Where did I hear about Eve Joseph’s remarkable Griffin Prize-winning book of prose poems, Quarrels? Did someone in Yvonne Blomer’s poetry workshop, the one I was part of back in January and February, mention it? I think so. However I learned of this book, I’m grateful that I did.
Quarrels is a collection of prose poems. It’s divided into three sections. The first half consists of strange and magical fragments that consider a panoply of stories and situations from many different perspectives. The next quarter is a series of ekphrastic poems that respond to photographs taken by Diane Arbus in the 1950s and early 1960s. The last quarter considers (I think) the death of Joseph’s father.
The poems amaze me, because they don’t make literal sense, but they make absolute emotional sense. One of the first poems in the book, “We met at a birthday party,” contains this sentence: “The illogical must have a logic have a logic of its own you said.” In her blurb on the back cover, Roo Borson suggests that sentence captures the entire book, and I think she’s right; the logic of these poems is unique, strange, illogical but entirely felt and true.
I wish I could write like this. Maybe everyone who writes, or tries to, feels the same way.