Posts about poetry, poiesis, and poetics.

Illness, language, impending motherhood, alongside the intersections and collisions of religion and science animate Chet’la Sebree’s Blue Opening. The gut-clenching realities of the human body in all its gross and magnificent possibilities intertwine with metaphysical abstractions in these wide-ranging poems. The malleability of forms proliferate this collection. Sonnets and free verse and a poetic sequence that parodies the Book of Genesis create an atmosphere of omnivorous hunger and desire. Family history becomes biblical legend and body parts are laid out in clinical definitions.

Sebree begins and ends the poem “Root Logic” this way:

“womb [vomb, wambo, wambe, wamme]: belly, bowels

[…]

“Afterbirth: home becomes hiraeth becomes hollow holler of genesis.”

(Italics in original.)

In “Hiraeth” we encounter her anxiety about childbirth’s possible impossibility:

I feel further from where I’ve come

when womb wreckage comes in clumps–

thick, slick ruby ruins from which I could birth spring

The poem sequence “Genesis” rewrites biblical legend as personal and physical history. The seventh prose poem of the sequence has Sebree worrying about “you beginning with me – my body a machine that mistrusts itself, gene schemes that make me devour muscle and organ, cannibalize my own joints, that will choose if you, too, become misfioring machine, become wolf.” The references to wolves and joints devouring themselves callback an earlier poem sequence regarding a diagnosis of lupus.

Towards the end of the collection is “On Epistemology,” a poem broken into five prose blocks. The second reads:

Structure renders my world a mild,

triple crème Brie—thick milk coat

against the elements of life and death

and in-betweenness, like sonnets.

The fourth reads:

Translation and etymology

scaffolding from which I hope

to discover something

like a dead frog’s heart still beating.

Life’s passions and frustrations intersect with the cold calculating rationality of science and intellect. These disparate elements meld together in poems of formal brilliance and magma-hot emotionalism. These poems come across as tiny monuments of polished beauty, but beneath the polish and elegance lay a chthonic churning, a deep burning supervolcano of personal anguish and stubborn hopefulness. Sebree desires a child, but the obstacles, physical and medical, threaten the matrilineal heritage she desires to pass on. Blue Opening is a brilliant collection of poems, a brief, jagged ray of light illuminating an otherwise dark world.