Review of Blood Medals by Claudia Cortese

by jackson holbert, poetry reader

Claudia Cortese's Blood Medals, her first chapbook, is a stunning investigation into the dark surrealism—and realism—of girlhood. The main character of these poems is a girl named Lucy. Her age is never stated, though one would guess she’s no younger than nine but no older than fifteen. The book provides no immediately discernible narrative, which allows one to focus entirely upon investigating the actions and the psyche of Lucy, rather than tracking how the character grows through time.

The collection opens with a poem that, in the first two lines, describes Lucie's state of being, “Lucy lives in her gauze house, a little terry cloth tumor. To live here is to be beautiful but very sad.” The second sentence might be about the best possible summation of Blood Medals.

The playfulness of the language is one of the most haunting elements of these poems. Take this excerpt from the poem “Lucy looks in the mirror and sees”:

a lidless eye. A holy of lye. The herpes sores the nun's slide show glowed before their fourth grade horror. Sees hairless cat. Trash bag a raccoon teethed open, (if I don't eat for one whole week she bargained, if I stich my lips—) its Kool-Aid pool ant-stuck and sunning.

The poem, initially, moves forward through wordplay. Lucy looks at her eye and then free-associates from the language she uses to describe it. I'm almost reminded of some of the LANGUAGE poets in the first two lines, but it feels like the poem, in its playfulness, is fighting—desperately—to find a language to describe what it must describe. Part of the power of these poems, and this poem in particular, is how Cortese manipulates the outer world by tunneling deep into the inner world. Her use of landscape calls to mind a less tame version of some of Louise Gluck's early work. The world of Lucy is not only filled with her feelings, it sometimes even seems to act on them or mimic them. The magic of this is that the ants, or perhaps the observation about the ants, seem like a “normal” part of the world. Part of Cortese's talent is that she can, seamlessly, breathe in the landscape of the real world and breathe out the altered landscape of Lucy’s world.

Cortese is not afraid of whittling her poems down to their core. Take the “Lucy plays her favorite game,” for which the title also acts as a part of the first line, “on repeat: tape the news of Jesica lifted from well. Rewind slowly, watch her return to her hole.” The peculiar masochism here also present throughout the rest of the book. One is never sure if Lucie's violence toward others—the dog whose fur she tears with her teeth, for example—is a desire to perform violence upon herself or if that violence toward others is, in a way, violence toward herself. It's a poetic paradox that reflects an emotional paradox and, as a result, one immediately accepts it as true, because it must be.

One of the standouts of the collection is the “Lucy Mad Lib.” In the hands of a lesser poet, the Mad Lib form might come off as a cheap trick, a poem that doesn't put all that much at stake but gives the illusion of being formally innovative or at least in tune with something outside of the normal poetic forms. In the hands of Cortese, the poem forces the reader to place him or herself in the book, and indict themselves in some of the torment present within it. The parameters Cortese gives for the blank spaces—for example “(violent noun because sincerity terrifies)”—exist in that nebulous space between the poet writing through the mind of the character—Lucy, whose vocabulary and self-awareness are different than the poet's—and the poet writing through the mind of the poet. The visualization of this dynamic, along with the inclusion of the reader through the mad lib form, acts as an interesting and unorthodox bridge from the reality of the world to the reality of the world of the poem.

When I read these poems I can't help but be reminded of a remark James Dickey once made about Jack Gilbert: “He takes himself away to a place more inward than is safe to go.” That place, for Cortese, in this offering of poems, seems to be the mind of Lucy. These poems are not just urgent and brilliantly crafted, they're brave.

Blood Medals

by Claudia Cortese

Thrush Press, 2015

$12.00 [ISBN 9781511599979]

[33 pp.]

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