Blue Never: Poems of the Apocalypse

Tiffany Christian

I find it amusing that Blue Never's catalog page at vanity publisher lulu.com describes the book as "Sometimes somber, sometimes humorous, often incoherent...". Think about this, young warrior: if your main goal is to sell your books, is "incoherent" really the word you want to put out there in your promotional materials?

Worse yet, it's not entirely accurate. While the poems in Blue Never are obviously well-informed by dada and surrealism, to mistake such imagery for incoherence is to entirely miss the point.

"Lightning beyond sunful ocean
every whale sings itself
Blue blue waters tempest sky
Uncle tests as miracle one bare toe"
(--"Uncle Mystic")

Insert oft-repeated Whitman "barbaric yawp" quote here. And it fits. Many of the pieces in Blue Never are colored (thankfully, not within the lines) this way: the rhythms organic, almost primal, the language an enticing blend of primary and... something. Subconscious? Not the exact word, but it'll do for the moment. As much James Joyce as Tristan Tzara, and it's an appealing combination.

It works less well when the haze clears and Christian removes the rose-colored glasses from our faces. A section of the book deals with the aftermath of bariatric surgery, which seems to me exactly the kind of place where the jungle of stream-of-consciousness-barbaric-yawp would be at its strongest; instead, we get stuff that's a lot more straightforward:

"As I gave, you took,
but you gifted me in fullness,
the contented rumblings of a well-fed monster.
And I, both master and slave,
caressed you with sugar, fondled you with French fries." (--"Ode to My Stomach")

There may not be any atheists in the foxholes, but the other part of that clich is that when you remove the atheists from the foxholes, they forget about God pretty quick. (Did anyone ever think to ask what happens to the foxholes? Didn't think so.)

That said, the majority of the book is of the former stripe, not the latter. Christian is a fine writer, most of the time, and her work is well worth seeking out.