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Open Books: Events
June 04, 2009 07:30 PM
CHRIS FORHAN & ALESSANDRA LYNCH
Chris Forhan’s new book, Black Leapt In ($16.95 Barrow Street), offers a collection of richly nuanced, deeply felt poems concerning sudden loss and gradual change. Forhan’s father died when he was quite young, a shock that ripples through the book. In the opening sequence, the father’s death is addressed as directly as lyricism affords, with elegant and unusual writing -- “It is possible to be born a prince / and slip into each day as into a golden robe. / It is possible to feel your chest fill with ash.” The self-perception in these poems is dry -- “it’s something, to have been inadequate / and made it look like stubbornness” -- an approach resulting in strongly emotional work mercifully without pathos.
In Alessandra Lynch’s second collection, It Was a Terrible Cloud at Twilight ($16.95 Pleiades), an often elegiac toughness is made lively by original, even playful language. Her poems encompass a wide variety of experience, from adolescence (“what she could not / grasp grasped her”) to a summer motorcycle rally (“wet T-shirts on at ten”) to the utterly surreal (“Drink it all said maroon to red. / Bolster it up said navy to violet.”). Her metaphors are surprising, and her voice is comforting in its shared awareness of our human foibles, as when a picnicking narrator finds deflated balloons “grounded after such short drifts of purposelessness / wherein they’d pressed up / the air, swell-headed and empirical.”
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