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A review by jd_brubaker
You Ask Me to Talk about the Interior by Carolina Ebeid
4.0
There are some poetry books that are beautifully subtle and require more than one perusal before I can fully encapsulate the experience of reading them. This is one such book. My review will, therefore, be somewhat short.
The cover of this book was what initially struck me. It's the close up image of a torso (it seems to be a woman's torso), with one hand covering up the left breast and the right hand stitching dark, black thread into the skin to make plant-like images. I don't know what I expected based off of this cover, but I was surprised about halfway through the book when those expectations weren't met and appeared like they wouldn't ever be. And they weren't. This isn't a criticism so much as an observation. Sometimes, I think, as a ready, I project what I want to read onto a book and so it's astonishing when the book delivers something entirely different.
However, even when I realized my expectations would be left unmet, I wasn't sure how to adjust them according to what I was reading. The poems are so beautifully subtle, the images a little hazy, as though the sun in my eyes was obscuring my vision enough to make me squint, but not so much as to make me look away altogether. The poems are generally about half a page long, with a handful spanning two or more pages. But the book still reads surprisingly fast, and I think part of this is due to the kind of distant/disconnected nature of the poems. It's not that the poems are disconnected from the speaker, or that the speaker is disconnected from either the work itself or the experiences being talked of, but there seems to be a measured distance between the speaker and what she's saying.
This could be intentional. Our interiors change over time. We move from being emotionally attached to one experience to being attached to another. Maybe the speaker wanted to write a collection of poems that weren't swallowed by experiences of grief and trauma, but rather wanted to examine them from afar. Maybe the speaker needed that distance to write these poems. Regardless, I never felt like I was fully immersed in this collection. I often felt disoriented, like I was being dropped into the middle of something without a map or a compass, and still expected to navigate myself toward meaning. Again, maybe that was intentional, but it impacted how I received these poems, how deeply I engaged with them.
In terms of writing, this book is beautiful. The images, the descriptions, are truly breathtaking. It feels very surreal, very mystical, even. It delivers a sense of reverence, of quiet reflection, and allows in that quiet space the expanse of time to carry us through each line. It reads like a lament of something lost, or something broken, or something taken. And I think, in its subtly, it asks the reader to read very closely, to pay particular attention, to slow down. Maybe I didn't read as slowly as I should have. Or, maybe the point is that I am meant to return to these poems, to mull them over a second time, to ingest them in smaller morsels.
As with most poetry books I read, I must also highly recommend this one.
The cover of this book was what initially struck me. It's the close up image of a torso (it seems to be a woman's torso), with one hand covering up the left breast and the right hand stitching dark, black thread into the skin to make plant-like images. I don't know what I expected based off of this cover, but I was surprised about halfway through the book when those expectations weren't met and appeared like they wouldn't ever be. And they weren't. This isn't a criticism so much as an observation. Sometimes, I think, as a ready, I project what I want to read onto a book and so it's astonishing when the book delivers something entirely different.
However, even when I realized my expectations would be left unmet, I wasn't sure how to adjust them according to what I was reading. The poems are so beautifully subtle, the images a little hazy, as though the sun in my eyes was obscuring my vision enough to make me squint, but not so much as to make me look away altogether. The poems are generally about half a page long, with a handful spanning two or more pages. But the book still reads surprisingly fast, and I think part of this is due to the kind of distant/disconnected nature of the poems. It's not that the poems are disconnected from the speaker, or that the speaker is disconnected from either the work itself or the experiences being talked of, but there seems to be a measured distance between the speaker and what she's saying.
This could be intentional. Our interiors change over time. We move from being emotionally attached to one experience to being attached to another. Maybe the speaker wanted to write a collection of poems that weren't swallowed by experiences of grief and trauma, but rather wanted to examine them from afar. Maybe the speaker needed that distance to write these poems. Regardless, I never felt like I was fully immersed in this collection. I often felt disoriented, like I was being dropped into the middle of something without a map or a compass, and still expected to navigate myself toward meaning. Again, maybe that was intentional, but it impacted how I received these poems, how deeply I engaged with them.
In terms of writing, this book is beautiful. The images, the descriptions, are truly breathtaking. It feels very surreal, very mystical, even. It delivers a sense of reverence, of quiet reflection, and allows in that quiet space the expanse of time to carry us through each line. It reads like a lament of something lost, or something broken, or something taken. And I think, in its subtly, it asks the reader to read very closely, to pay particular attention, to slow down. Maybe I didn't read as slowly as I should have. Or, maybe the point is that I am meant to return to these poems, to mull them over a second time, to ingest them in smaller morsels.
As with most poetry books I read, I must also highly recommend this one.