REVIEW: Meghan Privitello – A New Language for Falling Out of Love

Raw and focused disillusionment. A longing for a definable existence within the mundane. Heartaches tacked with pushpins. From all of this, with unexpected play with syntax, a defiance towards traditional form, and tactile and terse imagery, Meghan Privitello creates a playing field where she volleys ideas of love, loss, relationships, and the self. Within the boxed-in boundaries of fixed margins, the poet’s search for a new language is a way to re/define her heart and explore her own humanity.

In poems such as “Active Drowning,” “Manifest,” “Interpretation,” and “Too Late,” she exposes blind spots within herself and has a distinct way of illustrating what has left the room. There is a humility of the self in her poems which creates a vacancy that she is longing to fill, trying to fill with a new language if nothing more. Often, she lets in a crack of light to reveal what is behind the empty room, if only to reveal more darkness and despair. Even though at times Privitello exposes, at best, a fraudulent landscape of the disparity of the self, it is within these emotional juxtapositions that her personal perspective of her own humanity is put forth:

Gill-less and guileless, how long could we live
together in the sea, never knowing when we’ve
gone too deep?

Sometimes I am so small my obituary starts
and ends with she.

Three Poems – Stacy Lynn Feder

The night I try to write you a poem

I almost die. My mother is away at the edge of town, too far away
to call. I fall into the dream where I brush my hair all through the night, my couch

until it bleeds. My mother doesn’t belong here anyway. She never taught me
how to outlive this. Never told me what to write on the back of the envelope

before it slips up my skirt again. I loved you first, I’m sure,
when you drove me home from the airport and we ran out of gas.

At that point, I forgot about heaven. I forgot to draw a circle in the sand.
I told you because I am Gemini Moon, people do not realize how sensitive

you can be, that as a girl, I had a remote control for a brain, memorized the TV guide,
never heard of kinetic energy, then matured into a victim of synaesthesia

and an empty gas can. I never asked to resuscitate anything, never asked
for any of it. Safer to stuff a damp towel in the door crack, turn up Jesus

and Mary Chain, forget about the damn stuff, smoke anything my hands
land on. The night I try to say this to you, I want to touch your spine and make it liquid.