Lightsheen (Subsea Sheen)

Light is haunting. It illuminates and takes away, exposing the Louisiana coast and its disappearance, highlighting childhood memories, trying to make sense of death, addiction, navigating guilt, and remembrance. The loss becomes both personal and national with the loss of so many African Americans at the hands of police and the importance of "say his( her, their) name" made popular by the Black Lives Matter movement. The poem "Exile" focuses on the loss of Micheal Brown and the chaos and rage and injustice felt by the nation, "be island, be glass, be a man with his hands up," in which the see the grand possibility of a life with the simply gesture of innocence in the description of hands raised above your head. In the poem titled "Shots into Day", we dream of a boy becoming something new, becoming the sky, a bird, or better yet bullet proof.

Loss and grief take its last turn with the weaving of an unexpected death of a female friend in a car accident and the murder of the young woman Mickey Shunick. The deaths of these women push us to reexamine our place as a woman in society and the violence and beauty of the female body. We see how women just fade into night, a metaphor for societies perception, disposable and sexualized, as though woman are "undetectable, untraceable, unseen" a line from"Before Dusk." Evoking Frank Bidart's famous piece "Ellen West", the poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows us how we have become too occupied with the male story, evidence of the increased popularity of new serial killer dramas on Netflix. The poem titled "Carol Anne Boone" shows a possibility of her perspective and voice that was swallowed up from public view. We are then lead to tales of the narrators sexualization as a young child in poem titled "Blue Nude," where we imagine the female body as anything, "bird, bunny, anything for body". These deaths evoke a death of the narrator and create a sexual reawakening and new found love.

Love becomes reimagined. We live a short abusive relationship in poems titled "Artifacts," "Codependency" and "Roadkill," where we feel the strains of controlled love and the release of finding new love in poems titled "Soft Beginnings." Love then appears all around. C.D. Wright's famous collection Deep Step Come Shining repeats the word love. In the poem titled "Stripmall for C.D. Wright" differentiates love, " bullet love", "Elvis love", "bird love". Love of all kinds surrounds us and the collection ends with two erasures one of a page from Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger and the other of Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. In the end, we have reemerged with a new love: love of loss, love of grief, and love of new, and are left to hold on and let go to become one with light and sheen.

Author: Alexandra Gilliam
Publisher: Finishing Line Press
Published: 10/23/2020
Pages: 86
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.30lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.21d
ISBN: 9781646623266

About the Author
Gilliam, Alexandra: - Born at the foot of the Alamo and raised in New Orleans, Alexandra earned her MFA in Creative Writing from California College of the Arts. She is the author of chapbook, Femmesturary dancing girl press, 2016. Find her work at Second Stutter, In Parentheses Magazine, LIT, and Aspasiology in response to Donna de la Perrière. On her three year hiatus teaching English in Taipei, Taiwan, she co-hosted Taipei Poetry Collective, a reading series and workshop. Find some of her photography at Gravel Magazine and Instagram @poetsforsound

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