With the first poem, \u201cWho Now to Rebel Against,\u201d Cundieff dispenses with shame and its silent ravages: \u201cI\u2019m driving away from a childhood\/ friends\u2019 funeral. She died badly, her mother\/ embarrassed and hiding the cause.\u201d Hepatitis worsened by alcohol. The poems readily reveal bleakness and bad judgments, from friends\u2019 mistakes to the speaker\u2019s own. The speaker is never defensive; she never hides her own flaws, mistakes, or sins. From betraying her child by slapping away his hand in \u201cSnakes\u201d at the beginning of the collection to the bogeyman who she confesses everything to in \u201cBird of Paradise\u201d near the end. the speaker\u2019s implication in the humanness of trauma and the ways we wound one another makes her a credible critic of interpersonal dynamics and gives her prophetic moments credence. The opening poem rings to a close: \u201cReminiscence is an augury\/ backwards, a slow bullet returning to us, now<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n In blistering moments of clarity on the past, future, and human nature, Cundieff commands physics, religion, folk art, philosophers, and psychology. The collection draws on references to indie singer Joanna Newsom, \u201850s film flop \u201cThe Conqueror,\u201d critic and philosopher of language and society George Steiner, activist and mystic Simone Weil, and writer-turned-musician Leonard Cohen.\u00a0Darling Nova <\/em>graphs the calculus of humans to each other, the animal, and spiritual worlds with the likes of apogee, perigee, the modern curse of radiation in \u201cThe Conqueror, 1956,\u201d and the title \u201cCoefficient of Restitution.\u201d<\/p>\n Cundieff\u2019s linguistic calculations are as precise and powerful as the unexplainable forces of god, bardo, and magic; \u201cgymnasium carnations burning\/ our wrists down to desire\u201d characterize adolescence in \u201cRoll Call (2),\u201d and \u201cits cancer of windows flush against lace\u201d in \u201cHalf-life\u201d lets our society speak its own volumes about how we shun members with mental health issues. There are ways of losing and of grieving that English does not have words for, ways that it cannot bear in its abstract words of emotion\u2014sadness, pain, indifference, grief, ambivalence, relief\u2014but Cundieff can say with worms, matroska, cigarettes, and a dead darling \u201clike a boy and his roan horse\/\/ off to split the warm wind\/ with their teeth and chess, wet and white\/ below the sun\u2019s burst fist.\u201d<\/p>\n Darling Nova<\/em>\u2019s cast of characters includes a freak, mystics, lost kings, sluts, death, imperfect mothers, God, oddballs, weirdos, poor lovers, the bogeyman, eccentrics, villains, and witches. As with any good fairy tale or myth or life, these poems are haunted: a lost pregnancy, her father\u2019s life and death, the father\u2019s childhood friend who abused animals, a drowned Syrian refugee toddler, a lightning-struck all-American football player, and a friend who died by suicide. Cundieff has a talent for characterization that neither sugars nor salts, letting complex relationships shine.<\/p>\n On the shelves of these poems are the shards, bits, blood, and relics that power priests, fairies, and physicists alike. The speaker is a conjuror, a witch, an oracle, a mystic, and a priestess. In \u201cRebirth\u201d she comes back as a bird; in \u201cWest,\u201d Cundieff writes: \u201cthis time I am dead, I died a year ago, and it\u2019s only my afterimage\/ positioned in the passenger seat.\u201d As befitting those titles, the poems are also full of stark wisdom, like \u201cThe risk of remembering is guilt, my friends\u201d and \u201cThe headstone names around us\/ fooled you into thinking we weren\u2019t so\/ dangerously alone.\u201d As in the Grimms\u2019 fairy tales, there is reality in the fantastic, and there is rawness and ugliness in magic. In \u201cFairy Tale\u201d the speaker is a poor witch against two boys on the playground, \u201ctwo oiled and ready beasts.\u201d who know they can hurt her just as much as the archetypal wolf and bogeyman.<\/p>\n The structure of the collection\u2014one undivided string of poems\u2014conveys how beginnings and endings are not opposite or divided; rather, they are moments that blend together in cycles and pass traits from one generation to another. The poems, like stars and memories, seem fixed, but they can be constellated differently by each reader, rebirth, generation, or mysticism. The side-by-side poems frequently link together explicitly\u2014for example, the poem \u201cFreak,\u201d which begins with \u201cOpen his mouth for a word and it will be\u00a0tooth<\/em>,\u201d is followed by the poem \u201cEyetooth,\u201d and both poems beget a \u201cprevious life.\u201d These clear but impressionistic connections whipstitch the collection together, although it is best to let go of both a conventional understanding of characters and the ubiquitous creative writing workshop question \u201cWhat is their relationship to the speaker?\u201d The labels, categories, and particulars of chronology and biology are not necessary here; only knowing that the characters are important to the speaker is essential.<\/p>\n Darling Nova\u00a0<\/em>exists in the bardo, in the cycles we inhabit between life and death. It asks the most human questions that science and religion also try to answer\u2014like how do we live well after pain, or with it? The collection answers with its own mythology, lore, testaments, and table of elements: worms represent growth and potential, air and sky represent emptiness and abandonment, tooth represents food and the physical world, words\/language represent the connection of all living things, and leaves abound for grief. To these essential questions, the poems reply that there are not always satisfying answers, but there are ways of pushing through the cruelties of existence. There are incantations and relationships that will pull you through.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Review by Alicia Marie Brandewie From the very title onwards, intimate affections and expansive worldviews coincide in Melissa Cundieff\u2019s debut collection\u00a0Darling Nova\u00a0(Autumn House Press, 2018), winner of the 2017 Autumn House Poetry Prize. The collection encompasses from the micro level of person-to-person relationships to the macro levels of interstellar physics, sociology, and spirituality. Through regret […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1704,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[57],"tags":[55],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6Jypy-3SF","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14921"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1704"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=14921"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14921\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14962,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14921\/revisions\/14962"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=14921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=14921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wp0.vanderbilt.edu\/nashvillereview\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=14921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/cdn.vanderbilt.edu\/vu-wordpress-0\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/15\/2018\/07\/19123143\/Cundieff_DarlingNova.jpg\")
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Alicia Marie Brandewie<\/a><\/h6>\n