A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins\' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience.
Amen..
There are loons on your lakes.
Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: You don\'t seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights.
A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us -- / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us. // A hack.
America is a flub.
Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane.
Bereavement Status engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as then you lose your losses.
If marriage was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess), if aging brings the hateful labels OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE, every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity.
Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict.
These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states.
A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins\' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience
