Review by Jami Macarty
In the title of Charleen McClure’s debut poetry collection, d–sorientation, the absence of the letter “i” enacts a loss of orientation to self in relationship to other, time, and place. The disorientation explored in McClure’s poems primarily stems from the poet’s mother’s illness, which not only threatens her mother’s life but also disrupts the daughter’s/poet’s sense of grounding: she is “the woman / in the snow of [her] mother’s / / cancer—” As a result, there is a reversal of roles between mother and daughter which leads to a reorientation within caregiving that highlights a legacy of devotion among generations of helping women, “the casava women / we come from.”
To capture the essence of the threats to orientation, McClure crafts a lyric, elegiac, fragmented, and unstopped poetry that utilizes subtext, negation, and erasure. The choice of erasure is particularly striking and resonant. As cancer imposes its own form of erasure on her mother—something the daughter cannot prevent — the poet asserts her artistic power through a blackout of William Fox’s 1792 pamphlet, “An Address to the People of Great Britain on the Propriety of Abstaining from West Indian Sugar and Rum.” This poetic approach creates a compelling parallelism between personal experience and societal issues concerning the treatment of women and people of color. The approach also adroitly subverts a narrative of dominant culture while pulling its critique by non-dominant culture into relief, challenging the very notion of “negation.”
That is what McClure’s “words do”! They follow Ezra Pound’s imperative to “make it new.” The poet makes something new out of the givens — historical, physical, relational, and gendered elements — and in that gesture, acknowledges artistic and female fertility.
The reader of d–sorientation, having followed “the threads” of Charleen McClure’s “forlorn music,” arrives at “the edge of sweetness” and is nourished by the possibility of what “might mend.”
d–sorientation by Charleen McClure. BOA Editions, September 2024.
Reviewer bio: Jami Macarty is the author of The Long Now Conditions Permit, winner of the 2023 Test Site Poetry Series Prize (forthcoming University of Nevada Press), and The Minuses (Center for Literary Publishing, 2020), winner of the 2020 New Mexico/Arizona Book Award – Poetry Arizona. Jami’s four chapbooks include The Whole Catastrophe (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2024) and Mind of Spring (Vallum Chapbook Series, 2017), winner of the 2017 Vallum Chapbook Award. To learn more about Jami’s writing, editing, and teaching practices, visit her author website.
Erratum 3/26/25: The author’s name, Charleen, had been misspelled as ‘Charlene’ and may still appear this way in areas where it cannot be redacted.
