Stonepoems

by Never Angeline Nørth, Carrie Lorig

In their second collaborative poem-cycle (following 2013's rootpoems), Carrie Lorig and Sara Woods explore the constellation of effects achievable with the noun "stone." A birthstone is the blood from one who vomits after being removed from a freezer; "fuck you stone, that is hard to read." Often, these permutations present a stone not as a stone but as the pouring rain, as bars, as a habit. Before disappearing, stones gush God. (Secretly, this book is also about blood).

Genres: Poetry

32 pages, Paperback

First published August 12, 2014

About the author

Never Angeline Nørth is a mixed-media, cross-genre author and artist living in Olympia, WA. She formerly wrote books under the names Moss Angel and Sara June Woods.

Reviews

[cardulelia carduelis · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are 8 poems in this collection and I don't believe I understood a single one of them.

This is the second oldest of Sara Woods's collections I've read to date and the first collaboration. Unlike the whimsical and absurd imagery used in her other collections the pictures described here fell into obscurity. Things were being said in this, I'm sure of it, but they were always just out of reach. I couldn't find a thread to follow. It's almost as if they wrote poetry and the switched out some of the words - but I need the cipher.
Most of the imagery is naturalist, with references to bodies of water, birds, trees, wind, lizards.
Stones All Link Arms is the first poem and probably my favorite because even though I don't understand it it makes pretty flavours and shapes and colors in my head. For example:

ambers. what is a list of stone happening
in lizard-warm sand but mouths, mouths,
mouths? or pears in a jar, the last hoods
hoods in a salsa garden

I have no idea what's going on but there is music and nature and birds and maybe Thai food?

During You Give Stones a Blood Name we see many violent motifs. The phrase:

we all go boom boom boom
boom boom with our red gums

Is genius.
The second stanza is about the demands of others (fans?) looking for meaning/decryption in their being. Questioning the meaning of the poems perhaps?
Stones Rain has me completely stumped. This one had some water motifs with swimming, a red sky, a Great Lake. There is the sense of a journey beginning.
In Stones Gushed God and Disappeared we have some nice phrasing again, e.g.

What’s the difference between being haunted and being hunted?

But then there is also:

& there I gain panda

No idea.
ALL ALONG US / THESE STONES LAY AT BOTH OUR SIDES has a lot of images again,
with themes of naturalism and violence. Phrases like "pine-blood" and "lapis reading" and "sliding into forest" show up. These all sound like the seeds of a story, of a beautiful idea but there is no follow-through. For Stones Split Me What I had I will just give you some quotes:

but just enough for this bag of old magnets juicing carrots. their tenderness is salty and flat and dragging us softly against the dark figure of a storm.

It sounds like its saying something and it makes nice brain-images, but I'm not convinced it is actually saying anything at all. I think I've made that point enough now.
Then there is Stones are Godlets if not Believed, in which both Sara and Carrie define what stones can be in a numbered list. Unfortunately it involves definitions such as:

no porn here / just cows with bird accompaniments

So there we are.

I think I've said all I can about this work. It's a 2-stars because I just couldn't connect with it at all outside of the imagery BUT the imagery is great at times. I might use this as a source of ideas for paintings but beyond that I'm not sure what to think of it.



Here is a review from someone who did seem to understand this: https://www.tumblr.com/solarluxurianc...