3 Poetry Books on Infusing Experience with Personal Mythology
BY STEPHANIE ATHENA VALENTE
One facet in poetry's beauty is its urgency. Its collective need–which is beyond desire–to facilitate a process that weaves its spill and story. Urgency is one of the driving forces in poems that grab us and enchant us.
Building on this urgency is the stories we tell ourselves, and in turn, the stories we tell others. Urgency is a waterfall in personal mythology. The mythology of our identity through the complexities of experience and desire. How does personal mythology – the real experience, the fantasies, the truth, the dreams, and the hero's journey play a part?
These three books below answer that question.
Spectral Evidence by Trista Edwards (April Gloaming, 2020)
Imagine poems that weave in lore and legend alongside pain, hope, and transmuted experience. It's ripe and rich. With fantastical imagery, the poems zig and zag through legend tropes and structures with a fresh context full of chrysalis as the fairy tale worlds ebb and flow into consciousness. It's dazzling and a dark delight.
Notable lines:
- Have you ever built an entire city/out of sunlight?
- I want to enter into some soil, abandoned life
- Her body a fracture, a book split open
Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat by Khalisa Rae (Red Hen Press, April 2021)
A remarkable chronicle of agency and prophetic voice. Ghosts and apparitions are among playful agents in the pages to witness a reclamation and provide a powerful fire. This haunting is but a reckoning of reconciliations and a quest for meaning in agency against oppressive forces. Even in the smallest of moments there is still a way to cast magic in the darkness, a fire of hope. The poems mark the birth of a new mythology, a creation into existence. A creation that has long been systematically silenced and erased. The poems are a rhythmic trance that spurs freedom.
Notable lines:
- Our future is a sad summer. Sin and champagne
- When my eyes became/itchy, filled with water–/I thought this was a love spell
- a treasure chest of bones choking/ on saltwater. Cadavers hidden under floorboards/of the sea
FOREVERHAUS by Kailey Tedesco (White Stag, 2020)
Welcome to a collection that lifts the veil again and again. Each poem blends urgent memory reflective reality with a dark alchemical dreamscape. In this dreamscape, fantasy is fantastical and reality is also fantasy. It's sublime but tangible, accessible but also a looking glass. In the dreamscape, shadows illuminate the light, and light darkens the shadows. An opus of poignancy.
Notable lines:
- Your neon crucifixes/illuminate the stain/on the carpets
- The forest is haunted & I know this from dreams
- Becoming a forest with just one kind of tree
Stephanie Athena Valente lives in Brooklyn, NY. Her published works include Hotel Ghost, waiting for the end of the world, and Little Fang (Bottlecap Press, 2015-2019). She has work included in Witch Craft Magazine, Maudlin House, and Cosmonauts Avenue. She is the associate editor at Yes, Poetry. Sometimes, she feels human. stephanievalente.com
