Reviews

They Can Take It Out by Cheryl Clark Vermeulen

vivakresh's review

5.0

“They Can Take It Out” pulls apart the body and mind then puts them back together. The poems are strong in their vulnerability, tracking the speaker’s path from wellness to illness and back again. “I need to make another decision about you, body” she writes in “The Almost” capturing the stress and weariness of pain. In “Test Pieces” the disembodied fragments end without punctuation, the sounds jangling against each other, “nothing adorned,” “glass-and-metal-case body. / Incidental findings: No jewels, no candy hanging”. Healing is “sweet symmetry” and “nam[ing] ourselves.” I feel the meditative contemplation of a body’s eventual end soothing to the poet—as though knowing we all die allows her to enjoy life’s small moments of pleasure. “And the children they were / in their sufficient dream-shapes / until they feathered and trailed off” she writes in “On a Dead-End Street Is the Hour.”