Poetry's no spectator sport. What is written in these poems, Skebe works equally as hard at what's not written, so that you, the reader, must bring
your [ ] to them
as light through a gap in the floor.
From their bottoms up, each poem creates the double world of an hourglass.
—Craig Czury, author of Thumb Notes Almanac
Perhaps all matter is thin: permeable, fragile, fleeting. Alifair Skebe cuts in to the fabric of matter, not to find a slice of life but to reach a vast opening. Charles Olson wrote, “any of us, at any instant, are juxtaposed to any experience, even an overwhelming single one, on several more planes than the arbitrary and discursive which we inherit can declare.” Skebe embraces those planes, wherein she is “poised in the balance/between is and being.” She discovers “no past—there is none/no past—I have none/all is here, you see.” A favorite poet of hers, Muriel Rukeyser, wrote that poetry is an art enabling us “to understand, in the glimpse of a moment, the freshness of things and their possibilities.” Throughout Thin Matter the freshness of things and moments vibrate; and in the final poem of the volume, Skebe lacerates a world wherein depleted uranium sinks into groundwater, offering instead:
Forget your pretenses
these poems are angry poems, sad poems,
fighting for their lives poems,
cannot be read as abstract poems or
tired image-driven poems,
don’t give them Wellbutren poems
or life-support.
These poems have concussions.
—David Landrey, September 2016
From the book:
By the Riverbank
rivulets snake through the mind
like words like sand
turning lines of verse
in linear time undulating
reeds bend at a safe distance
from the edge some
growing against the current
words take courage
and crumple it up like an old paper bag
down in the river below
Mother curled her cursive
O’s in grade school
courage takes words
to make deeds
follow me down the riverbank
and we’ll put a few words together
Alifair Skebe, who is an English/writing instructor with the SUNY/Albany Educational Opportunities Program, has published two poetry chapbooks--"El Agua Es La Sangre De La Tierra: The Water Is the Blood of the Earth" (Finishing Line Press, 2008); and "Les Cartes Postales" (Basilisk Press). She has also published poems in numerous literary journals and multi-genre magazines. She was raised in Louisiana and Texas, and holds a PhD in literature from Suny/Albany.
Thin Matter
is an 80 page hand-stitched paperbook with spine. $16.00
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