A New Language For Falling Out of Love

by Meghan Privitello

A New Language for Falling Out of Love is a good book to be reading when your plane down, when the dumptruck runs the redlight, when the neighborhood sugar factory explodes. Enamored with the flames & pleasures of the world, it also sees them passing & processed already in the spark. Through prose poems that mix the meditative & the lyric, the book haunts itself with its own alertness, reminding us that despite all these big thoughts & worldviews & romcoms & cathedrals “My body is the only lucid thing” & that this is a hopeful truth. It assures us that we are all possible.
—Mathias Svalina, Destruction Myth

Meghan Privitello's A New Language for Falling Out of Love is built—brick by gorgeous brick—of prose poems that restlessly investigate the bewilderment of being alive. These poems, by turns surreal, sensual, humorous, and rigorous, work to dissolve and reconstruct the self as lover, (potential) mother, believer, visionary, and inventively articulate speaker: "If you collected enough stones you could build a mouth which is the only way to say What if I don't want any of this, What if the body was born to float away, What if I go and go." The poems are charged with so much frenetic energy and light, they pulse in their boxes—urgently reaching out to the reader as if each act of speech was love, was life itself: "Here, it is the last act of intimacy before our borders become electric."
—Allison Benis White, Small Porcelain Head

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, ebook

First published January 15, 2015

Reviews

[Marne Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Somehow I bought this without realizing it was a book of prose poems, which I normally don’t enjoy at all. The fact that I actually enjoyed some of these is a sign that it’s probably pretty good! I’ll pass this book along to someone who’ll be able to get more out of it than I did.

[Claudia Cortese · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book so much--it is pure badassery. Privitello's prose poems are punk rock; they are embodied and dripping with viscera; they are weird; they will cut you. These poems are not precious or saccharine (though they are beautiful!)--they are electric with dark humor and bodies that bite. Each line in Privitello's poems is surprising: rather than presenting a linear narrative, the poems meander from one startling image to the next. I was never bored when reading this book. Reading it felt like wandering inside a museum of Victorian oddities and noir grotesqueries and riot grrrl mementos--I never knew what weird/daring/badass line I would stumble upon next. In fact, I was so excited by Privitello's book that I kept calling one of my best friends to leave poems on his voicemail: yes, this book is so good that it will make you want to call your friend at 2:00 a.m. Though he is fast asleep and has to wake up early the next morning, you will leave poem after poem on his voicemail so that on his train ride to work, he will hear these amazing poems.

Here are some killer lines from her work:

Your voice is my favorite pair of paints I wear skintight I wear it until it's frayed until I'm sore between my legs. . . I love him unrealistically I love him until my body never hurts. When you talk to the neighbor, your voice strangles me. In that willing, sexual way like when I say choke me, choke me now. (from "Rival")

Or

If this were a coloring book, the black crayon would try its damndest to darken only what is truly dark. In real life, the colors ask paintings which parts of them are the symbols of sadness. The painting freezes in its own headlights. Like us it is guilty of not having anything more to prove. (From "This Could All Be Yours")

Or

In a poem about Jesus, which the speaker calls Jesse--

I swore not to tell when he said he made male seahorses carry eggs because he was trying to make up for inventing the body-hugging dress. (From "Jesse's Girl") (Lolol!)

There's much more I could say, but I will stop myself and end with this: the book blew me away. Read!

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a true gem. Prose poems that move a mile a minute. Try to keep up. Underline some of these sentences and have them tattooed on your chest.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first at least 8 poems in this book are perfect. Perfect after perfect after perfect. All dense prose poems that operate almost wholly on juxtaposition (a term I taught my creative writing kids--and which they thought I made up) and every one clicks. My only small complaint is that after 2/3 of a book of dense prose poems, my brain kind of tapped out and stopped wanting to make connections.