The Book of Crooked Prayer by Marcella Remund
Review by Angie Dribben.
Marcella Remund invites us to pray with her to the divine or to seek the sacred only within the self as we peel through the pages of The Book of Crooked Prayer. This collection breaks itself and the reader into three parts: Supplication, Illumination, and Desperation. Poem after poem, the unnoticeable is lifted to the reader for praise. The grief and loss none of us will escape is held up to the cosmos for acknowledgment and healing.
The story of being a woman runs heavy throughout the poems drenched in earnestness, riveted to reality, “Let them find my ex / and haul his ass into court/...let me win the iowa lottery / so I can cover my bad checks at rexall / ...let him be a good man / even if he leaves his boots on.”
The speaker explores the holiness in a cup of coffee, reveres the brokenness of a teacup, and considers veneration for everything in between. She grants the reader space to be on their own search: sometimes god is capitalized, at times the existence of god is questioned, or if real, the poems ask is god even necessary. Healing from a stroke, the poet advises St. John Liccio, the Patron Saint of head injuries, “I can work miracles too, John /...I won’t need you to turn this supernova / into a brand new galaxy.”
A professor once asked me, “Why doesn’t an energy healer write about energy? Why isn’t it in your poems?” I answered, “I don’t know how.” Then I read Remund, “We kneel / into the twigs and ash press / our vision into microscopic / spaces between stars /....a million / crown chakras in a chant / resolved at the edge of a galaxy / in a single sustained note.”
In the exact center of the collection on the middle of the page, the source of its concatenation of prayers is stamped, “What if there is only a pause / a mirrored moment in which we see, / ... our selves, and in that moment know / with certainty that we have been bathed / in love since the beginning.”
With intense specificity, the volume of the unsaid rages and anchors us in even the most minute moments. In "House of No Sound", “a song I once sang prowls outside / under frozen hydrangea / caught in mid-bloom, / ...not even boiling water / breaks the silence.” We know in our reader’s heart the loss and sadness percolating just beneath the surface.
We are not dismissed from the collection without a sort of answer, “Mandala, tantric lens through which / we could finally glimpse ourselves... / Light the way ... / ...bathed in cobalt, saffron, magenta. Light the way to your bed of roses / where, if God is anywhere, It is here.”
If you believe in anything or everything, if you question what your faith is in, but always know you possess it, an orison waits for you in Marcella Remund’s The Book of Crooked Prayer.
Marcella Remund invites us to pray with her to the divine or to seek the sacred only within the self as we peel through the pages of The Book of Crooked Prayer. This collection breaks itself and the reader into three parts: Supplication, Illumination, and Desperation. Poem after poem, the unnoticeable is lifted to the reader for praise. The grief and loss none of us will escape is held up to the cosmos for acknowledgment and healing.
The story of being a woman runs heavy throughout the poems drenched in earnestness, riveted to reality, “Let them find my ex / and haul his ass into court/...let me win the iowa lottery / so I can cover my bad checks at rexall / ...let him be a good man / even if he leaves his boots on.”
The speaker explores the holiness in a cup of coffee, reveres the brokenness of a teacup, and considers veneration for everything in between. She grants the reader space to be on their own search: sometimes god is capitalized, at times the existence of god is questioned, or if real, the poems ask is god even necessary. Healing from a stroke, the poet advises St. John Liccio, the Patron Saint of head injuries, “I can work miracles too, John /...I won’t need you to turn this supernova / into a brand new galaxy.”
A professor once asked me, “Why doesn’t an energy healer write about energy? Why isn’t it in your poems?” I answered, “I don’t know how.” Then I read Remund, “We kneel / into the twigs and ash press / our vision into microscopic / spaces between stars /....a million / crown chakras in a chant / resolved at the edge of a galaxy / in a single sustained note.”
In the exact center of the collection on the middle of the page, the source of its concatenation of prayers is stamped, “What if there is only a pause / a mirrored moment in which we see, / ... our selves, and in that moment know / with certainty that we have been bathed / in love since the beginning.”
With intense specificity, the volume of the unsaid rages and anchors us in even the most minute moments. In "House of No Sound", “a song I once sang prowls outside / under frozen hydrangea / caught in mid-bloom, / ...not even boiling water / breaks the silence.” We know in our reader’s heart the loss and sadness percolating just beneath the surface.
We are not dismissed from the collection without a sort of answer, “Mandala, tantric lens through which / we could finally glimpse ourselves... / Light the way ... / ...bathed in cobalt, saffron, magenta. Light the way to your bed of roses / where, if God is anywhere, It is here.”
If you believe in anything or everything, if you question what your faith is in, but always know you possess it, an orison waits for you in Marcella Remund’s The Book of Crooked Prayer.
Angie Dribben’s poetry, essays, and reviews can be found or are forthcoming in Deep South, San Pedro River Review, Crab Creek Review, Crack the Spine, New Southern Fugitive, and others. Recently she joined Cider Press Review as Contributing Reviews Editor. Everygirl, a finalist for the Dogfish Head Prize, is due out in 2021 with Main Street Rag.