Kevin Hatch
The Tongue is a Brush
1.
Moe’s. Berkeley. Donna de la Perrière reads “First Love.” The crowd as quiet as the landscape in Goya’s El Perro. I am softening my breath. I am inside my body, somewhere between stomach and diaphragm, caught. I am in the dreaded den. I buy a copy of Works of Love & Terror after the reading, tuck it gently into my bag. The book’s eye watches me from my nightstand. I open the book as one would step inside old manor—pulled in by the shapes but cautious of every step. This caution comes from de la Perrière’s ability to render some of the most viscerally real and specific instances of trauma I have ever encountered in poetry. Make no mistake—upon encountering de la Perrière’s work for the first time one feels confident that they are in the right hands. The key difference is that these hands refuse to cover eyes, to dance around without confrontation, to soften the titular terror or love. This poet’s hands are crucial.
2.
Works of Love & Terror is a gallery, a space to sit inside. It contains a sense of magnitude not unlike Goya’s Black Paintings. This is not only because of de la Perrière’s ability to so artfully render the horrific reality of trauma, but also because of a delicate sense of dynamics present in every poem. The experiences of the poems bleed into one another. The violent rape depicted in “First Love” sits inside the same “body” as the remembered promise of Astro Boy in the basement in “Tell Us About Yourself.” There is a sense in the Black Paintings that the space blurred out behind the subjects hides something more ominous, more eternal than the figures in the foreground. This sense of the undulating always-there is part of what makes de la Perrière’s most recent collection so crucial—it refuses an oversimplified closure, it demonstrates both the damage and delight cohabitating inside a single body, it is a masterclass in the expansive nature of specificity.
1.
Moe’s. Berkeley. Donna de la Perrière reads “First Love.” The crowd as quiet as the landscape in Goya’s El Perro. I am softening my breath. I am inside my body, somewhere between stomach and diaphragm, caught. I am in the dreaded den. I buy a copy of Works of Love & Terror after the reading, tuck it gently into my bag. The book’s eye watches me from my nightstand. I open the book as one would step inside old manor—pulled in by the shapes but cautious of every step. This caution comes from de la Perrière’s ability to render some of the most viscerally real and specific instances of trauma I have ever encountered in poetry. Make no mistake—upon encountering de la Perrière’s work for the first time one feels confident that they are in the right hands. The key difference is that these hands refuse to cover eyes, to dance around without confrontation, to soften the titular terror or love. This poet’s hands are crucial.
2.
Works of Love & Terror is a gallery, a space to sit inside. It contains a sense of magnitude not unlike Goya’s Black Paintings. This is not only because of de la Perrière’s ability to so artfully render the horrific reality of trauma, but also because of a delicate sense of dynamics present in every poem. The experiences of the poems bleed into one another. The violent rape depicted in “First Love” sits inside the same “body” as the remembered promise of Astro Boy in the basement in “Tell Us About Yourself.” There is a sense in the Black Paintings that the space blurred out behind the subjects hides something more ominous, more eternal than the figures in the foreground. This sense of the undulating always-there is part of what makes de la Perrière’s most recent collection so crucial—it refuses an oversimplified closure, it demonstrates both the damage and delight cohabitating inside a single body, it is a masterclass in the expansive nature of specificity.