PLAY DEAD, BY FRANCINE J. HARRIS
Though Harris’ second collection, play dead, frequently gazes into the domestic sphere, home, in these poems, is almost never a safe space. Under Harris’ gaze, the whole world becomes a kaleidoscope of dangers, rich and vivid and often beautiful, though blood-soaked. Harris’ poems shift and tumble, images and actions cascading one on top of another, repeating and doubling (even tripling) down in a kind of fixated revision, as if revisiting the site of a trauma in order to heal. The image of the saw that appears in the poem “woodshop” (“…that is not the way the saw should move…”) resurfaces in repetition as the past tense of “see” a few pages later in “lights in the room” and then again as part of a magician’s act in “the comedian” (“She makes the face of a woman who just felt the saw”).
This obsessive revision appears between poems (as in the sequence of numbered suicide notes, with gaps in the numbering that suggest unknown limits), and also within individual poems, as when, in the poem “canvas,” the addressed “you” erases and repeatedly redraws figures as if by compulsion. This book itself compels the reader to revisit, repeatedly, to pick up and turn the kaleidoscope again.
