Book Review: Fabulosa

FABULOSA

poems by Karen Rigby

Jackleg Press 2024

reviewed by Bethany Reid

Oh my, put on your spangled tux for this one.   

Some poetry books are balm. They soothe a reader’s jangled nerves. Fabulosa isn’t one of those books. From the first poem, “Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves,” to the last, Karen Rigby turns up the volume and heaps on the glitz. Whether a poem is (ostensibly) about movie stars,  thoroughbred race horses, artists, “fuchsia engines,” or “carnal peonies”—everyone and everything here is gussied up in black lame and hot pink, ready to party.

And the glitter isn’t only on the surface. “On Marion Cotillard’s 2008 Oscar Dress,” begins with a “mermaid silhouette…X-back sweeping to a fishtail hem,” but the poem grabs us in its teeth and carries us beneath first impressions:

Never mind white like wedding cake piping or fit
like second skin. What I love about sleeveless
couture is negative space:

              collarbone, shoulders, neck

fugitive as the first crocus.

And elsewhere in the poem:

What’s in a dress? Stitch. Scaffold. Silver edge.
A piano hammering notes pure as jet.

            Fabulosa is devoid of stock, expected images. In “The Roses,” petals “are edged with bruises,” and “yellow tape // dividing yesterday’s gunfire / from today’s erasure.” Here, as in a number of Rigby’s poems, surprise goes hand in hand with violence. The elegantly gloved hand in “Lady with Glove”: “Fingers cocked like a gun.”

Rigby doesn’t need violence to grab our attention, only the thrum of her adoration. She sets images sparking and pinging like a pinball. I wish I could offer you the entirety of “To Johnny Weir on I Love You, I Hate You.” (I wish I had written it.) The first sentence of the poem dives through ten lines of the poem, ending with: “obsession honed to art, each edge // a fretwork left on ice.” Rigby choreographs her obsessions—and her lines—dangles them into and dances with the white space. By the time I reached the ending lines of “To Johnny Weir,” I, too, was starstruck: “The end of grief is the beginning of fire / as when the last note sunders air.”

In our political moment, and—more generally—our highly distractable age of gadgets, games, and screens, Rigby reminds us how attention can be a sacred act. “Half of reverence is getting the names right” she exhorts in “Why My Poems Turn Forensic,” and then:

So a petal is never a petal, but an origami dove
inside the Holy Ghost orchid.

and, a moment later:

I never write
without measuring, each line
hooking a quicksilver hunger.

Quicksilver. Think mercury, silver and quick (“alive”), impossible to hold. A “quicksilver hunger”? A delightful pair that made me ponder.

In “Why My Poems Refuse Daylight,” Rigby ends with these lines, an ars poetica, or maybe a cri de coeur:

My poems hunt shadow in the folds: Madame X
             dusted in lavender powder. Persimmons stacked
                       in a blue bowl. Everything in art

                                         is gesture. I can’t save you
             from whatever’s next, but if you’re listening
                       for the sound a house makes when the locks fall

this is for you, with your stung heart.

If I’m listening? These poems compelled me to listen.

Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018).  Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she  blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .

Buy Fabulosa at Jackleg Press (through IngramSpark)

Read interview with Karen Rigby on Fabulosa at Mixed Asian Media

Watch YouTube interview with Karen Rigby on Fabulosa at Poet to Poet