Stories That Listen
Priscilla Becker, Four Way (UPNE, dist.), $15.95 trade paper (72p) ISBN 978-1-935536-05-5
This second book by Becker (Internal West) speaks from a stark place beyond heartbreak, after the dust has settled, where "It is a mistake to call logic/ cold: it has no temperature at all./ It merely reveals itself/ when the last of the emotion is gone." Cast in uneven free verse lines, this book begins and ends in resignation; it's less a journey than a confirmation of what its speaker suspected all along, that life is both disappointing and unfailingly interesting. At times these lines echo the lonely brilliance of Sylvia Plath or Louise Glück, and, of course, their forebear Emily Dickinson, for whom the natural world mirrored the inner one. Becker's claustrophobia begets insight--Becker often addresses a hazy "you," a lost beloved, but really this is the self addressing the self, saying what only the self needs to hear or can understand, "the kind of thing/ one notices--/after the extremes-- /a kind of sobriety." (Oct.)
