Ottawa ON: It was good to finally see Ottawa poet Vera Hadzic’s [see my “six questions” interview with her here] debut chapbook, Fossils You Can Swallow (Proper Tales Press, 2023), published recently through Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press. There’s such a lovely clarity and unselfconsciousness to Hadzic’s lines, enough that one might end up following those lines to some unexpected and even dark places through a thread of surrealism. “The sound of your name on my tongue / is sweet and secret and swollen with / the crackling of syllables,” she writes, to open the poem “Your Name on My Tongue.” Offering poems as narrative-theses that accumulate from one point to another, there’s an interesting sense of Hadzic carefully feeling her way through form, with some poems feeling a bit of hesitation, while others, a kind of confident, subtle, stride. “The Atlantic is dtoo deep and salty / to drink, lady.” the poem “Atlantic Drainage” begins, “You are going / to hurt yourself. I am always hurting / myself.”
soup chicken
my sky is an overturned
bowl
bowling is something I do
when I’m desperate
desperate birds tuck in
wings, torpedo windows
windows that haven’t been
cleaned in ages
ages are numbers painted
over in grease
grease gathers in the
curve of the pan
pan, god of wilderness,
sings into moss
moss grows like fur
across the backs of my hands
hands I once dug with,
unlike now
now I feel the slowness
in my pulse
pulse, that’s what the
sky does when it turns red
red like onions and warm
orange soup
soup would be good right
about now
now I’m hungry for a nice
full bowl
a bowl of sky soup, maybe
maybe just chicken soup
Brooklyn NY: I recently received a copy of Cindy Juyoung Ok’s chapbook House Work (ugly duckling presse, 2023). I hadn’t heard her name prior, but a quick online search offers that she “is a writer, an editor, and an educator. Her debut poetry collection, Ward Toward, won the 2023 Yale Younger Poets Prize.” There’s a really propulsive and lovely flow to her lyrics, one that rolls along long threads through line breaks and commas and flow. As the opening poem “The Five Room Dance,” begins: “In our search for a proportionate address we leak / out of bed as you stretch your books and I mine / the frozen language for olding hands day by week. / I account for each siren and you count the hips to sigh // for with the seam of open borders.” Her linearity is anything but straightforward, through a wordplay that aims straight but turns and twists in delightful ways, offered as tweaks and tics, presenting such wonderful, subtle movement. “Tracing the yard,” the poem continues, “the lace of leaves as why I write. Why I, right, frown / your side affects, the cadence of the fact that stars: / a woman is a thing that absorbs.”
Her
lines are searing, slippery; and her narratives offer a quickness that suggests
phrases working to simply fly by until one meets you, as is her purpose,
deliberately head-on. “My country is broken,” she offers, to open “Moss and
Marigold,” “is estranged, is trying, we write, / as though there is such a
material as a country, as / though the landlord doesn’t charge rent for life
lived / outside the house. When it comes to survival there is no right // way
but there’s no wrong way either. The country is / a construction, with each
writing becomes more made.” Her poems have such an ease to them but strike with
such incredible force. Oh, I think I am very much looking forward to seeing
this full-length debut.
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