Clockwise Cat Strikes Back

soul-stifling past - we'd rather shutter our ears and not listen, pretending that the world
turns in giddy glee. But these poems won't let us off that easily - indeed, they won't let us
off at all. We are forced to reckon with relationships gone deadly wrong, all wrought with
devastating poetic charisma. We can't simply ignore the content of the poems just
because they sound good. The succulent sounds are what bring the content to more
vibrant, if agonized, life.
I have dog-eared practically every poem in this book and could not possibly quote every
line I admire, but the poem, "No Alembic," reprinted in whole, represents the heart the
collection, I feel, both because of its magical locution as well as the crafty conveyance of
absolute dread and emptiness. It's an apocalyptic piece, wherein the poet, soul-deadened,
is subsumed as if by a contracting, self-destroying universe.
No Alembic
Every morning, I trek deep into deserts, where time’s illimitable
epochs permit visions of jeweled flowerpetals to fall, uninhibited,
over the searing, variegated shades of sunlight on sand. I dream of
ice-wings and scorchings, but waking provides no alembic; it
permits no distillation of clarity. The stinging winds intensify,
blurring the words of the pivotal question: when I was there,
within reach – when I was thrashing on your palace steps, burnt
by the blue flames of our dying star – where were you? I always
find myself/caught at the bottoms of things, snared by the spaces
in between, where every abyss asserts itself so that it might
invade and rearrange the steady presence of the deep,
uninterrupted light. I can hear the midnight screams of
plummeting stars. The liquid-morphing shapes flickering on the
ceiling descend to brand me with their seething colors.
Dispersal of breath, disposal of self, the moment that divides itself
into countless/thousands of voids.
Michelle Greenblatt has risen up from the ashes of her harrowing youthful experiences
and planted the seeds in her maturity for a fruitful adulthood, one that is founded in her
past, but not defined by it. Writing poetry is the way that she copes with and makes sense
of the experiences - she freezes them in verse-prisms, and then allows their light to refract
on her fresher experiences. In a few years, we will probably be blessed with another
collection of similarly startling verse, that astounds for its imagery-intense "confessions"
of a life of struggles, that nevertheless nestle the roots of redemption. I for one
impatiently await its arrival.
Watch Michelle read poems from Ashes and Seeds: https://youtu.be/wrjFj7jURow