The Small Blades Hurt by Erica Dawson (review)

Rhythmic, musical, unforgettable, Erica Dawson’s The Small Blades Hurt is a wild and exhilarating testament of self-love against the backdrop of America—its history, its literature, its popular culture, and its bizarre dramatis personae. They are somehow both controlled and wild, both daring and traditional. Though most of Dawson’s poems are self-portraits, as in her first collection Big-Eyed Afraid, these new self-portraits show their subjects against ever-changing backdrops. Her zany inward gaze doesn’t merely explore private history; it’s in the very self—in her psychology and in her body—that the poet finds the world. In one poem, “I am a suckerfish. I am / In love with my own mouth.” In another, “I’m talking gangsta. Please. / I’m full of ghetto woe.”

After the publication of Big-Eyed Afraid, which won the Anthony Hecht Poetry Prize and was published by Waywiser Press in 2007, Dawson was a rising star in formal poetry. Contemporary Poetry Review named her book Best Debut of the year. Her work has been included in a number of anthologies, including two editions of Best American Poetry. She’s become an assistant professor of English at the University of Tampa and poetry editor of the Tampa Review. The Small Blades Hurt confirms and extends Dawson’s star status. The new collection begins, “I’ve half a mind to make a move.” And making moves is what these poems do. Dawson’s poems exploit all the resources of craft—showing and showing off their dazzling techniques page after page.

There’s a restlessness in The Small Blades Hurt that is not unrelated to the speaker’s having “half a mind” for things, “half a mind” for others—a phrase repeated throughout the book. These songs exhaust themselves reconciling opposing forces within the speaker—between the dual legacies of the Civil War, the streets of Baltimore between splendor and decay. It’s not surprising that Maryland, the poet’s home state, often figures in these poems—the border state between the distinct Americas Erica Dawson inhabits:

Maryland, my Maryland, a border line, “Free State,” disordered North/South, mountain pine Cones west, bald cypress at the Bay, with brine

Along the coast and snow in Hagerstown, White Oak, blue crab, orange and black, and down The Ocean, hon, that January brown—

Each of Erica Dawson’s poems seeks, like Maryland, to be an “America in Miniature,” to hold within their tightly controlled borders the whole variety of identity and experience—city and country, male and female, black and white, high art and pop culture.

Some of the best poems in the collection confront the confusing and painful legacies of the American South. Her poem, “I, Too, Sing America,” dreamily re-imagines the execution of Mary Surratt, a Lincoln assassination conspirator and the first woman executed by the United States federal government. It’s a terrifying and erotic fantasy that anxiously meditates on violence, sexuality, race, and history:

      We sing a lullaby Like mothers, hers softer when the man veils Her already blackened face. White bag. One steep Step to the drop. She falls. She snaps. She wails Deep sighs like she knows she should be asleep.

The speaker inherits, in the persona, the violence of other times and places. Another liebestod, “Chronic,” works its complicated death wish over the body of an unnamed Jane Doe:

I know the moon’s persistent but a dead Woman is rigor, more moonlight and branch Than moonlight on a branch. I want to cut My teeth on her. Her skin holds dawn’s illusion. Post-mortem piss dries yellow on her thigh.

I don’t know why she dies or who she is, Whether I murder her in quiet sleep Because I can’t dream dying, or because I’m literary and need metaphors.

Poems like this are dark, strange, honest, unsettling, and they always implicate the poet-speaker in their morbid curiosity. Her complicated love song to Baltimore, “Gave Proof,” (an homage to Edgar Allen Poe, to Francis...