notanotherbookreview

I read through these short poems a couple times and slyly, through the layers of her forms in this varied collection, I began to get meanings. Form is something Beasley-Baker enjoys and her free-verse employs counting forms Haiku and the Elfchen, minimalist versions of John Cage’s mesostic forms, as well as poems based on colors and that borrow from traditional American songs. (According to Wikopedia an Elfchen is “an 11 word poem in a specific format” and a mesostic poem  is “ such that a vertical phrase intersects lines of horizontal text.”)  Many of these poems have a weight of the past and its tension with a present that challenges or threatens to erase it. There are sweet children’s songs that jar with adult perceptions. In one poem a bride is left at the altar and she cries, when the groom refers to 27 cans of peaches—feeling the loss of “errant desire.”  Leonora Carrington was a singular surrealist painter and poet and Beasley is also a painter. There is some...