By Kellie Schorr
Everywhere.
Everywhere we go screens are blaring at us with bright, horrible, bountiful noise. Bad news. Good news. Promises of hope. Portents of doom. The more stressed we become, the louder our surroundings scream at us until we, too, are screaming while mindlessly going about our routines in some kind of desperate bid for sanity.
Never in the history of the world has there been a better time for poetry.
Not just any poetry, but the kind of baroque melancholy verse that you read while sipping dark tea, sitting by soft light with gray clouds dropping rain that creeps down your window like heavy nectar. That’s the setting we need so we can commune with the ashen sky and reflect on our own journey fraught and uplifted by the realities of humanity and the challenges it carries.
N33D: Poems of Human-Being by J.L. Pendall is exactly the poetry for a time such as this.
Simultaneously modern and classic, it is a chapbook that will sit with you, sharing longing, questions, regret and anger with a subtle note of hope. It isn’t a manifesto to dash your optimism against the rocks, and it won’t inspire you to march against tyranny waving banners so you can change the world. It will just accompany your most private, lonely, pausing thoughts.
As those times when you feel most alone, N33D is the friend you never had.
Although the forward comments revel in humor and a genuine addiction to word play, they are an essential component to understanding this work by an author who brings a neurodiverse lens to each situation and lets us look through it as well. While the poetry may be introspective, it is also reflective of the outward view to innermost longing.
Individually, each poem is a companion. Not an intrusive presence yapping at you while you pray for silence, but a warm, if waning, supporter who whispers to you with words that curl and rise like smoke from a pipe.
“I know,” the poetry says. “I feel it too.”
As a collection it is a symphony of dissonance.
Deep memories of loss or confusion are mixed with patterned grumblings about corporations, phones, and the speed at which we do everything, and nothing. One moment you feel like you are touching the secret heart of a desperately searching lover, and the next it dissolves into coffee shop banter with a wordy jester who won’t shut up.
If this book had a soundtrack, it would be in the Dark Academia genre. Classically influenced with a modern edge, it’s a little gloomy but in a way that leaves you feeling trusted, not depressed. It is a good, solid read for a delightfully reflective moment.
I don’t why we aren’t reading more poetry these days. It is the medium most able to help us express the complexity and fraught emotional state of our times in a word efficient manner. If we have needed it ever, we need it most now.
Everywhere. We need it everywhere.
Photo: author’s book
Editor: Dana Gornall
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