Reviews
"Anna Journey has talent to burn: gothic, elegiac, and celebratory by turns, her poems possess a giddy imaginative dexterity that is exceedingly rare in a debut collection. More important, there is a gravity and heft to her poems; they are willing to confront the Big Issues and militantly resist the easy tour de force. Jarrell says somewhere that a certain helplessness before her material is one of the poet’s principal tools. I hear that haunted helplessness in lines such as these: 'I can’t stop— / the story // going like the tongue goes: // lit and loosed, moving, / like Lucifer, / down.' Anna Journey is on the threshold of a significant career."
—David Wojahn, author of Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004
Description
In this debut collection, Anna Journey invites the reader into her peculiar, noir universe nourished with sex and mortality. Her poems are haunted by demons, ghosts, and even the living who wander exotic landscapes that appear at once threatening and seductive. In these poems, her sly speaker renames a pink hibiscus on display at Lowe’s, “Lucifer’s Panties”; another character chants, “I’d fall devil / over heels over edge over oleander”; and one woman writes a letter to the underworld:
Dear black bayou, once, by a river
I bit a man’s neck. His scent: the raw
teak air husked inside stomachs of six
Russian nesting dolls—the ones in the attic I pulled
apart and open. The ones I
pulled apart and open like Styrofoam cups.
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Paper List price: Your price: 3/15/2009 |
Anna Journey is currently a PhD candidate in creative writing and literature at the University of Houston and a poetry editor for Gulf Coast. Her poems have been published in a number of journals, including American Poetry Review, FIELD, and Kenyon Review, and her essays have appeared in Blackbird, Notes on Contemporary Literature, and Parnassus. In 2006, Journey discovered the unpublished status of Sylvia Plath's early sonnet "Ennui" and the influence of Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby on it.
