Shall We Play a Game?
Daniel Jenkins on Nomi Stone’s Kill Class
Daniel Jenkins on Nomi Stone’s Kill Class
The wick is lit / like a gun.
Severance Songs Joshua Corey Tupelo Press, 2011 — Put anything in fourteen lines, and someone will call it a sonnet; although each poem in Joshua Coreyâs third full-length collection, Severance Songs, shares that number of lines (often with visual variations that slide the tree line of the volta up and down the poemsâ slopes), his poems are sonnet-like less for their containers than for the bright shapes they contain. The sense of a sonnet, these poems suggest, isnât in formal configuration but in a manner of speaking, of talking to oneself, of talking things through. In Severance Songs, this manner reels through landscape to render the âpool of newsworthy airsâ that âsurrounds my perception.â For Corey, such perception typically comes from pastoral inspiration that he is both suspicious of (âBuilding sorrows / on a plan of pastoral affectionâ) and beholden to (âI do not reject terrainâ). Early in the collection, a poem begins with a walk; throughout Severance Songs, one sees the record of a mind sent outside by some fever, and what it sees, …