REVERENCE AND IRREVERENCE AT THE SAME TIME
“Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too” by Emily Alexander
http://www.glass-poetry.com/
One of the greatest things a poem can do is pull a surprise laugh out of the reader when solemnity is all that’s expected. Mark Halliday, Stephen Dunn, and Dick Allen are masters of this. The reader moves along in beautiful sadness, and then, suddenly, laughter. In Emily Alexander’s “Meredith Is Crying and I Am Too,” a richly detailed meditation on the Emergency Room, the serious tone stops to elbow readers in the side. “a bomb rib-lodged in a man’s chest / then two train commuters / skewered onto a hand rail so I shove / a spoonful of peanut butter in my mouth / to shut me up,” Alexander writes, and already the bleak moments feel lighter. Or: “I woke up to pee then I found / my keys drove home I barely made / a dent in night it dented me right / back.” This poem bares a moment, revealing both its tragic and comic sides: reverence and irreverence, existential absurdity … life.
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