Dark Thirty

Description

Writing sometimes in dialect| sometimes in gunshot bursts| sometimes in sinuous lines that snake across the page| Santee Frazier crafts poems that are edgy and restless. The poems in “Dark Thirty|” Frazier’s debut collection| address subjects that are not often thought of as “poetic|” like poverty| alcoholism| cruelty| and homelessness. Frazier’s poems emerge from the darkest corners of experience: “I search the cabinet and icebox–drink the pickle juice / from the jar. Bologna| / hard at the edges| / browning on the kitchen / table since yesterday. / I search the cabinet and icebox–the curdling / milk almost smells drinkable.”
“Dark Thirty” takes us on a loosely autobiographical trip through Cherokee country| the backwoods towns and the big cities| giving us clear-eyed portraits of Native people surviving contemporary America. In Frazier’s world| there is no romanticizing of Native American life. Here cops knock on the door of a low-rent apartment after a neighbor has been stabbed. Here a poem’s narrator recalls firing a .38 pistol–“barrel glowing like oil in a gutter-puddle”–for the first time. Here a young man catches a Greyhound bus to Flagstaff after his ex-girlfriend tells him he has fathered a child. Yet even in the midst of violence and despair there is time for the beauty of the world to shine through: “The Cutlass rattling out / the last fumes of gas| engine stops| / the night dimly lit by the moon / hung over the treetops; / owls calling each other from / hilltop to valley bend.”
Like viewing photographs that repel us even as they draw us in| we are pulled into these poems. We’re compelled to turn the page and read the next poem. And the next. And each poem rewards us with a world freshly seen and remade for us of sound and image and voice.