager prize at night’s end.
I have done Cassandra Dallett a disservice: having seen her perform several times—thankfully not in a slam situation, which always makes me uncomfortable, turning literary performances into a bit of a freak show and, horror of horrors, a competition (although I do get how the format can and does often spice up an evening that could otherwise crawl along painfully when the writers are so into their printed words that they never look up from the page, forget that they are performing, and drone on indefinitely) I kinda thought that she was one of those slam prize-taking women. She’s unabashedly sexy and confident, but she’s not only a prize-snatcher playing an audience, she’s a smart, thoughtful writer trying to make it in a man’s world. Wet Reckless proves that her poems are not at all mere performative flash, but rather pure gold: they are thoughtful, technically excellent, and, for me at least, actually work a little better on the page than they do live.
I savored this collection. I read it slowly, giving the poems time to spread out before me and form wholes greater than their parts. The verse really worked its magic on me, weaving a tale of the poet’s life in its several stages. To read Wet Reckless is to put the pieces that you get at a reading together into a narrative, to better marvel at the technical complexities of the poems, to revel in their revelations, which whip by too fast in performance, and which disattention can short change. Although Cassandra’s performances are also good, reading her book was much, much better.
The first time I heard her read (Beast Crawl 2013) I told a friend who already knew Cassandra and her work how much I had enjoyed it and she said, “Yeah, her work is very...raw.” Later I joked with Cassandra herself that this is bound to be the operative adjective for her critics and how it, too, short changes the thoughtfulness and revelatory qualities of her poems. Sure, she’s in the great tradition of the confessional poets, the Sextons and Plaths, who eschew literary references, allusions, and formulas to lay their experiences out in a direct line from their personal memories and impressions, their ruminations and revelations, rather than constructing a theme in a pre-decided-upon frame. Ah, but the human mind can’t help itself. Even here we find structure and narrative. The book’s opening epigrammatic poem “I come from” lays out four of the collection’s five sections: Mud Pond, Fillmore, Richmond, Oakland: the geographical sites that act as categories or ages in the poet’s life as charted in the book. Left out is section IV, the longest of the collection, which focuses on the erotic life of the poet and it’s fallout: the sexy poems, in others words. But even there, the fallout, the consequences of romantic entanglements, are examined more closely than the flash and burn of hot passion in the great slam style.
The key word, I guess is “thoughtful”—I think I used it three times already. Wet Reckless is a slow rumination on events that performance can cheat out of a poem, where a dirty or outrageous word sounds so much louder than a melancholy reflection, the key detail, or thoughtful revelation. For that you need a book from which you can look up and reflect yourself on the moment described and the poem’s means of presentation, its interpretation of the event, and the process of rendering that is such a part of a poem’s beauty. I'm so glad I got to read the work and that this book exists. This isn’t only a collection of some of Dallett’s best poems, it’s a great book, a holistic object made of stellar fragments of an interesting life because rendered through a consciousness, not just tossed out with pleasing bells and whistles to win the meager prize at night’s end.
April 24, 2020
Well, sh.t. I wanna give it one star, cuz a big, tough, blond chick who gets off cavorting with black and brown bad boys, I mean, like criminal element types, and romanticizes "ghetto," really puts me off. It puts me off when white men or women exoticize people of color. I hate to be exoticized. It's a form of "racism," really. Sorry, I hate bringing up the effing "R" word. But it's true. It's a form of racism. I think of it as an overcompensation for not wanting to admit they see us as "different." They just get off on it. (Whoo. Them's fight'n words. IK. Don't mean to put no one off. I'm just telling how it is. WE know it. We POP.)
But she got a pretty good rep as a poet here in the Bay Area, so eff me.
Wild. Fierce. No remorse. Not the slightest hint of it. Even Bukowski or Denis Johnson felt remorse when they were caught up in reckless, insensitive, self-destructive behavior. They had a sense of right and wrong. After the fact. Reflecting. (Tho I am aware that not all their fans even get that.)
I can't fault the writing, though. Can't fault it. Not at all.
But she got a pretty good rep as a poet here in the Bay Area, so eff me.
Wild. Fierce. No remorse. Not the slightest hint of it. Even Bukowski or Denis Johnson felt remorse when they were caught up in reckless, insensitive, self-destructive behavior. They had a sense of right and wrong. After the fact. Reflecting. (Tho I am aware that not all their fans even get that.)
I can't fault the writing, though. Can't fault it. Not at all.
May 18, 2017
The poems in “Wet Reckless” are searingly honest and so rooted in real life that they make me think: “You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.” I read this collection through in one sitting on a lazy Sunday morning: I wanted to see what happened!
Loosely following a narrative from rural hippy childhood to tearaway teenhood to hard-scrabble urban young adulthood, the individual moments captured in each poem have a realistic, no-nonsense ironic tone that is extremely appealing. Nothing is a “metaphor” here: everything is what it is. For example: “None of them bloomed after we moved in/ and the apples were all crab.” It’s a metaphor for something, but it’s not.
The snappy double entendre title of the collection comes from a California classification for a type of DUI offender and Dallett takes us there in “Drunk School, 2011.” “In fact the punishment of attending is/ the only actual rehabilitative aspect to this thing.” This wittily sums up just about all custodial sentencing and the entire justice system in two swift, deadpan lines. She speaks the truth.
Hard-edged city poeticism abounds: “Where our burned brown grass blows with Swisher Sweets/ and orange Cheeto bags the kids call Hot Chips/ beg for them like crackheads searching for rocks.” This stunning, hard-living collection is peppered with sublime moments of rough beauty.
Loosely following a narrative from rural hippy childhood to tearaway teenhood to hard-scrabble urban young adulthood, the individual moments captured in each poem have a realistic, no-nonsense ironic tone that is extremely appealing. Nothing is a “metaphor” here: everything is what it is. For example: “None of them bloomed after we moved in/ and the apples were all crab.” It’s a metaphor for something, but it’s not.
The snappy double entendre title of the collection comes from a California classification for a type of DUI offender and Dallett takes us there in “Drunk School, 2011.” “In fact the punishment of attending is/ the only actual rehabilitative aspect to this thing.” This wittily sums up just about all custodial sentencing and the entire justice system in two swift, deadpan lines. She speaks the truth.
Hard-edged city poeticism abounds: “Where our burned brown grass blows with Swisher Sweets/ and orange Cheeto bags the kids call Hot Chips/ beg for them like crackheads searching for rocks.” This stunning, hard-living collection is peppered with sublime moments of rough beauty.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews