Status Pending

by Adrian Blevins

A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins’ oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage “was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess),” if aging brings the hateful labels “OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE,” every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. “Bereavement status” engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as “then you lose your losses.” Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. “America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us — / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us.” Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last “You don’t seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes.” Amen.

120 pages, Kindle Edition

Published September 15, 2023

Reviews

[Liv Campbell · Rating 5 out of 5]

These all hit me in a place where not many things can! As someone with family from Appalachia, I really found such a connection with every single poem, and it felt very special. Some of my favs were: Fallout Status, Name Status, Facebook Status, Code Status, Resolution Status, Coping Status, and Fox Heart!

[Hannah Warren · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Zady out there somewhere leaning against a fence post like a dead doll maybe. Like a rotten little birdhouse. Like an urn.”

Incredible book about divorce, expectations for the female body, and complicated emotional tugging.