Fulfilling my obligations to my long-neglected TBR one book a time. Want to know why? I explain it in the first post here. Posting striking lines daily on BlueSky

This week’s slow read is another choice to not let a book sit on my TBR pile for who knows how long, but to read it when I am still close to the reason I bought it. Bret read at the December 2024 audience and blew the room away. She is a young, energetic poet who has a natural knack for performing and while she may still be finding her way structurally, her voice is amazing!

There really is nothing new under the sun. The themes Bret Crowle is working through in her debut volume are not new: religion, identity, depression and mental illness, awakening sexuality, loss, nature. These are the things we’ve been writing about since we invented writing. What makes poetry, poetry is the unique voice, perspective, history, bag of allusions, mouthfuls of rhythms, the actual words each individual poet uses to explore these things which have all been said before. What’s being said isn’t new, who is saying it and how, is.

This book careens from religion to depression to sex and back again with wild abandon. I was particularly delighted by the sudden “intrusive” poems that, like the intrusive thoughts for which they are named, appear unbidden and unwelcome, like this first one:

Collect cum rags, fold
origami swans.

And then again in the fourth Intrusive poem in which the narrator dreams she’s with her mother, watching a falling star, or the fall from heaven, concluding

Vaguely, in that moment, do we understand the price of freedom.

Yeah, like that. This book is a wild ride with some truly spectacular moments. Go buy a copy and read it. You won’t regret it.