Review of J.C. Reilly's chapbook, La Petite Morte

I had decided by the fourth poem in J.C. Reilly's collection that I liked her stuff. Her poems are mostly lover's complaints, written with intelligence and humor in a comfortable, conversational style. They mix literary allusions and other high-minded tropes with a mordant, biting wit that should make one careful not to irritate her.

Some poet, I can't remember who, said most contemporary poems have a train that runs on schedule, arriving just on time at the Epiphany Station. JC. Reilly ends her poems crisply, and they usually pull into that same station, only with her trains the engineer is carrying a cream pie in one hand: most of her poems end with a joke. This is her charm and the same time her limitation. Her work is clever and amusing, but sometimes I think she hides behind the humor and goes for a ta-da! kind of ending gag when she could have had an even stronger poem by exploring the heart of the matter a little more.

Usually the heart of the matter is that her lover pisses her off. The first poem opens with a "Discovery Channel Valentine" where the literal heart has been removed from the poet and given to the lover, along with a scoop of insouciance. The romance just gets worse from there. He's insensitive, he's feeling sorry for himself, he's gone out with the boys on Valentine's while she is soldiering on, alone with her humor; angry and presumably heartbroken.

There's a lot of funny stuff here; almost every poem has something that entertained me. For example, in "Amphigory" we have "a yellow goat / in blue galoshes, humming / "There's Nothing Like a Dame" where "Love's little toe, / while unquestionably nutritious / could give you indigestion."

It verges into the tragicomic, too, where you can feel the pain that drove the joke, such as in "Deus Ex Machina" when her mother "said to take it as a sign / when the B&B you've planned / your wedding at burns down." Or in "At Heart" where "the wedding gown I loved / ...you said made me look / like a lace-and-satin-sheathed sausage." That's funny, but it hurts me even to type it. And so she kills him off, in the former poem by burning him "one night when you're asleep" and in the latter poem by "garrotes and guillotines and guns oh my / (and the occasional atom bomb) / laying waste to your flesh."

She kills him off in about half the poems, and writes him off in the others. She's angry and sarcastic in all the poems, and while there's nothing wrong with that, I would have preferred a little more range. Neruda wrote Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, and J.C. Reilly is Looking Back in Anger Twenty-Three Times. All in all, though, I like her stuff. She says in her notes that she is thrilled by weirdness. I have to admit I have a penchant for that, too, and look forward to coming across her work again.