In I WILL WRITE LOUDLY SO YOU CAN HEAR ME, written from Karyn M. Bruce’s adult perspective, we hear the voice of a child, the only daughter of a vivacious, alcoholic mother and charming, raging father, struggling to understand her world. From the first poem, dedicated to Bruce’s own daughter, to the final work, acknowledging that at age 66, she is nearing the age when her father died, Karyn M. Bruce tells the stories of her life in bright, sobering flashes. This is eminently approachable poetry; direct, visual, images that are sharply etched in brief flows of words; plain language that evokes a visceral response.
Bruce goes straight to the darkness of her childhood in her first poem “I Was Never Allowed To Attend Funerals”, but tempers all the rest of her pieces with “In Perfect Black & White”, a beautifully nuanced exploration of her mother’s own life in black and white photos, tenderly acknowledging that her mother was trapped in her own way. There was a particular photograph of Bruce’s mother in an arabesque as she’d longed to be a dancer and “…a couple from New England wanted to adopt you to put you in their troupe. But Nono wouldn’t sign the paper. So there you were, stuck in that photo, on your toes.” Bruce has the photographic evidence of the love between her and her mother, “we were tucked into each other, my head under your chin, your voice slipping through my hair…“, which she needs to express before expressing her anguish over her mother’s descent into alcoholism and mental illness in the marvelously titled “If You Can Bake Cookies, You Can’t Be Too Crazy”. But Bruce’s collection is not all tragedy; her sense of humor and spirit peek out hopefully throughout, particularly in the short, wonder-filled moments of recollection, like being six years old and able to walk to school alone in “Spring, 1955”, or her blissfully normal times spent with her grandmother, “Everything About Her”. The poems of Bruce’s adulthood don’t fare quite as well, slightly lacking some of the specificity of the childhood canon, but there are still moments of revelation in pieces like “In Our Twenties, We Smoked Cigarettes”.
I WILL WRITE LOUDLY SO YOU CAN HEAR ME is a quiet book, full of tiny moments of pain and joy, tracing a gentle line from despair to resolution and perhaps even victory. Any reader who takes the journey with Karyn M. Bruce will sigh and laugh, and occasionally wince, with recognition, and will be the better for joining the ride.
The poetry of I WILL WRITE LOUDLY SO YOU CAN HEAR ME by Karyn M. Bruce is simple but devastating; a lost childhood conveyed in small, lean images so vivid, readers will feel like they are experiencing Bruce’s life alongside her.
~Shari Simpson for IndieReader