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octavia_cade's review against another edition
3.0
This collection is based on the idea that grief at the loss of a loved one can be a genuinely horrifying and destabilising experience. Which is not wrong, of course - the central death in the book is cancerous, with mentions of chemotherapy here and there, and I imagine there are very few people who have watched someone they love die of cancer and not considered it monstrous. That being said, I felt the collection was a little uneven.
The most successful of the poems, it seems to me, were the ones most based in a twisted sort of realism. Poems like "Government Rules for War Widows" and "The Last Words of a Lovely Lady," both of which address the idea that there's a set time limit for grief, and society will look down on you if you wallow too long, are painfully excellent. There's also one deeply creepy little poem, "Misty was an Ugly Doll," about a girl's relationship with her mother, expressed through the hair styles of daughters and dolls, which was very good indeed. When you've got material like this, you don't need to go overboard with the fantastic in your imagery, I think, and the poems that did that just didn't appeal to me. "The Departed Come and Go," for instance, with its witch and spider crabs and necromancers and swarming wasps... I found it far less affecting, and far less disturbing, than the more restrained poems.
The most successful of the poems, it seems to me, were the ones most based in a twisted sort of realism. Poems like "Government Rules for War Widows" and "The Last Words of a Lovely Lady," both of which address the idea that there's a set time limit for grief, and society will look down on you if you wallow too long, are painfully excellent. There's also one deeply creepy little poem, "Misty was an Ugly Doll," about a girl's relationship with her mother, expressed through the hair styles of daughters and dolls, which was very good indeed. When you've got material like this, you don't need to go overboard with the fantastic in your imagery, I think, and the poems that did that just didn't appeal to me. "The Departed Come and Go," for instance, with its witch and spider crabs and necromancers and swarming wasps... I found it far less affecting, and far less disturbing, than the more restrained poems.
andreablythe's review against another edition
5.0
Dragonfly is a beautiful exploration of the horrors of mourning and childhood abuse.
"Poetry is the way I have been expressing myself since I was a teenager. I’ve always loved horror fiction and films so as an adult I found that combining my real life experiences with horror imagery was a way I could deal with my sorrows from a distance. Horror in my work is like a distorted lens I can use," said Scalise in an interview I published on my blog.
"Poetry is the way I have been expressing myself since I was a teenager. I’ve always loved horror fiction and films so as an adult I found that combining my real life experiences with horror imagery was a way I could deal with my sorrows from a distance. Horror in my work is like a distorted lens I can use," said Scalise in an interview I published on my blog.
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