american dust and other silent killers

Beautiful and heartwrenching as always <3

hi silv!

so yeah, I am reviewing this after all!

I think what strikes me most is how controlled this is -> your poetry always has this road trip feeling, but the actual motion here is more like emotional withholding. The narrator is physically traveling with someone, yet the deeper drama is what cannot be said inside the car. They are crossing enormous distances, but the real distance is sitting in the passenger seat. They are trying to be kind to the landscape, maybe to the other person, maybe to themselves, but kindness doesn't work out that well - what's good for the goose isn't always good for the gander! That is really strong!

I also really enjoyed the contradictory relationship the narrator has with the other person. The other person has "anything to say," while the narrator has observation and restraint through various images (like the dirt, for one). I thought this made it clear that poem is meant to be uneven: one person overflows verbally while the other absorbs. That becomes especially interesting later when the narrator says, "i still cannot see you as anything less / than overflowing." The beloved / friend / ex-lover is excessive, spilling, incapable of containment.

THOUGH, I wonder if a lot of your ideas are... very conceptual? For example, hunger, emptiness, longing, etc. They all work, individually, but they create a cluster of language that all blurs together and may benefit from one actual concrete image. The boots and the Great Plains are so good because they physicalize feeling - the chest / hunger image does some of that too, but because hunger and emptiness are already densely metaphorical ideas, I would've liked something to anchor the poem into the physical world again. What does longing feel like? What about emptiness?

^ That said, "you'd claw your hunger out of your chest / to make more space for it if you could, / or to keep it from eating you alive first" is one of the strongest images for me. It is violent, but not melodramatic, and the paradox is great; they would remove the hunger either to enlarge its home or to survive it. That contradiction captures self-destructive longing the narrator has built up very well. It also suggests that the person’s emptiness is not ACTUALLY absence but appetite. Their relationship to the narrator is defined by their want to consume them, or their essence, which does reframe how I viewed them -> maybe the relationship is more toxic than earlier thought? Maybe both people are "bad guys" instead of simply the other person.

My other larger critique is that the poem’s first two-thirds are so careful and polished that I found a few phrases to just not fit with what you've written: lonely road, wilted hopes, maybe "eating you alive." They are not bad, and they fit the poem’s register, but the best lines here are more SURPRISING. I would possibly revise by asking each phrase whether it can become more uniquely yours. Your voice is always so precise, homesick in a way, and I think you could push a few lines more.

I mean, this is awesome though. Really, really great work here as always! Now, I want to go on a drive or something...

best,
chi

Hi,
Mini Review on this lovely sunday morning!
I'm using Cherie's fruit-themed template today.

Skin - Initial Observations
The title. It was intriguing. Once I'd read the work I saw how apropos it was. Metaphorically, the dust, the silence - something that is hardly noticeable as being there yet simulatneously everywhere - was what killed the relationship.

Rind - Interpretations
Firstly I noticed a contrast between how you're crossing vast distances across space, but the relationship is stuck. How the person being addressed insists they are empty but to you they are overflowing.

Pulp - The Tastiest Part
How the great plains do the talking for you. It even deepens that contrast how the other person won't stop talking - they can't manage to express everything in them. And you let nature do it, you are aware that you can't fill the void as you are trying to find a way to describe the middle of nowhere, but silently.
And the last paragraph is especially awesome: irony. So much time + silence has passed and yet the effects of the endless hunger reverberate.

Seeds - Critiques & Suggestions
Nothing I can think of except the line 'once bitten, twice shy' was ambiguos and I didn't know what you were referrring to.

you always write the most fire poetry