Yesterday I was reading the latest JMWW when I fell upon Nicelle Davis's poem, "The Wings Inside Our Stomachs." Let me just say, I have not fallen deep in love with a poem this way in a long time. For me this poem was one of those, "damn I wish I wrote that" pieces. But then thinking about it for just a minute or two it became the "damn I'm glad that poem was written" piece. It starts, "I'm not a monster, you say. The little girl in me agrees— / sits next to your boy-self on the curbside / of our childhoods." I love that I truly believe the poet can travel back to the edge of a childhood sidewalk and goes on to explore the memory of place in childhood. I also love the liberties the poet takes with the line break in this piece, kind of prosey, but smart and risky and the prose style is coupled with one to two word stanzas. Breathy.
Of course after this poem, I googled her work to see if her other poems blew me away with the same force. My other two favorites are published in http://www.escapeintolife.com, "As Songs Travel Past Their Singers (the reprise)" and "Dolly." In these two poems there's play with form and an element of surprise. I like that, when I read a poem and think, "there's nothing like that in which I've read before." When the imagery and syntax and element of the story just take the reader away into that magical place where one forgets they are reading and they are allowed to float in the world the writer created.
I eagerly await Nicelle Davis's first book and feel lucky for electronic publications because otherwise I might not have found her on my own.
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