Books

Anna Journey’s lines echo like lines of a song. The final word is ‘blooming.’ The poems are big, rangy, expansive in Whitmanesque, democratic ways. They have a narrative charisma, but maintain Dickinson’s perversity, independence. Journey is as much a poet as a storyteller. Few write with her variety of emotional, intellectual, and musical muscle. This is simply a masterful collection of poems.

Journey brings me surprise after surprise in language so vivid, peculiar, truthful, and moving, that I gulp the poems down, a glutton for their strange energies and observations. Journey’s formal concision, intelligence, and decorum rub up against her speaker’s slightly feral interiority. It’s this instinctive wildness of soul that I think allows Journey to capture what others miss within seemingly ordinary moments and states of being. This is a terrific book by an important poet.

Anna Journey, in her new book of poems, Vulgar Remedies, creates an alchemical self whose shimmering limbic/alembic lyrics distill the mysterious terrors of childhood, the dangerous passions of adults, into her own honey-dusk ‘voodun’ - protective, purified to gold. Poetry is always a time machine - here we are invisible travelers to a bewitched past, a beautifully occluded future. These poems are erotic, vertiginous, revelatory, their dazzling lyric force reflecting profound hermetic life.

The tropic foliage of Anna Journey’s book is so lushly ashimmer with invitation and threat that it’s difficult to tell the two apart. Which is just what this poet intends - the world seduces us to enter, and to enter again, and to do so is both to find pleasure and to perish into a field of ghosts.