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FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM
By Kathleen Balma
- Posted by IR Staff
- |
FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM is the first full length collection from New Orleans based poet Kathleen Balma. Her work has already appeared in numerous anthologies and reviews including Best New Poets and the Montreal International Poetry Prize Anthology. Balma’s poems are often presented as prose style texts blocks, like dense flash fiction whose metaphors and allusions need to be carefully unpacked. She is a modern poet with an ear for the lyrical and musical. Hers are deft lines that chime with times, that resonate long after the page has turned.
There are numerous pop cultural references. Musicians and movie stars. Television, especially sci-fi. Numerous ghosts. And history. The excellent “Abraham, Honestly” finds Lincoln as a baby building a cabin. Another poem visits an invisible gun show. Balma is skilled enough to add weight to this kind of whimsy. Elsewhere, the disarmingly simple poem “Vase”, its lines shaped to represent its title, plays with meaning and form. The title poem, with its referral to realist nudes by artists Gustave Courbet and Edouard Manet and a glance towards the 1880s cabaret club Le Chat Noir, reflects on the thoughts of a burlesque dancer, though she represents all women, caught in the male gaze. It’s bold. Uncomfortable. Angry and urgent. Similarly, the poem “A Tour of Pompeii’s Red-light District” wearily questions the ways women have often been treated.
The book ends with the extended work “Snubbed: A Motion-Picture Ekphrasis” a literary adaptation of a documentary called “The Mystery Monkeys of Shangri-La”, a film that examines the life of a group of snub-nosed monkeys who live in the highest forests of the world. Balma explores their story with allusions to Shakespeare and Mark Twain, taking in a myriad of pop cultural references stretching from Brad Pitt to the Beastie Boys. It’s sometimes impenetrable, especially without ready reference to the film itself, but the phrases and couplets skit across the page, the idiosyncratic line breaks calling to mind the way that monkeys swing from tree to tree. It’s innovative. Admirable. A grander more elaborate version of the kind of chances Balma often takes in her poems.
Poet Kathleen Balma’s FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM is a wide ranging collection that is both accessible and fun to read but its real power is in the ideas and phrases that stay with the reader long after the book has been set down. An excellent first collection that will bear frequent revisiting.
~Kent Lane for IndieReader
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978-1913606886
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- Posted by IR Staff
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FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM by Kathleen Balma is a small collection of the author’s poetry which vary from the delightful to the bizarre and often read like miniature stories. An interesting anthology for the artistic minded.
FROM YOUR HOSTESS AT THE T&A MUSEUM
Kathleen Balma
978-1913606886
Rated 4.0 / 5 based on 1 review.