Off-kilter, Stephanie Conn’s third collection, sees the environment and the body under pressure; the landscape burns, the body sickens, relationships fracture. Threat looms large in the collection, yet these poems also chart a tentative path through the darkness – animals adapt to hostile conditions, the body rests and art is created out of the lived experience of chronic illness. The reader travels across the globe from Tasmania, in the blistering heat, to Canada and its frozen winter, by way of the Amazon Rainforest and Frida Kahlo’s Mexico. These are poems of people and place, crisis and pain, but also of hope.
I struggle with poetry sometimes, but this was not as obscure as some. Topics ranging from mother-daughter relationships to the noise of the big city are covered.
favorites r probably: lizard, the city moves, lone valentin, before death came to it, the blind spot of god(!), the horizon is tired and on the very last note of the cadence.