Here on Rue Morgue Avenue.
Cynie Cory. Hysterical Books Press: Tallahassee, FL, 2018.
The poet Cynie Cory springs word-songs like hot hail from the sky in Here on Rue Morgue Avenue, a collection of almost-sonnets, almost cantos, that grab language by the gills, that fling stanzas skyward into a fiery stratosphere.
Often the fire in the sky is a pre-apocalypse or post-apocalypse marker for the setting or “atmosphere” of each poem that screams just above the ground like a nuclear missile. Cory gives a nod to Denis Johnson’s Fiskadoro in the book’s acknowledgements, more than likely because this collection similarly explores a postapocalyptic landscape, except Cory’s is of the heart, mind, and soul. Two poems here actually tap Johnson’s novel directly: “Fiskadoro Revisited” and “Fiskadoro Last Seen.” In the former, the images and mind are exploding with “. . . the whole accordion, the plot / of dirt at my feet. According to noon, / there’s no more room. . . . / The lover is a robber, aborted / perfume. What day is it the stars collide?” In the latter poem, the explosions continue: “What see? What me? Impose the last drought, / thermonuclear assault. Winter climbs / over us, snaps shut the lake.”
Throughout the collection, these images of a charred landscape create their own strange momentum, snagging the reader into the strong, dark magic of her poetry. In “Turn and Face the Strange” “There’s a war in you. . . . / We’re all in chains. It’s cruel the way you tune / the range of your vermilion rage. . . . / Gunned / into a bunker that’s home, another // country you moan. . . .” The playful rhyme of “home” and “moan” here gives a wonderful contrast to the poem’s somber images, and this game of rhyme glows at the end of each poem. Every piece closes with a rhyming or slant-rhyme couplet: “. . . redundant, stunned, / anonymous, promiseless—ill-tongued”; “Hurry, courage is the stage / of the mind without a verse iced in blades”; “Dislodge the bilious spleen. / The mind is an after-lock of being.”
In “Reactor Tractor” the images and language sing together with true, raw power. The reader follows this tractor’s furrows into the burning, bright light: “I want the roof, no sky louder than dogs. / I can’t say what caused it, an atomic / split. God’s silhouette disappeared now lost.” And we are left with this: “Without vision winter’s in place. / The invasion by the United States.”
Cynie Cory has yet again graced us with a vibrant, provocative, and dynamic collection.
–Michael Trammell