Personal & Generic

by Rachelle Toarmino

Chapbook

Published January 1, 2016

About the author

Rachelle Toarmino is a poet from Niagara Falls, New York. She is the author of the poetry collections Hell Yeah and That Ex, as well as several chapbooks, most recently My Science, winner of the 2024 Sixth Finch Chapbook Contest. Her work has appeared in Poets.org, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, American Poetry Review, Bennington Review, Southeast Review, The Slowdown, and Omnidawn, which awarded her its 2024 Single Poem Broadside Prize. She earned her MFA in poetry at UMass Amherst, where she received an Academy of American Poets Prize. She is also the founding editor in chief of the literary publishing project Peach Mag and the creator and lead instructor of Beauty School, an independent poetry school. She lives in Buffalo.

Reviews

[Aidan Ryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The individual pages of Personal & Generic (a lovely little hand-stitched book that feels good in the palm) are windows into windows into Rachelle Toarmino's mind. There's nothing at all printed in the guts of this book -- the pages offer pictures of needlepoint works, each containing deracinated fragments of poems, stitched into hoops of various shapes and sizes. These are luminary moments, then, in lines like "stay as if / you were my nerves" -- often funny, as in "I want to / feel neutral / like an / expired coupon" -- and always intimate: "we dissolve / through and into / everybody else / and wait shaking at / the other end of / the light." Frozen in thread, though, these moments become more unsettling than they would have been in a some serif or san serif font. We become aware of the EFFORT of stitching each line and angle of each letter -- we're aware of the SLOWNESS.

I taught selections from this book to undergraduates at Canisius College. A generally baffled bunch, their bafflement inside this book was special.