Devorah Major

Jesse went out of town a couple of weeks ago and I was left to my own devices at Burton Barr while G was in musical theatre class, so I wandered the poetry shelves and wondered at the selection. I checked out several, including a Ross Gay collection that I read that day. I checked out volumes by Langston Hughes, Nikki Giovanni, and Anne Carson (names I recognized); collections by Rosmarie Waldrop, Marissa Davis, and devorah major (new-to-me poets); and a giant anthology of ecopoetry. Then show more they were all buried on our table under stacks of more books until today when I had to hunt down a book that was overdue (holds...why do people want to read the same books I want to read?!).

The first I picked up was the Marissa Davis collection, which was doing too much for me today — or I'm not smart enough to take in the technicalities of form that fill it (which seems most likely). But this devorah major hit. word time is thought-provoking, very much set in the here and now; lyrical, you can hear the beat of the words; and clever, with dissection of meek vs. gentle, (in)sanity ("very sanely become altogether mad"), and reminders of our brief human lifespans in the grand scheme of the universe. show less