XXX Poems

There are 30 poems in Raquel Balboni’s first book, and they are edgy, risky, and frisky in their business. And it is business that they are about: the business of sanity, love, sex, and identity, all streaming by in the reflection of a funhouse mirror.

Ms. Balboni has a delicious, self–effacing sense of humor that conjures up images like that of a five–pound fly as it “twinkles its leg all over” a bowl of pasta being shared by naked lovers. That poem — “SELF DEPRECIATION” — ends crashingly with the line:

          That is how disgusting i feel right now.

The titles appear in all caps, like one of those lit sandwich boards along the road that exhort us to stop over and pull up a poem. This device is no more alluring than in the opening poem of the book, which shouts — “YEAH I’M IN BETWEEN BODIES RIGHT NOW” — and certainly sets the tone for what is to follow:

          yeah i’m in between bodies right now
          in the medium field
          can’t quite see to the other sides
          the party, i don’t like big crowds
          the best people are drinking and having fun
          better off drunk and covered in ashes

What is to follow is a panoply of stunning imagery as we tour the funhouse mirrors of Ms. Balboni’s imagination and reality. Some representative lines:

          . . . flowers in a ditch sickness in my heart . . .
          i imagined pulling down the biggest pair of scissors i’d ever
          seen from a deep blue starry night
          . . . the ghost bicyclist feeling, the moon on empty feeling . . .

Within each poem, Ms. Balboni covers a lot of emotional ground with abandon and unexpected twists and turns throughout. One of the most striking of these moments is in the poem “COME,” which appears near the end of the book. The poem begins over “Waking up to easy coffee,” and meditates over feelings of inadequacy and rejection before hairpin turning us into this passage:

          Using the wand in public spaces
          Masturbating in the library
          The library truly makes me horny
          So what turns you on and how can i do it
          Also make me cum i wish

This is the longest poem in the book, and this turn prepares us for anything that follows: reverie, worry, and a cacophony of imagery. Make no mistake, this book is a journey of sorts: from inception to beginning, a journey of introspection (“People are outside having fun i am inside having fun”) and inspiration, a journey that is just getting started with this impressive first book.

The poem “COME” ends like this:

          MIDNIGHT SNACKS
          it can be anything
          AND SO CAN YOU
          Blossom
          blossom I wish in my belly
          Ugh about all the sauces
          All about the success
          A little bit of recognition of being here.

Ms. Balboni bends our linear reality though the funhouse tour, creating a self–portrait that is creatively distorted, but very real to its moment. I love the last lines from the poem “BREAK SLOW,” which kind of sums up that journey:

          there is a continuous impulse to decompose back into the soul
          how life will work from now on: this is what I will do
          meaning: DON’T PANIC.

— Craig Sipe