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4 ratings, 4.00 average rating, 3 reviews
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4 ratings, 4.00 average rating, 3 reviews
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published
2008
by Cervena Barva Press
binding
52 pages
url
isbn
description
Poetry with occasional translations.
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Poetry with occasional translations.
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bookshelves:
poetry
Read in August, 2008
recommends it for:
Lovers of sensual poetry
A CURE FOR SUICIDE by Larissa Shmailo - Cervena Barva Press / 47pps / $7.00
How can you not like a book that opens with the “Vow” that
We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
and sensually seques thereafter? As if making good on that very opening vow, Shmailo follows up with “My First Hurricane”
Like a dead leaf
Lifted from the scorched summer earth
Now wet and almost green
Are these the “little suicides” that An...more
A CURE FOR SUICIDE by Larissa Shmailo - Cervena Barva Press / 47pps / $7.00
How can you not like a book that opens with the “Vow” that
We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
and sensually seques thereafter? As if making good on that very opening vow, Shmailo follows up with “My First Hurricane”
Like a dead leaf
Lifted from the scorched summer earth
Now wet and almost green
Are these the “little suicides” that Anais Nin wrote of? Little turbulences ..
... in the eye of the storm
Dizzy, motionless,
Suspended in the humid air
Waiting.
Ahh, and then that vortex one simply enjoys swirling into. And giving credit where due, she finishes “I have known tempests, squalls, and gentle rain./You are my first hurricane.” Now, what guy wouldn’t like to be him? (Or woman, for that matter!)
In Shamanistic poem, “How to Meet and Dance with Your Death / (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide” a Brazilian Curandera prescribes;
2 gallons of pulque (fermented Mayan beverage), or if available, gin
1 case tequila
several cases beer
1 bottle Mescal
2 ounces good marijuana
carton cigarettes
three large peyotes
coffee as needed
Are these the instructions given to Jim Morrison? Could he have had his own Curandera guidin
g him? There is a lot of dancing, music, 2 men “but they must be your lover” and massive imbibing. The poem made me dizzy, but it was a dizzy I’d ride again. Then there is further warning in “Dancing with the Devil” that “They say that if you flirt with death/You’re going to get a date;”
These poems have a strong sensual spirituality to them, steeping & seething .. Hearty. I love the playful way she has with expression, so visual, as in “Skin” where she whispers...
My tongue is bruised
My nude is creaky
Or at least I read it as a whisper, impetuously dank in a lover’s ear...
Take me
Know
The fast love of my hair.
As if she is resting on her laurels, somewhat reflective of an active past - some regrets, some animosities, some remnant yearning, she gives us “Bloom”
All ways are fettered
Fellated and fucked
No bird’s no damn good
until it’s been plucked.
A man? Amen. This is Easter:
Rest that piece.
The 2nd to last piece, “Exorcism (Found Poem)” seems out of place, dealing with the massacre of civilians in My Lai Vietnam in 68 by the “tired, poorly trained, and hastily assembled” soldiers of “Charlie Company Task Force Barker.” I Thought the final poem, “New Life 1-3 (Magpie Translations from Joseph Brodsky)=2
0should have preempted “Exorcism.” That it would have been a better segue. But better still, to have left both those poems out and end with “Bloom”, as they served only to distract me from the the sexual melancholy the previous poems left me with.
Still, this is a marvelous pen flowing and I would welcome the opportunity to read more of her work. She inspires me.
To appear on Mad Hatters Review
...less
recommends it for:
poetry lovers
Reviews of my collection, "A Cure for Suicide"
A Cure for Suicide
Larissa Shmailo
Cervená Barva Press
Reviewed for The Pedestal Magazine by Joselle Vanderhooft
Larissa Shmailo plumbed the depths of human emotion and the heights of such extreme human states as homelessness, madness and grief in her dramatic 2006 spoken word CD The No-Net World. Although the majority of the poems in her latest chapbook, A Cure for Suicide, read less like conventional monologues, t...more
Reviews of my collection, "A Cure for Suicide"
A Cure for Suicide
Larissa Shmailo
Cervená Barva Press
Reviewed for The Pedestal Magazine by Joselle Vanderhooft
Larissa Shmailo plumbed the depths of human emotion and the heights of such extreme human states as homelessness, madness and grief in her dramatic 2006 spoken word CD The No-Net World. Although the majority of the poems in her latest chapbook, A Cure for Suicide, read less like conventional monologues, the turbulence, sensuality and unabashed wildness that engirds her earlier work is very much alive in these twenty-four poems. Indeed, the book's leading poem "Vow" (here reproduced in full) provides an uncannily accurate epigraph for the chapbook's mood and feel.
We will love like dogwood.
Kiss like cranes.
Die like moths.
I promise.
"Vow" is a provoking promise for a passion that is as expansive as it is unconventional (after all, while "we will love like dogwood" is not a typical image to describe passion, the dogwood is a species of tree that blooms riotously). Shmailo delivers on this promise in poems such as "My First Hurricane," a heavy and wet description of a dizzying love affair, the wry "Dancing with the Devil" and "At the Top of My Lungs," a sharp, dark look at the narrow gap between love and violence. True to her interest in poetry as spoken word and her numerous poetry and music CDs, these riotous dogwood blossoms of poems often demand that they be read aloud, even sung. At times, the reader may even catch him or herself slapping a hand against a thigh or tapping a toe in time with the poet's effortless rhymes and tight, but never restrictive, meter. Shmailo writes in "Personal":
I want to know
what makes you
tick.
I want to know
what makes you
fickle; I want to know
what makes you
stick.
Tell me
which ion propels you
which soothsayer spells you
which folksinger trills you
which hardwood distills you
which downward dog twists you
which protest resists you
which neural net fires you
which siren desires you
Shmailo even uses her sense of musicality to play with her readers, to force them to engage with the text kinetically in ways beyond just squirming to her poetry's pulse. In "Sea (Sic)," she presents the reader with this intriguing puzzle as a type of stage direction: "Please read the stanzas in any order you like." The speaker, meanwhile, presents his or her lover with a similar challenge:
Ramon Fernandez, tell me, if you know,
the order of my words.
Indeed, read in every possible way, "Sea (Sic)" flows like the tides of an ocean and mirrors the often obtuse language of desire between lovers. It also makes perfect sense.
For readers who may long for some of the more straightforward "dramatic monologues" Shmailo presented in efforts such as The No-Net World, there is no need to despair. Although many of the poems in A Cure for Suicide are shorter and more abstract than those on the spoken word CDs, the title poem "How to Meet and Dance with Your Death (Como encuentrar y bailar con su muerte): A Cure for Suicide" is a fantastic story (in the truest sense of the word) about the human lust to know death, to see the way in which one will die, to flirt with one's own mortality and hold it close. In this prose poem (which reads like the very best of magic realist fiction) a woman is able to meet and dance with her personal Death by way of a strange and deadly recipe that consists of mostly alcohol, cigarettes, peyote and "coffee as needed" and a number of excesses that recipe brings on: wild dancing, frantic singing and flirtation with two psychopomps who lead the speaker to her Death. However, the ritual can only be performed once. To do it more is "common."
...If you do this more than once, you will do it
often, and then you will become an old borracha who sleeps with
common men. Punto.
Arguably the book’s most engrossing poem (perhaps because of its strong narrative engine), "How to Meet and Dance with Your Death" is a taut piece of fantastic literature that discusses, with no lack of sexiness and slyness, the ways in which humanity's all-too-common todeslust can be tamed, mocked, teased and ultimately turned into a virtue.
Larissa Shmailo is a poet who sings, and fans of her spoken word CDs—as well as readers who enjoy their poetry flush with life, lust and the more awkward aspects of both—will find a lot to love in her latest offering.
In a “Cure for Suicide” by Larissa Shmailo, Shmailo writes (as the founder of Fulcrum Magazine Philip Nikolayev points out in his introduction) as if she is …” constitutionally predestined to sing out her lines…her eyes filled with life and love, pain and death, freedom and coercion, the real of the mind and the imagined of the heart.” In the poem “Dancing with the Devil,” the poet sings about the need to throw caution to the wind and trip the light fantastic with the Devil:
“They say if you flirt with death,
You’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.”
Shmailo put herself in the deceptive calmness of the eye of a hurricane, asks us to tell her what makes us tic, and takes us on the Harlem River Line, like the “Duke” took us on the “A” train. In a sea of mimics this poet is an original voice.
--Doug Holder, Ibbetson Street Press
A Cure For Suicide (Cervena Barva Press) by Larissa Shmailo
reviewed by Richard Barrett see experimentalfictionpoetry.blogspot.com/2008/07/cure-for-suicide.html -
To order go to http://cervenabarvapress.com
Or send $7 to Gloria Mindock Cervena Barva Press POBOX 440357 W. Somerville, Ma. 02144
...less
Mindy
marked it as to-read
09/04/08
bookshelves:
la-poesie,
to-read
recommended to Mindy by:
Kate
I liked the snippets I read in the reviews on GR, and then I read this bit from "Dancing with the Devil" on thelostbookshelf.com:
They say if you flirt with death,
you’re going to get a date;
But I don’t mind—the music’s fine,
And I love dancing with someone who can really lead.
Sold!
