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  • Breaking the Silence
  • Beth McDermott (bio)
Out From Calaboose
Karen Corinne Herceg
Nirala Publications
www.niralapublications.com/new-booksarrivals/out-of-calaboose-new-poems/
91 Pages; Print, $15.00

The title and cover art of Karen Corinne Herceg's Out from Calaboose immediately suggest release into new life. "Calaboose" is defined by Merriam-Webster as "a local jail," and it comes from the Spanish calabozo, which means "dungeon." Now, imagine a jail or dungeon can look like different things to different people, maybe even a former life full of "false impressions, / pride and blame." In Out from Calaboose, the cover art of which features a large egg on a stormy coastline, new life entails awakening from "grilled iron / and locked rooms" to presence, intimacy, and oneness. Even the first poem's opening line—"I can't remember what I left behind . . . "—contributes to a sense of awakening; although it's not repeated, the line flutters like an affirmation over the collection, as if the speaker could forget past grievances that continue to haunt her. The poems in Out from Calaboose intuit their way down the page and are sensory and imagistic, often in short-lined block stanzas, their syntax with or without punctuation. They're as empty of pretense as they can be, if that's possible to say about poems still aware of their own artifice.

In an essay on mentoring, Katie Ford writes that Jorie Graham described the "the beginning of a book of poetry [as] the breaking of a long silence." Out from Calaboose is Herceg's second book of poems after a thirty year hiatus she mentions in a brief "Preface" to the collection. There are five sections to the book: sections one and four strongly give the sense that new life is permitted because the speaker has narrowly escaped the "calaboose" of an unloving marriage and traumatic upbringing, a history she associates with pretense in poems that seek substance. Take "The Glass Vision," an early poem in the collection. The "you" of the poem builds a house that represents himself and his own interests much like Ozymandias built a sculpture in his own visage and likeness. The speaker never feels like she fits in:

That house:too grand to holdthe comfort of a family,to bold to assimilate usinto the patterns of the land,the community,setting us apart from neighborsand one another.

The parsed lines deliberately underscore feelings of isolation. Short lines are common throughout the collection and work better in some poems than others. I'd love to see Herceg experiment with a longer line in poems that derive rhythm from the syntax and anaphora more so than the lineation. But in the case of "The Glass Vision," each line hovers as if separate from the next, bracketing "family" out from "land," "community," and "one another." One gets the sense of isolation in the marriage because it upholds, like the capitalism that drives it, glass visions or dreams "too large to last." What is most interesting to me about Herceg's poems are the far-reaching implications of what could be perceived as a highly personal problem. In numerous poems the speaker is not the only victim in the situation, nor is she most important. My favorite lines from "The Glass Vision" question the body count that exists because of this couple's perfect vision:

How many birds did we losecascading into walls of windowsthat reflected sun-speckled lightthat deceived theminto thinking a horizon was there

The Ozymandias-type "you" built the house in the way that capitalism itself works, remaking the landscape, molding it to his will, deceiving others into thinking a "majestic mcmansion" is not indicative of "shared disillusions." I can almost hear Shelley's poem as Herceg's poem ends:

our bodies lost within cavernous rooms,windows all around, skylights, glassand endless vistas,specks beyond distanceexpansive to the point of gone.

Certainly "expansive to the point of gone" echoes "boundless and bare / The lone and level sands stretch far away."

As later poems also suggest, these disillusions aren't unique to the couple but characteristic of a capitalist...

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