A collection of contemporary poems that focus on a variety of topics, including relationships, social and political trends, nature, psychology, human development, and the stress and beauty of being alive.
A collection of contemporary poems that focus on a variety of topics, including relationships, social and political trends, nature, psychology, human development, and the stress and beauty of being alive.
Phone Call
You hold the happy together
I want to break it
Unveil your blindness
Yet
To speak to you I weep
At your probable wisdom
Because who said my sombre is wise?
The squirrel I accidentally killed
Has sad friends now
But others jump for the peanuts
Play in the trees
I don’t get it
I should have
That’s what they always said
Hey, how did you know?
Ascension
(After “Drinking There” by Mark Nepo)
In ascension
To a place confabulated
Like green on green
Becomes our dream of
A treasured crystal contrast
Perhaps aqua is what we seek
Laid over the green below
Not death, unless
We want it to be
But perhaps flight above this
Past this
An expansion beyond our tongues
And skin
But slow
Because that left behind is
Still us
We allow the kernel –
that essential bead of self –
which was hidden –
To debut
In slow motion
To splay the crusts of each disguise
Creaking with pain, yes,
and over and over, blinking
Innocently into the new
Centered
The young child asks why the heart
is to the left and not centered.
The parent smiles.
Where would you like it to be?
I want it perfect. In the middle.
Nothing is perfect, honey.
After a pause, the child cries.
But we are!
The parent fears for the child’s future.
Hugs the child.
Yes, yes we are.
Years later the parent laments
having missed the blinked moment
when the child’s slippery clear vision
of all that is was shining and warm
and smiling and embracing
and was in reach, not just hoped for,
but owned.
Somewhere, at the same time, the grown child
is seen sitting at a red light, staring
too long at nothing, blank, weakened,
until a horn honks them
into compliance.
Years later, at the end, the parent sees a scene:
The young child asks why the heart
is to the left and not centered.
The parent smiles.
Where would you like it to be?
I want it perfect. In the middle.
Where is yours?
To the left.
Mine too, how’s yours working?
Good, I guess.
Let’s see…
The parent puts a hand over the child’s heart,
the child does the same to the parent.
And in this final vision of the parent,
past when the thousand previous laments
had hardened to regrets,
then melted to absolution’s release,
no word is spoken.
I love poetry. I love to write it, as for me, it unlocks a feeling of catharsis. I want to pour everything that lives inside me onto a page, find it like a bloody reflection of me.
I love to read it, and experience the truths of life for other people. I want my poetry to be as honest as possible, and this collection hit the mark wonderfully.
The Alchemy of Blood is a raw and visceral collection of poetry. It grasps with a strong fist and delights with its unabashed honesty and gritty truths.
Reading the collection evoked a spiral of emotions in me. Sometimes I was shocked, sometimes I was moved, other times what I read made my stomach churn. But that drew me to this collection, and kept me reading. I want a collection of poetry to spill all. To be as real as possible with its reader. The Alchemy of Blood certainly fulfilled this desire.
The collection is made up of four parts. Nigredo, Albedo, Citrinitas, and Rubedo, the four stages of a Magnum Opus in alchemy. This naming convention gave me high expectations of the work, though in the end I settled on a four star rating. I thoroughly enjoyed the collection, and would love to read more of LaBrie's work, but I felt there were a few poems which just missed the mark for me, or that I enjoyed much less than the strongest poems.
As I started reading through Nigredo, I was struck by LaBrie's interesting use of structure and syntax. In 'Deconstruction', the violent acts of the poem are made visceral through random spaces, and sporadic punctuation. The poem is visually messy, which makes the violence more impactful. I also found the ‘question’ stanza format of 'Qualitative Data Collected at Parnassus' to be unique and memorable. I enjoyed these experiments in structure which LaBrie utilises throughout, giving the collection a good variation and extra intrigue.
In Albedo, I was quickly met with a standout poem: 'Suspension'. This poem felt soft and airy, with a childlike sweetness that separates it from the profanity and violence of other poems which surround it. LaBrie writes:
A psychologist once told me that hope
is the mechanism of the helpless child.
This line stuck with me, for its beauty and innocence.
Another standout poem for me was 'Intergenerational'. I loved this poem, which revealed painful truths of family, and inherited trauma, and truly moved me.
Finally, I would like to mention 'February, 1970'. This is another melancholic poem, which is airy and beautiful. It has an almost hypnotic gorgeousness, which truly captivated me. While the collection has many dramatic, gut punching notes, I often found myself most enjoying poems like this, which sting with their longing.
He told me the daylight in Maine
is heavy with its own ending.