Review of Where it Goes by Albino Carillo
This book rocked me, threw me off the chair in the little forest where I dwell. These poems made me cry, cheer, laugh, made chills run down my spine.
In her new poems, “Where it Goes,” Martina Reisz Newberry conjures the mythopoetic, the natural, conjures the contact zone of the body in nature, fully aware of itself and of nature’s powers. Her poems are sometimes harsh and honest about the self in relation to others, and the lived life: human, to be sure, meditative in the face of death and ruin.
Starling and surreal, intoxicated with love and lust in its images and her characters, the book achieves a rare form of history from the inside: real old desperate “hipsters,” suburbanites, the poet as a visionary and voiced persona narrating the adversity of living in the 21st century. There is a gentle but convincing gathering of the past that has created the sharp present in this book. So, when she looks back, it is with passion and fury and wisdom. There are political poems here which dare to dissect the darkness in which we all walk, a darkness we’ve been acquainted with for a long time.
Here and there, her poems are neat, sharp, beams of light, sunlight and soul-light. There is a hint of the Ginsberg, the Levertov and the Bukowski in the metaphysics she’s dealing with. She reaches amazing levels of passion, her words are even and precise and put together organically, creating startling and beautiful vistas of life—and by this I don’t mean she hews to the golden mean—she makes poems organically, she speaks her visions and meditations in the projective, in the space between bodies, in the space between the city, nature, and herself.
As a poet Reisz Newberry crafts lines of hot, personal intensities:
“Hold me hard and close
while I fight for our passion
and fight our way out of slavery.”
“God pisses ice. I know he’s there—someone’s there—
doing some insider trading or
checking out the Fall collection
from Abercrombie and Fitch.” (Prima Serata)
Beyond the realm of confession, and into the heart of the desert, her poems tell us
“The wind
is so strong sometimes, it pulls
needles from the cacti and
sends them straight through our hearts. “ (Redhead—Three About Sadie And Me)
This is exactly what her book accomplishes in great, dazzling poems of
emotional, mythic and poetic intensity
Dear reader, in this book you will find so many poems worth reading over and over
again, as I did. Truly the work of a master poet.
Albino Carrillo
Author of In The City of Smoking Mirrors
Associate Professor of English, University of Dayton, Dayton, Ohio