When I was a little girl, I would go to my neighbours’, also little girls, living by a creek, to catch frogs. We would play with them, make them kiss, and, at the end of the day, feed them, whole, to the sunfish. Weirdly, I was reminded of this ritual sacrifice reading Laura Vazquez’s poetry, where innocent communion with nature is always underpinned by some unspoken violence. Here, mouths are home for wasps, lashes live underground, and “we sense the taste of blood / in glasses of water,” “like / drinking the viscous / and scented liquid / through a straw.”

Vazquez paints with a muted palette, so that a word like blood or even “strawberry” almost audibly pops. Her word choices are otherwise simple: night, trees, hands, “objects.” Their anti-specificity gives the poems their epic feel; they could be set in any time (one of the only giveaways that we are in the contemporary period involves an amazing image about noticing someone’s pierced nape). 

Elsewhere, Vazquez’s language is governed by an unusual, almost surreal logic: “I set down a pot of honey, it is night on the table”; “I will have to walk a big kilometer.” The effect is one of a secret code, or a child’s invented language. If that seems silly, it’s not, partly because of the poems’ restraint, and partly because of their real tactile beauty. The line “I see my eyes in dirty water” is like some of the best lines of Eliot, as ancient as it is prophetic.

Indeed, if there is menace in Vazquez’s poems, it is always accompanied with tenderness, one signalled by a desire to become one with the material world. Over the course of the collection, eyes, hands, sky, and earth repeatedly consume and inhabit one another. Perhaps this tension between communion and oblivion should have been tipped off by the collection’s epigraph, a quote from Clarice Lispector: “If I look at an object too long, I explode.” This is a collection that alights with each reading, whose pleasures, however violent, afford something like the experience of being totally consumed: “Then, / I lay down / And the night had nothing to say.”mRb