Book Review: Poems for the People
- Apr 1, 2023
- 3 min read
Poems for the People by Nicole Tallman, Southern Collective Experience, 2023
Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
“Not bad” says Dale Tallman, poet Nicole Tallman’s father, in the introductory blurbs to her new collection, Poems for the People. It is this spirit of fun that carries the collection forward. Here is a clear, candid, funny voice exploring what it means to address readers on the page.
Poems for the People is less a political tract and more a colorful convocation. Each poem is addressed to a different type of person. The speaker of the poems raises more questions than answers, and the collection becomes an ongoing dialogue between what is revealed and asked of intended subjects. In “Poem for the Dead (Including My Mom),” which is styled after Alex Dimitrov’s “Poem for the Reader,” the speaker asks, “Would you return? / To Earth, this dream, or anywhere else?” In “Poem for People Who Don’t Like Poems (Including My Dad),” the poet says, “I’m going to use this poem to break the stupid rules / I’m also going to write plainly so everyone can see it.”
There are poems for witches, for people who don’t like candy corn, for those who take public transit and for those who don’t like the beach when it’s sunny. From topic to topic, the collection moves with a quirky spin, but it would be a mistake to consider this collection light. There are poems to the suicidal, to Sylvia Plath, to disordered eaters and phobics. In some of the poems we get a glimpse of the poet’s roots, and the images are striking to the point of inducing shivers. Such is the case in “Poem for the Soft Boys,” which originally appeared in trampset under the title “Rifle Season.” “There’s a sound out my window where I come from. It’s earsplitting gunfire and / the fight between my uncle and cousin who never speak again.” There’s also a mascot from this place of origins: “a dead deer, purple gray tongue out, gutted and hanging / from the rafters of the garage.”
Likewise, in “Poem for the Midwest Goths,” the poet speaks of growing up in cornfields, “taking swigs from a shared bottle of Boone’s Farm.” And in this place always “someone telling a story of someone who died young among the corn.” “Who told the story, and who died young — that, I can’t remember.”
Where the speaker of these poems has arrived, somewhere near Miami Beach, veers toward the feminist and queer, toward “girls I wanted to hug a little too long.” In “Poem for My Hyster Sisters,” which discusses hysterectomies, the last line reads, “& you will ask if there is ever any real relief from being a woman.” In a poem for perimenopausal women, the “heady rose” and “saccharine violet” and “languid linden blossom” in the poem help “resurrect the pink fluorescent / of my faded Electric Youth.”
Several poems leave the collection’s plainspoken diction for thickets of imagery, for Plathian nodes of beauty and desolation. “Poem for the Moonlovers,” for example, deserves to be retyped by this reviewer, line by line, below:
“Moon light over noon light
I dust hyperbole
I float on a lily-livered lie.
If the center shifts ragged
I swim backstroke to shore
Sing to ruby-throated robins
Bow to pink-fingered roses freesia
Heal the wounded wasps dying in the hive.”
One of the best poems in the collection is a shape poem that cannot be retyped here. “Poem for the Grieving” is the shape of a sphere, a sun, a piece of fruit. Readers must bend down to read the small font size. The tone of this never-ending line is direct and down-to-earth, like that of the collection, but also potent with emergent imagery. “There is no redemption here, only rust, seeing my face reflect off the gray of the day, the stillness of all who have touched the bottom before me…Water too cold to swim in, we all wade out way too far. A single swan ignoring the warning, a shiver as summer strays to fall.” And then, in the middle of the sphere, a single, larger line blooming upside down: “The summer sky opens up orange.”
