Sorrow Arrow
Emily
Kendal Frey. Octopus Books, $12 paperback (92p) ISBN 978-09851182-6-6
Your self-hatred has lost its precision
A metal gleam pokes through
In my reverie we’re eating boiled
peanuts on barstools
It’s not sexy to be at home with your
things
While bulbous paper lanterns hang
overhead
Girls, stop peeing on the seat
Close range snowflakes
In my mind I’m running hard into your
forehead
I’d
been looking forward to Portland, Oregon poet Emily Kendal Frey’s second trade
poetry collection, Sorrow Arrow (Octopus
Books, 2014) for some time now, after the striking opening salvo of her first
collection, The Grief Performance
(Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011). Sorrow Arrow is constructed as a collection of short, untitled
lyric fragments that accumulate into something far larger. It is curious that
her first collection explores grief and this new collection explores sorrow,
which suggests, at least, a positive direction. Sorrow Arrow opens with a quote from René Char, “Sorrow is the last
fruit of youth.” Is Frey suggesting that this is something that carries
life-long, or is this collection one that might also contain her last feelings
of youth, composed as a final portrait of her youthfulness? Some say youth
contains a degree of naïveté, and to lose this might be seen of a sign of growing
older (or growing up), as she writes to open the second poem: “The Greeks sank
/ Their bodies gold / My body is Greek / What can I say to you / Your dick
inside someone [.]” Given the hints that she runs throughout the collection,
this entire work might be poised as a break-up collection, and the resulting
sorrow wrapped up in a feeling of crossing a line from one stage of life into
the next stage. This might be a break-up book, or some other possible romantic
entanglement, such as a triangle or affair—in the end, the specifics don’t
really matter. What does matter, instead, is the articulation of sorrow Frey’s
narrator works through, nearly as short poem-essays meditating on the endless,
hollow movements of grief. “You do not love me / I knew it when I entered the
duomo capped in mint green / at the center of town / Jesus hung like a piece of
toilet paper / Night opening its black flower / Every statue had bullet-sized
holes in its feet [.]” Frey’s poems are constructed in relatively straight
lines that crash headlong against and into each other, writing out her
frustrations, romantic and domestic confusions, responses to her family, and
her father’s illness, her rage and observations, and various other personal
considerations. Early in the collection, she writes:
Don’t fuck with me, Christian PTA moms
My sandwich is overly mayonnaised
The cheapest thing to do in winter is
get a disease
No one can figure out where the sky
comes from
Trees lifting into the mist
The horrible light of morning
Shuffle in and out of sleep
Thighs aching like a giant
Moms twisting their fingers on Caesar
salad napkins
Moms with empathetic bangs
Pin a badge on the dirty river
With my god hand I put us inside my
father’s new heart
She
writes of fear, grief and sorrow in a straightforward and fearless way, and
explores dark emotions head-on. “Your skin suddenly moist / You put a baby
inside her / Everyone’s tethered / To the supermoon [.]” There is something
about the way Frey writes that is powerful, skimming the surface of pessimism
but never quite falling into the depths, striking out with a precision that is
cut-throat and calm, flailing wild and pinpoint, letting line upon line pile up
against each other like firewood. Her poems read as notebook entries or
collage-works, and what makes her poems so powerful is in the way she manages
to pack so much into short phrase-lines, each one as forceful as a physical
blow.
French New Wave cinema is dead
You suspect you’re not a person after all
Wars are citywide considerations
What if there was rubble
Your parents falling down around you
Your body throbs
Big-eyed flies
Your mouth on her arm
Piles to step over
She walks out into the field
Fingering the bright bones of her
ancestors
What is music if not speech through
sound
You hatch your future
You train a new dog to sit watch
You divide fear by delicate fear
(April
2014)
Purchase
Sorrow Arrow HERE.
