In Short, a Memory of the Other on a Good Day

by Allison Cundiff, Steven Schreiner

In and with these poems, Cundiff and Schreiner offer us, and one another, a sheltered exquisite conversation that encompasses the tangled narrative of love and other things less easy to announce or acknowledge. It catches and attaches in a fractal, organic way, melancholy and exultant, factual and defiant, gravid from the exploration of the secrets of the dark body, private and intimate and universal. You could peer through the window, but the vine-covered door is neither locked nor unduly difficult to find. I recommend that you walk in, pour some wine, and straightforwardly celebrate. -Susan T. Adams

94 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2014

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

The authors, Allison Cundiff and Steven Schreiner, corresponded over considerable distance (he in Kuwait, she in Missouri) in a loose and indirect verse, Schreiner's more closely entablatured by blank verse tradition. These letter-poems in their first instance seem to have been erotic, and the Persians Rumi and Hafiz are their most apt company, since the act of mind in which the psychic personages are locked, "Schreiner" and "Cundiff," as each title in the sequence signs itself, rests upon an assumption of ineffable negativity and instrumentality, auto-eroticism through the balance of the sequence, but upended slightly by a mythical past of violent "othering" on Cundiff's memory of her family's pastoral sexual constraint, that she no doubt assumes her disclosure of these poems transgresses -- and that's a knowledge different in kind (political, for starters) than the mystical. What poetry readers will delight in is that these two readers got to each other -- psychically. Their disclosure to each other is always a pleasure, whereas the disclosure to us (Schreiner's labor in the mystical tropes of rain, windows, dark rooms; Cundiff's "returning to difficulties and masks," as her correspondent nudges her) can't always keep the sexy bodies on the bed. The poems seem to need something else to keep the psychic identification in focus: a better format, a more fictive exposition (Cundiff's Western mythology seems to be straining for that), or perhaps just a keener sense of scenes. Nonetheless, a terrific verse novel for non-academic readers of poetry.

[Mary Ellen Summers · Rating 5 out of 5]

Within this text the authors draw us in with a dialog that captures the intensity, passion, and the frustration that are so often mixed in with the pursuit of love. The chemistry between them is very real. The poetry is exquisite.