23 pages; dancing girl press (2015)
Purchase @ dancing girl press for $7.00
Reviewed by Cat Dixon
Raylyn Clacher’s debut chapbook All of Her Leaves is an ambitious collection of poems that begins with “this tornado is Oliver’s only mouth”—the vibrant language and fierce imagery continue throughout the book.
The opening poem, “Fishery,” has Oliver catching an owl:
The owl wants to fly,
would rather shred her wings in the sheer
than stay here, but Oliver is too much.
The second poem, “I Live You,” continues to build on this idea of friction and unity which runs throughout the entire chapbook:
If I could hook back your eyes,
fill the hole of your skull
with my body, I would.
And then later in the poem: “You could peel back my crown,/ score me at the ridges, unfold me/ like a star.”
Even though hooks, skulls, and shredding wings and other images may sound violent, Clacher is exploring the push and pull of intimacy along with the inconsistency of attraction and repulsion with a brutal honesty. Every line pushes us forward to the next image, the next page, the next poem.
What is unique about these poems is the balance they strike between a life and its lyrical flights. One moment in the poem “Onion Love” we are cutting an onion, experiencing the smell and the dicing, and like magic, Clacher writes:
what fraction have you become?
over me/under you/over me again,
then root--
She ends the poem, “for me, Oliver, be an eighth.” Later in the poem titled “Tea with Oliver and His Wolves,” finger sandwiches and cucumbers are ignored as she observes,
But the thing you like the most
is my foot full of bones, my ten toes.
Clacher’s words bristle with blood, bone and claw.
One aspect that makes this chapbook both engaging and essential is the elegance of the lines, which are sparse and well-arranged. Each poem stands on its own with its complexity and prosody. If this chapbook is any indication of what Clacher is working on next, I am waiting with bated breath for her full length collection. These haunting poems paint magical scenes that I did not want to leave.
Purchase @ dancing girl press for $7.00
Reviewed by Cat Dixon
Raylyn Clacher’s debut chapbook All of Her Leaves is an ambitious collection of poems that begins with “this tornado is Oliver’s only mouth”—the vibrant language and fierce imagery continue throughout the book.
The opening poem, “Fishery,” has Oliver catching an owl:
The owl wants to fly,
would rather shred her wings in the sheer
than stay here, but Oliver is too much.
The second poem, “I Live You,” continues to build on this idea of friction and unity which runs throughout the entire chapbook:
If I could hook back your eyes,
fill the hole of your skull
with my body, I would.
And then later in the poem: “You could peel back my crown,/ score me at the ridges, unfold me/ like a star.”
Even though hooks, skulls, and shredding wings and other images may sound violent, Clacher is exploring the push and pull of intimacy along with the inconsistency of attraction and repulsion with a brutal honesty. Every line pushes us forward to the next image, the next page, the next poem.
What is unique about these poems is the balance they strike between a life and its lyrical flights. One moment in the poem “Onion Love” we are cutting an onion, experiencing the smell and the dicing, and like magic, Clacher writes:
what fraction have you become?
over me/under you/over me again,
then root--
She ends the poem, “for me, Oliver, be an eighth.” Later in the poem titled “Tea with Oliver and His Wolves,” finger sandwiches and cucumbers are ignored as she observes,
But the thing you like the most
is my foot full of bones, my ten toes.
Clacher’s words bristle with blood, bone and claw.
One aspect that makes this chapbook both engaging and essential is the elegance of the lines, which are sparse and well-arranged. Each poem stands on its own with its complexity and prosody. If this chapbook is any indication of what Clacher is working on next, I am waiting with bated breath for her full length collection. These haunting poems paint magical scenes that I did not want to leave.
CAT DIXON is the author of Our End Has Brought the Spring (Finishing Line Press, 2015) and Too Heavy to Carry (Stephen F. Austin University Press, 2014). She is the managing editor of The Backwaters Press, a nonprofit press in Omaha. She teaches creative writing at the University of Nebraska. Her poetry and reviews have appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Sugar House Review, Midwest Quarterly Review, Coe Review, Eclectica, and Mid-American Review. Her website is www.catdix.com.
