14
2019
NORTH CAROLINA L I T E R A R Y RE V I E W
THROUGH THE LENS OF THE HEART’S CAMERA a review by Janice N. Harrington Amber Flora Thomas. Red Channel in the Rupture. Pasadena, CA: Red Hen Press, 2018.
JANICE N. HARRINGTON’s poetry collections include Even the Hollow My Body Made Is Gone (BOA Editions, 2007), which won the publisher’s A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize and the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and The Hands of Strangers: Poems from the Nursing Home (BOA Editions, 2011). She has worked as a public librarian and now teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Illinois. AMBER FLORA THOMAS is the winner of the 2004 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, the Ann Stanford Poetry Prize, and the Relia Lossy Poetry Award. She has an MFA in poetry writing from Washington University in St. Louis, and is now an Associate Professor at East Carolina University. Her other books are The Rabbits Could Sing (University of Alaska Press, 2012) and the Eye of Water (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2005). Read her interview with North Carolina Poet Laureate Jaki Shelton Green in NCLR 2016.
In Red Channel in the Rupture, Amber Flora Thomas writes poems about place, her lived experiences within a natural environment, her childhood memories, and her family. Her clear, understated poems describe, recall, retell, and record. Thomas’s words also assure the reader that “you are here. Be at home.” Divided into three thematic sections – Stills, Apertures, Reels – Red Channel in the Rupture immediately grounds its poetry in the photographic: we peer through Thomas’s eyes and see what she sees or tries to recall. Her vision is always lyrical and pointed toward the details that the inattentive will overlook. Although Red Channel frequently draws on and lyrically describes the natural landscape, this is not nature poetry, but rather poetry describing a life that has intersected with natural spaces, objects, places, and events. Thomas does not romanticize or make her natural world into an abstract façade. This is a poet who has held the remains of an owl’s pellet, feathered a kayak’s paddle, pulled the skull of a horse’s head from the sand,
and even seen a mountain lion disappear in “three exact steps.” Anchoring her lived experience in a sense of place – Noyo Harbor, Navarro Beach, the Atlantic Ocean, Pungo Lake, Elk, Jack’s Creek – Thomas infuses her poems with plants, animals, climates, and forces that shape the natural spaces around her. Thomas is also a poet of the erotic. In “Orchid,” for example, she reveals a sensual intimacy that unsettles and fascinates. Liquid consonants, suggestive description, and exotic details draw readers into the poem. Is it a flower the poet describes? At the very least, Thomas suggests the sensual and seductive world that language can reveal or open to readers: the frill labellum. The shroud where the shoot births unfurling tongues that couldn’t hide their waves when I brought you to the nursery. All around you a light that put the pearl in there and kneaded it like a pit some girl could spit into her palm.