BLACKACRE - MONICA YOUN

Gotta be honest with you, this one did not hit for me. Typically, when a book isn’t really connecting with me I simply stop reading it, which is why almost all of my reviews are positive with a few very negative reviews wherein a book was so bad I wanted to finish it to trash it. This book falls in the middle and I probably would have stopped reading if it wasn’t so short. I did enjoy diving into it right before bed, the best time for poetry, and I wanted to like it, but none of it ever really clicked for me. This book, like Voyage of the Sable Venus, was given to me by a friend of mine who knows much more about poetry and is much more plugged into current verse. Youn is, technically, a talented poet. Formally, the poems are interesting and novel. Her command of rhythm and language are admirable and apparent. She does interesting things like include a cycle of poems focused around hanged men, or poems that respond to an Antonioni film. Nevertheless, while clever, the poems never seemed to tap into anything real. She plays with images of barrenness and emptiness but it always seems cerebral and theoretical, I didn’t get the sense that a real human was feeling these things, more that a very smart person was alluding to them and playing with them in a clinical, detached way. Occasionally there was some interesting imagery, like:

a woman

wearing a steel

collar, wearing

a stiffly pleated

dress, which lifts

to reveal nothing

but fabric where

her body used to be.

But mostly it seems like a high level exercise, which isn’t what I personally want out of poetry. Give me intensity. On the other hand, I say all of that but I have found myself returning to the book, picking it up at random and reading a page or two, so perhaps it’s growing on me and in a month or two I will have really gotten it and will love it. Who knows, poetry is more fickle to me that other sorts of literature.