What We’re Reading: Apparition Wren

Apparition Wren by Maureen Alsop (Main Street Rag Publishing Company, 2007).

Maureen Aslop is an associate poetry editor for the online lit mag Poemeleon. She’s had poems published in such magazines as The Laurel Review, AGNI, Blackbird, Tampa Review, Action Yes, Drunken Boat, and The Kenyon Review. She has also published several chapbooks, in addition to this collection of poems in Apparition Wren.

Alsop’s poetry in Apparition Wren holds its smoky magic close. Each poem reads like a quiet recipe of witchcraft. Often, this creates an alluring sense of mystique, calls to mind lace and dirt, and, to my mind, the 1998 film, Practical Magic. The poems are tinged with sexual tension, loneliness, broken holiness, animal urges, and pleasure.

The voice is inherently personal in this collection. Take “Butcher Girl” with its self-reflection:

Split wide the valley & this brief
breakdown — o, some sweet butcher girl
claimed she knew me. But
I was not aware — I drew shades
across her hatch-marked face. What failure
might live so close to my touch?

…

I tell her I am wicked
and she believes me. Grunt lure, greased
nettle of hair… Yes, perhaps
I have seen you:
some stray
shadow in the mirror I could not bless.

However, some of the collection veers off its track, lacking true consistency of focus. Many of the poems feel off-center, and some emotions are pushed too far. Poems start with one tone or format, and change gears and end abruptly in a completely different place. Voice changes throughout. Sometimes, this effect is actually welcome — it kept me as a reader on my toes. However, in others, the absence of solid ground made me dizzy, and I found myself skimming the lines instead of really digging in.

Despite these moments, I came away from the collection admiring Alsop’s adventuresome pen as it experimented, pushing the lines a little more, despite the occasional discomfort.

Which poems or writers have you read that pushed you a little too far? Lost their center of gravity? At what point does experimental become detrimental?