The Sense of Suspension in Lisa Rogal's Feed Me Weird Things

Erin Becker looks back to Lisa Rogal's chapbook, Feed Me Weird Things (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018) for a review at MAKE Literary Magazine. Rogal is most recently the author of la belle indifference (Cuneiform, 2020), but this volume is slim, "made up of eighteen poems, many of which begin on the bottom third of the page, as if to give the reader a few gulps of air before plunging into the depths." More:

The poems all feature clipped lines––often just a word or two––and stanzas that follow one logical path before darting off toward something more unexpected. The poems also feature details that place them squarely in the narrator’s physical world: a yellow bathroom; bubbles on the surface of a soda; a cricket the narrator fed to a turtle. Yet despite this precise, quotidian language, the overwhelming feeling of the chapbook is one of floating. Our feet never touch this world’s solid ground. We never linger on one image or setting too long. Not quite dream or reality, the feeling in Feed Me Weird Things is that of being suspended between times and places–a misty gray area in the middle.

At first glance, aside from their style, the poems seem to have little to do with one another. But it’s this sense of suspension, of floating, of in-between-ness, that eventually emerges as the chapbook’s thematic through-line. Tracing a skinny wake in a sea of white space, the poems explore the gulf between our expectations of an event and its reality, reckoning with the yawning gap between what could be and what was.

“I used to eat / the manes / of horses,” the narrator says, remembering a childhood where they knew all the names of clouds…

Read on at MAKE.