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Some of my favorite poems in Savannah Brown’s “Closer Baby Closer” Collection
All the poems in this collection are free verse and as expected come with their strengths and weaknesses. A strength is the ability for poets to replicate their actual, unadorned voice in their head, allowing readers to experience as close as possible their consciousness or point of view. A weakness is that as readers we rarely are privy to the outside. I mean we are trapped in her half-recollected thoughts and blurry impressions. Very little has been made sense of; every thought follows another in the rambling stream of consciousness. The overall shape of the poems are often incoherent, jumping from one loose thread to the next. The consequence is the poem, though moving at certain lines, overall lack the final impact.
Pain Theory
Pain Theory starts the first section and touches on masochism, a topic that pops in a few poems throughout the collection. The first line
The story of the masochist’s daughter only ever had one ending.
Foreshadows themes of childhood trauma, even death. Brown has a strong intuitive sense for simile and metaphor and it shows in the first few lines.
Under the nail / skin unravels like a secret orange peel
And
