Stonepoems - Carrie Lorig & Sara Woods

by guest reviewer Dalton Day (<3)

Stone. Stone. Stone. A stone can be skipped across a body of water & into a memory. A stone can be combined with other stones, crumbled down, & reshaped into a shelter or a monument or a piece of jewelry. A stone can not exist, but still manage to drift, to settle into the pits of our own bodies, while we spend our whole lives or pieces of our lives trying to learn how big or small or jagged our hands need to be to hold it, to throw it, to turn it into something else. 

Carrie Lorig & Sara Woods turn it into something else. They turn it into a word, or else break it into crumbs of two words: antler foam, droughtflour, growchild. They make it a sound, & then control the echo. They take a stone & a stone & a stone, & listen to it, & eat it & hate it & love it, & spill what the stones have made out of them & us.

& I am in love with it.

From the first line in the first poem, “STONES ALL LINK ARMS,” I know I’m not here to take notes, but instead to listen to reckless the focus in my vision: 

we look like ghost tours here held

in strong personal herds

Of course, I know what a ghost tour is, what it looks like. Of course. I know how a personal herd is held, particularly if it’s strong. But now, there are words for it. But now, there are images I can filter the feelings of haunted-ness & lack of body-ness to. 

These poems, these stones, are tossed so gently you’d think they were weightless. & then you catch them. & then you are underground & not happy but content & not wrecked but cold & still the stone possesses a warmth. A possibility. In each poem Lorig & Woods present a possibility & almost nothing else, but almost everything not so. From “STONES RAIN":

what if coats held breath machines

found in weird dances

what if a warm arm

across the red sky

took a shatter stalled at its end what if we became swimmers

I myself say “what if” all the time, to everything, to anything. & these stones give me an answer to question. & these answers are not easy. These sounds aren’t always melodic. These images are very often unsewn. These poems are difficult, but they make you, the reader, feel so easy in your movements, in your catching, in your burning.

I read poetry for big feelings. I hear poetry for small beings. Stonepoems is reflected wind. It blinds & culls. It confuses & illuminates. It takes something & gives something else. A blood. A tender. A limb. Carrie & Sara have done all that I want poetry to do. They have made a mountain. & I have been crushed.

Find Carrie here: http://carrieabigstick.tumblr.com/

Find Sara here: http://saramountain.tumblr.com/

Buy the book at: http://solarluxuriance.com/stonepoems.html