Heather Brinkman

I want to focus on Heather Brinkman for a moment. I was reading Coconut Poetry volume four and she stood out immediately--so inventive, interesting, with a huge sense of everything fully formed. Now typically I am mostly a fan of typical format poetry, the canon and even the Modernists who don't stray too far--but I love all her choices here.

Her work was a perfect example of how a more modern format can be done in an invigorating way. Too often you see people who recklessly try odd formats and it's more of a quirk than a real way of expressing anything. What is poetry if not expression, if not something to stir feeling?

I loved her work here in Shampoo Poetry as well, especially her lines--it's looking at a backwards doppelgänger of Hilda Doolittle, sometimes even down to the steps of feeling:

my whorehouse your heart
a burning violet 


My favorite lines of her work in Coconut were:

x      x      x

iris of rapscallion (impassible)

[...]

South African goddess as caliper

[...]

the scarlet has expired
on a devolution

and you are
but a man gone