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Rigger Death and Hoist Another
Poetry. Poems located in the interstices of parenting and politics that vibrate with heat, anger, and strange grace. Rife with guns, tattoos, booze, wounds, and lost teeth, these explosive narrative lyrics imagine what it means to try and fail and still go on.
- GenresPoetry
90 pages, Paperback
First published February 12, 2013
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 2, 2013
The mortician knows his job'
Laura McCullough is a poet who continues to explore situations and emotions unavailable to others - subsurface fears, frustrations, moments of doubt that arise only out of living a life that crosses forbidden accepted borders. She has that uncanny ability to shave terror and fear into moments that are tangent to a bizarre humor, seemingly finding the human comedy that so often is masked by a brittle black surface of incidental reality. In RIGGER DEATHS & HOIST ANOTHER McCullough uses language as a weapon, a tool, a sex toy, a map, a love letter and argue with alternate provocation and tenderness that language is the sexiest and most intimate mode of intercourse that humans have, enlightening incidents of disaster in the most mundane and unexpected places - memories, accidents, bruised emotions, transient moments of tragedy. How she finds these occult forces and molds them into such perfect poetic measures is the conundrum of what makes her a great poet.
Presenting an example of her talent is a challenge, but the following measure her subtlety well:
ARROGANCE
My village wasn't slashed and burned today,
and since I don't live in a village,
all I had was guilt
which seems to wash over the coat of Jersey
now and then like a red algae swarm
or the predicted high tides
said to imperil our future. I live on a cul-de-sac
which seems like a French work for circle
of homes, but there is no such word in that language
though they have a coast, too, and I'm sure, epidemics
of guilt, but today, there's only the one I have
that these pills won't assuage.
And next door, I hear screaming. The neighbor's
son is home from Iraq,
his teen girlfriend is pregnant,
and the mother-in-law has Alzheimer's.
None of us was on the news,
and my children are laying quietly, for once, with clay.
One is making pizza; the other a princess crown.
I stand by the window watching the weather
creep in from across the bay. Some foreign
smell is in it;
something I don't care to know about'
something I wouldn't dare to claim.
THE LIPS WERE THE WORST
They bled ink for days, and couldn't be kissed;
she could barely eat. Swollen like small plum slices,
she was afraid for a little while, but then it
was alright. He kissed her one night, just on the corner
because he was afraid though he had not told her
so. He touched a finger to the bottom one and then checked;
they were set. `What do you think now,' he asked her,
and she pouted. `My eyes' she said, `I'll do them next.' He
blinked. `I don't think I could do my eyes,' he said.
She touched the small nob of metal between his eyes. `You
did this,' she said. `That's different,' he said. `That's
the bullet I've dodged my whole life. Bang. Quentin Tarantino
to the head.' He ran his pinky across his lashes
letting them feather across his skin. He touched the lid. `This,'
he said, `is baby flesh.' He moved to touch hers, but
she startled away form him, covering her face, looking
at him through the bars of her black tipped fingers.
What Laura McCullough cannot do with words that make ideas probably cannot be done. She has a quirky nature and the facility of pen to paper that suddenly turns on a light in the dark little space we think is our private interior. Then we find she has already explored that and described it and simply blushing or looking aghast doesn't stop her. She is funny, perceptive and yes...a little naughty, too.
Grady Harp
Laura McCullough is a poet who continues to explore situations and emotions unavailable to others - subsurface fears, frustrations, moments of doubt that arise only out of living a life that crosses forbidden accepted borders. She has that uncanny ability to shave terror and fear into moments that are tangent to a bizarre humor, seemingly finding the human comedy that so often is masked by a brittle black surface of incidental reality. In RIGGER DEATHS & HOIST ANOTHER McCullough uses language as a weapon, a tool, a sex toy, a map, a love letter and argue with alternate provocation and tenderness that language is the sexiest and most intimate mode of intercourse that humans have, enlightening incidents of disaster in the most mundane and unexpected places - memories, accidents, bruised emotions, transient moments of tragedy. How she finds these occult forces and molds them into such perfect poetic measures is the conundrum of what makes her a great poet.
Presenting an example of her talent is a challenge, but the following measure her subtlety well:
ARROGANCE
My village wasn't slashed and burned today,
and since I don't live in a village,
all I had was guilt
which seems to wash over the coat of Jersey
now and then like a red algae swarm
or the predicted high tides
said to imperil our future. I live on a cul-de-sac
which seems like a French work for circle
of homes, but there is no such word in that language
though they have a coast, too, and I'm sure, epidemics
of guilt, but today, there's only the one I have
that these pills won't assuage.
And next door, I hear screaming. The neighbor's
son is home from Iraq,
his teen girlfriend is pregnant,
and the mother-in-law has Alzheimer's.
None of us was on the news,
and my children are laying quietly, for once, with clay.
One is making pizza; the other a princess crown.
I stand by the window watching the weather
creep in from across the bay. Some foreign
smell is in it;
something I don't care to know about'
something I wouldn't dare to claim.
THE LIPS WERE THE WORST
They bled ink for days, and couldn't be kissed;
she could barely eat. Swollen like small plum slices,
she was afraid for a little while, but then it
was alright. He kissed her one night, just on the corner
because he was afraid though he had not told her
so. He touched a finger to the bottom one and then checked;
they were set. `What do you think now,' he asked her,
and she pouted. `My eyes' she said, `I'll do them next.' He
blinked. `I don't think I could do my eyes,' he said.
She touched the small nob of metal between his eyes. `You
did this,' she said. `That's different,' he said. `That's
the bullet I've dodged my whole life. Bang. Quentin Tarantino
to the head.' He ran his pinky across his lashes
letting them feather across his skin. He touched the lid. `This,'
he said, `is baby flesh.' He moved to touch hers, but
she startled away form him, covering her face, looking
at him through the bars of her black tipped fingers.
What Laura McCullough cannot do with words that make ideas probably cannot be done. She has a quirky nature and the facility of pen to paper that suddenly turns on a light in the dark little space we think is our private interior. Then we find she has already explored that and described it and simply blushing or looking aghast doesn't stop her. She is funny, perceptive and yes...a little naughty, too.
Grady Harp
April 8, 2014
Although these poems are often dense--long lined, thick-stanza-ed--they're also full of humor and a desire to understand the human. McCollough is a meditative poet, and the best of these explore the contradictions inherent in the experience of being alive. Sometimes their music falters, and when it does, there's a plain spoken proseyness that can frustrate a reader of poetry, but when these poems are "on"--as most of them are--they're terrific.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews