Lydia Havens Still a Welcome Respite

by katherine frain, poetry editor

It’s damn hard to write a good love poem.

We all know what bad love poems are. Glass hearts. Soul imagery. Women who make half an appearance and then vanish in a haze of fruit imagery. Men who are tragically powerful in some hopelessly predictable way. Maybe it’s the inversion of Anna Karenina; every good love poem has to be different from the other. Every bad love poem needs to sound alike.

Girls Invent Gods, the latest chapbook from slam poet Lydia Havens, is the lesbian love song I’ve been waiting for.

“The Most Gorgeous Feeling” is really the pinnacle of the work here. “For her,” Havens writes, “I will sleepwalk. I will sing/refrigerator songs, write kitchen sink love/notes.” Every turn of the work is an Andrea Gibson-like inversion of practiced tropes, a new note rising above old noise. This is where Havens is at her best; balancing her past as a slam poet with rich life experience, translated into wonderful imagery. This is a poem I could read or have read aloud to.

But not all the poems work so neatly or so joyfully. “5 Things She Said During the Retrograde” seems written for the excerpts. It’s a collection of orphan lines I’m not sure belong together: moments that individually could have sprung their own narrative, but seem stifled next to each other. There are moments when Havens’ slam experience sticks out uncomfortably – repetitions that may be necessary in competition or readings where the audience is only allowed to view the work once, but seem weighty on the page. Moments where she seems to capture and summarize everything she’s so far said. And there are those final slam sins, the easily-accessed imagery that many poets use to build a platform for their more luminous.

“Glacier in the Bathtub” is one of those luminous works, a strange exercise in surrealism that seems to unravel backwards into a slam cliché. Would I read it for the opening stanza alone, one that opens with the author picking Arctic creatures out from the wrinkles of her skin? Yes. But I would have loved that kind of landing as well.

I think I want Girls Invent Gods as an audio-chapbook. Call it some invention of this modern age. We barely stop listening to music anyways. Havens’ work seems to be begging for music underneath it, for the fire of everyone’s collective voice. These are important poems and they deserve to be enjoyed – but ultimately, her poetry seems to dislike paper, its line breaks and stanza pulls, its demand to be read twice. Her work is meant to be heard.

#katherinefrain #lydiahavens #bookreview