Crossing the Great Divide

Jean S. Feraca

The good thing about being a thirty-six-year-old fanboy is that sometimes you stumble across gems like this. I started hunting for Crossing the Great Divide because Dominick Fernow, the brain behind Prurient, uses many of Feraca's pieces as lyrics in his material, and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I finally tracked a copy down.

(The bad thing about being a thirty-six-year-old fanboy is that, well, you're a thirty-six-year-old fanboy.)

Crossing the Great Divide is for the most part a good, solid book of poetry, the kind of thing that will make you remember the author's name, but won't stand out in your head once you've finished it; more Debra Weinstein than Debra Allbery. However, there are a select few pieces in here (most of them coming in the book's third section) that can only be described as sucker punches. These are pieces in which it seems some form of fog has been lifted from the reader's mind, and all the images click into place with a clarity completely unexpected given what has come before. The language turns a notch more sensuous, the descriptions become a bit more descriptive, and the reader realizes, hopefully, how fine a line there is between good poetry and great poetry, because the reader is getting a perfect example of how a poet sometimes crosses that line. (One is tempted to make amusing puns on the collection's title here. One will resist.)

This is a fine piece of work, and was well worth the trouble I have put in over the past six months looking for it. (Established Feraca fans will want to be on the lookout for Prurient's albums, especially Troubled Sleep, released a few years back by Truculent Recordings, to see just what cam be done with poetry adapted to lyrics.)