At night, the dead by Lisa Ciccarello Reviewed by Erin McKnight
Clinging to the reader’s consciousness in much the same way that Lisa Ciccarello’s dead linger among the living, At night, the dead: opens with an ominous prediction--“You lock the door. You lock the window. You dream of the dead”--that immediately materializes in the form of lost souls seeking embodiment. This collection of mostly prose poems entombs the reader in words fleeting in nature, yet enduring in effect; not only do the dead emerge from within measured language, but they do so enshrouded in its lush minimalism. Ciccarello’s reader, however, will be hard-pressed to begrudge these spirits their longing for connection, and is unlikely to attempt escape from this sepulcher’s sixteen chilling pages. With a rhythm to her spare prose that begs recitation, Ciccarello’s poems function as incantations intended to protect against, as well as pay homage to, the dead that linger beyond the salt-coated sills of her collection’s windows. The dualistic nature of her insistent writing transforms the reader into observer, as a series of sensory visions centering on coins and candles and throats and eyes collocates the metaphoric exterior and interior. Located within the staccato-stylized house is a narrator “learning to knit [them] a new home” with spare language woven by her breath. This narrator comes to appreciate that “The dead need chandeliers” and “someone to smile at,” that “they still have what matters” and rely on the voice of the living to interpret their coming and the guise of night to expose what is typically obscured by daylight. And it is under this cover of darkness that the collection transcends predictability in rendering vignettes of otherworldly disturbance. The desperate longing of Ciccarello’s dead is suspended just beyond the thick boundary of text isolating each poem as tomb-like: the repeating “At night, the dead:” caption functioning as a black mound of words excavated from Ciccarello’s exposed plots. The demarcation of her fright-filled house, however, shifts in the same imperceptible manner as her poems’ repeating lead-in--by the collection’s end, the dead have penetrated both the narrator’s space and the reader’s psyche with their doleful longing for kinship and remembrance: They do not touch you but they follow you everywhere, open & close doors & point to the door frame. All they want is to lie down with you--you lie down and they lie in yr body. They mimic a stretch & curling up, but they are curling through your body & know it. It makes them sad they can’t feel you. The dead may languish in this state of divestment, but their attempts to invade the living world are artfully rendered as reflecting recognition on both sides of the house’s windows. The interface between life and death emerges as existing within action, within Ciccarello’s ability to “write the same word over & over again” in a stirring yet transfixing manner. At night, the dead: is a daring, resolute grouping of poetic works that meets the reader’s demand for melancholic language and uncanny image, and exceeds the expectation of how lasting the influence of a sinister mood may prove. Ciccarello’s dead seek enlivenment, but only so as to imbue their afterlife with a meaning that outlives their corporeal existence. The page titles--the collection’s reappearing epitaph--may feel a tad unnecessary, but even the most macabre anticipation of what will haunt this lettered graveyard cannot predict the fleshiness of Lisa Ciccarello’s dead.
Visit Blood Pudding Press on the web at http://www.etsy.com/shop.php?user_id=99221
Erin McKnight is a Scottish-born writer now living in Texas. Her writing has been widely published and nominated for Best of the Web, the Pushcart Prize, and W.W. Norton’s The Best Creative Nonfiction. Erin holds a BA in English and an MFA in creative writing and currently teaches fiction writing in the Dallas community college system.
© 2009 prickofthespindle.com |
||
|