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serenaac's review
5.0
Arlene Ang's Secret Love Poems is a short chapbook of 22 pages, but the poems pack a powerful punch. The incongruous images used in some of these poems come together in unusual and satisfying ways. Readers will be hooked from the first page and the first poem, "The mime under my left breast."
"The glass slipper on his night stand/is the couplet I swore//never to write after the first act./In a copy of Scientific Monthly,//the average boy steals at least five/street signs before he loses his virginity.//" (Page 1)
The last line says it all, revealing the "secret love." I think it also sets the stage for the rest of the chapbook. "girls who live dangerously."
A number of poems in this volume have girls, really women, who live dangerously. A woman involved with a married man, a woman who's lived a long life and is running out of time, and a girl home alone with a boy she hardly knows and her parents are not home, just to name a few.
Whether these poems are real situations or hidden desires, it is obvious many of these poems are about hidden desires, passions simmering beneath the skin.
From "The 13th Secret Love Poem":
"I wonder how his leather briefcase/would move against my skin./Twenty meters apart, we are never alone.//" (Page 10)
From "The 22nd Secret Love Poem":
"We never exchange more than/a few words: my professional advice,/the weather, her next appointment.// She leaves like snow crystals on/my lash. Briefly, the world glitters.//" (Page 19)
In "The 13th Secret Love Poem," mundane objects like a briefcase have an electric charge, emanating from the poem. A woman in "The 22nd Secret Love Poem" becomes magical to the narrator, helping the world to shine. Ang's poetry has a luminescence that will stay with readers for many years to come, whether she speaks of passionate love or convivial love.
I cannot praise this volume of poetry enough.
"The glass slipper on his night stand/is the couplet I swore//never to write after the first act./In a copy of Scientific Monthly,//the average boy steals at least five/street signs before he loses his virginity.//" (Page 1)
The last line says it all, revealing the "secret love." I think it also sets the stage for the rest of the chapbook. "girls who live dangerously."
A number of poems in this volume have girls, really women, who live dangerously. A woman involved with a married man, a woman who's lived a long life and is running out of time, and a girl home alone with a boy she hardly knows and her parents are not home, just to name a few.
Whether these poems are real situations or hidden desires, it is obvious many of these poems are about hidden desires, passions simmering beneath the skin.
From "The 13th Secret Love Poem":
"I wonder how his leather briefcase/would move against my skin./Twenty meters apart, we are never alone.//" (Page 10)
From "The 22nd Secret Love Poem":
"We never exchange more than/a few words: my professional advice,/the weather, her next appointment.// She leaves like snow crystals on/my lash. Briefly, the world glitters.//" (Page 19)
In "The 13th Secret Love Poem," mundane objects like a briefcase have an electric charge, emanating from the poem. A woman in "The 22nd Secret Love Poem" becomes magical to the narrator, helping the world to shine. Ang's poetry has a luminescence that will stay with readers for many years to come, whether she speaks of passionate love or convivial love.
I cannot praise this volume of poetry enough.
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