ALL GLITTER,
EVERYTHING
Laura Relyea. Safety Third Enterprises,$10 chapbook (40p)
Glitter is unstoppable.
I do not mean this in a metaphorical way. If you touch anything glittered, you become
glittered. It sticks to you, it
permeates, you find it days later on your fingers, in your bed, on your
computer as you type a review.
Laura Relyea’s chapbook ALL GLITTER, EVERYTHING is covered in
those ever-present sparkles, but glitter is just a indicator of the character
who is “all” and “everything” in this collection. Ke$ha is the ubiquitous one. Each poem is a dedication to Ke$ha and each
poem details the speaker’s adventures with her.
Often the speaker addresses Ke$ha directly, but sometimes the poems are
more distant—a memory of a faraway friend or a self-conscious admission that,
even as a best friend, Ke$ha cannot be fully known.
The collection begins with the Ke$ha we’re all
expecting. Our speaker will tell her
future daughters, “Once, your Aunt Ke$ha and I threw a party at a bar and the
polar bear carolers confettied the floor with cigarette-scented newspaper
clippings.” Ke$ha is “in pursuit of
life. Her mouth is usually ajar, she is
just that excited.” There is Jim Beam
and Jack Daniels and horse racing and, yes, glitter. It’s a fun exercise of imagination and
play. What situations and settings will
we find Ke$ha in next?
But as the prose poems continue, Ke$ha shifts into something
else. Ke$ha is a recovering alcoholic
after flipping her truck. She is the
oldest of childhood friends but she also met the speaker in college. Ke$hsa is a confidant. She “drove two and a half hours because [the
speaker] called her and said [she] needed a hug.” Ke$ha carries the weight in the relationship.
She is a bike commuter and a mythic baker. Ke$ha attends readings. She “is
a cowboy in the center of a panicked herd.”
Ke$ha is a portrait in a Michigan hotel.
And we come to realize that these Ke$hi stand in for many
women in the speaker’s life, that what begins as a fun exercise becomes a story
of development, support, and survival, a story more about the speaker than the
pop star.
Safety Third makes beautiful books, and not only have they
sprinkled this cover with red glitter, but there is a kind of embedded glitter
in each page. It’s printed on
multi-colored pages of what I can only describe as funfetti paper. It’s a good choice to
keep things fun. Because, even with the
complexities and darker moments, that’s what ALL GLITTER, EVERYTHING is about.
(October 2013)
Purchase All Glitter,
Everything HERE.
Reviewer bio: Christy
Crutchfield writes and teaches in Western Massachusetts. Her work has
appeared in Mississippi Review online, Salt Hill Journal, the
Collagist, Newfound, and others. Her novel How to Catch a Coyote is forthcoming
from Publishing Genius in 2014. Visit her at christycrutchfield.com
