Vulgar Remedies: Poems

by Anna Journey

"Anna Journey's poetry is really magical." -- David Lynch, director of Blue Velvet and creator of Twin Peaks
"Anna Journey's second collection of poems is wonderful and brings something precise and wild out of a vivid night, an imagery that finds its own necessary music, like sudden isolated birdsongs at dawn. The multiplying shadows of the mind are made exterior here, surprisingly illustrated with anecdotal thought. And Dante no longer concludes that all lovers are martyrs. I'm so happy to have this work in my life." -- Norman Dubie, author of The Volcano
"Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic/alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk 'voodun': protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine: here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life." -- Carol Muske-Dukes, author of Twin Cities

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Kindle Edition

First published August 12, 2013

About the author

Anna Journey is an American poet and essayist who was awarded a 2011 National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship for Poetry.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anna Journey's essay collection, An Arrangement of Skin: Essays, is one of my top picks for 2017. I read it back in the spring and was blown over by her voice, her settings, and her clever phrasing. After reading that, I was very happy to see that she also has three collections of poetry.

Happy to report that her brilliance continues here. Her metaphors, her constructions - they just jump right off the page. Love her work and I will return to this collection again and again.

Highlights (amidst a spectacular book):
"Elegy Where I Initially Refuse to Eat Sand"
"Base Notes in Perfume Are Almost Always of Animal Origin"
"Wool Blanket Covered in Nipples"
"Black Porecelain French Telephone"
"Nightmare before the Foreclosure"
"The History in Coffee"

[Jennifer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This might be the most tightly constructed book of poems I've read. It's not only that particular images and characters recur throughout the book, but also that each poem tugs at a thread from the one before it, so that the collection wove a little world around me as I read. That world, filled with deaths and ghosts, situations mysterious and ominous, is nevertheless inviting, a dimmed exhibit asking us to lean closer, to step inside.

[Mark Folse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anna Journey captures the terroir of the south perfectly in the early poems of this book and hooked me right there, then moves through childhood, marriage and memory with equal facility. The poems have a plein air reality and accessibility that never the less manage to capture the magic and mystery of startling moments of life with great beauty. A book I will come back to like a new favorite restaurant again and again.

[Aria · Rating 4 out of 5]

Review can also be found at Snow White Hates Apples.

As a contemporary poet, Anna Journey is perhaps one of the lesser known ones, though that does not mean that her poetry deserves any less recognition. Her debut poetry collection, If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting was selected by Thomas Lux in 2008 as one of the five poetry collections to be sponsored by the National Poetry Series for publication that year. It is a collection that is constructed tightly, filled with immensely provocative writing, and powerful in terms of subject matter—traits that can be safely associated with Journey’s style due to their continued prominence in her following collection of poetry, Vulgar Remedies . However, those traits are not all the reasons why Anna Journey is one of the few 20th century poets that I like. It is the combination of her individualistic diction along with the vivid imagery she weaves into her poems, and her seemingly effortless usage of phonaesthetic devices of poetry, that provides her poems a tone that is more favorable to me.

Diction is crucial as words are a writer’s primary tool that can either make or break their ideas—particularly since diction, as John Lennard states in The Poetry Handbook , has the ability to reflect a writer’s vision and steer the reader’s perspective as well. Mary Oliver notes in A Poetry Handbook that much of contemporary poetry ‘…is written in a diction that almost belies that it was formally composed: its general tone is one of natural and friendly intimacy; the language is not noticeably different from ordinary language’ (p.77). However, Journey’s diction—which often leans towards macabre as she employs words and phrases like ‘bacterial slither’, ‘fistulated’, and ‘scarred my sternum’—contrasts with the aforementioned ‘general tone […] of natural and friendly intimacy’ for it sounds more vulgar or gory. It deviates from the general language of contemporary poetry where the colloquial diction used is more suitable for daily conversation. Therefore, Journey’s poetry becomes more unique to me, and it leaves a greater impression on me as well. On top of that, I feel that Journey’s diction does steer my perspective of contemporary poetry for it demonstrates that a poet does not have to conform to the usage of conventional daily language in order to act as a medium of thought and inquiry.

Due to Journey’s diction, I find it unsurprising that the imagery Journey weaves into her poems are incredibly vivid. As many are aware, imagery is crucial for ‘it is the detailed, sensory language incorporating images that gives the poem’ dash, tenderness and authenticity ( A Poetry Handbook , p.92). In her works, Journey approaches the materiality of language and privileges the imagery in her poems with an acuity and poise that feels pleasantly natural. She twines a controlled profusion of floral and animal imagery that are thematically connected, into her poems to create surrealistic effects of accretion and dissemination which then, propels her thoughts through each collection. One such example of thematically connected imagery would be the ‘black-eyed Susans’ that appear together with the persona’s deceased uncle in “The Devil’s Apron”, “Danse Macabre, Mississippi : My Great-Grandmother Fires a BB Gun” and “There’s Another Forest Growing in the Water”. The other imagery such as ‘old frequencies of cicadas cinch up’ and ‘[t]he hummingbird’s nervous embroidery / through beach fog’ also acts a foil to the more macabre imagery, making the latter more vivid in process.

Even so, Journey’s diction and her usage of imagery are simply not enough when it comes to contributing to the tight construction of her poems, though they do well in creating the overall grim and surreal tone I have come to associate with her poetry. Instead, it is her seamless-like usage of phonaesthetic devices of poetry that does so. Since phonaesthetics is the study of the euphony or cacophony of certain words, phrases and sentences, assonance, consonance, and alliteration are some of the phonaesthetic devices of poetry. These devices are important for both the creation of a poem, and the investigation of the verbal expressiveness of language. In Vulgar Remedies , Journey's often-subtle usage of the poetic phonaesthetic devices reflects her overall linguistic style which I prefer over poems that have more obvious inclusions of the aforementioned devices as it makes the poems sound forced and unnatural.

There are one or two poems in Vulgar Remedies that I didn't like, and there are even more in this collection that I'm unable to wholly form my own depictions due to my lack of understanding. Even so, I find Anna Journey’s poetry really refreshing. Her poems remind me of John Donne, in the way that they both use rather unconventional imagery. She also stands out among the ocean of mainstream "poets" who have published works unsuitable to my tastes despite their overwhelming success in creating bestsellers.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

The past and its piled losses feature heavily in this volume. Characters living and dead recur and phrases and words are repeated throughout, both of which serve to render a cohesive volume with poems that link to one another. My favorite is "Vulgar Remedies: Tooth and Salt," from which the book title comes. I love the purpose of this poem (which is prompted by a visit to a museum exhibit): to re-declare one's love for another in a specific, corporeal way:

"Suddenly,

I knew what I should've written
in my wedding vow: how *forever* feels
too vague a word, that I'll stay

beside you until we rise in the shine
of our fangs, our silver pails
filled with blood."

In the final poem, "As I Rewind," time is turned back for the speaker who watches a Christmas video from years ago--literal enough, but the closing lines hit just the right ethereal note for this collection:

"I smooth shut
the wrapping paper, re-secret the objects, seal

all the ripped seams. The stripes of winter
sun--rewound--run eastward,

and the smoke from my grandfather's cigar
ciphers back into leaves."

[Mikayla Humphrey · Rating 2 out of 5]

i actually feel so terrible rating this so low — do you really just rate a book based on how much you enjoyed it, even with how subjective that is?

this just wasn’t for me. these poems and writing style didn’t really resonate with me, but i don’t think that’s a reflection of the quality of the book. it just wasn’t for me, but is clearly beloved by many others!

[Eris Varga · Rating 3 out of 5]

I find Journey, Landeau and Howe all have the same impact on me. I liked 'Saint Bruise' in this collection for it's specificity (and callback to the boy with the eyeball-sucking fetish) but otherwise I don't see what others see. I liked the imagery in 'Diagnosis: Birds In The Blood' as well.

Bear in mind my poetry reviews are based on how much of myself I have to scrape off the floor afterwards and not a reflection of quality. These were fine.

[VG · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another excellent volume - Anna Journey’s poetry is a mix of dark nostalgia, dreamy yet grounded, personal but with a slight air of detachment. These juxtapositions work so well in her capable hands; each poem is complete in its own right, but the common threads that bind them also make it a fluid collection.

[Evan Minniti]

Not every poem is perfect but there are so many unsettling, deeply moving moments throughout. At its best, the poems encapsulate the melancholic anchor of the past that always succeeds at least from time to time in making us look back at where we came from and what we have lost over the years.

[Molly]

I read about 25 pages, closed the book, looked up, and realized I couldn't remember a single thing I'd read.