Simone Kearney is a prolific and versatile artist, holding one MFA in poetry from Hunter College and a second MFA in painting from the Maryland Institute College of Art. Her book, DAYS (Belladonna 2021), is what happens when a painter gets a hold of a prose poem and lets it run. DAYS travels leashless, and Kearney serves as a tour guide of thought, who for these purposes has created a speaker so gently meditative that reader and speaker become one.

As a writer and lover of prose poems, I was giddy to receive this book in the mail. How beautiful it is to see these blocks of text—each seven lines—run over page and page again. The seven-line structure organizes the physical, the visual, but the lack of endstops pushes forward an unkempt lyric that is at once familiar and surprising. DAYS gives readers the experience of an endless search to find the right word(s), to find the right place(s) to put them. Kearney is keenly aware of how frustration becomes reward in a poet’s pursuit, as she admits that “mistakes are points of departure” and “such formations of accident are never neutral, though they exist alongside aggressive piles of adjectives and nouns they appear to never touch” (7). How’s that for a description of the image that can never be seen? By meditating on the impossibility of a “correct” image, the speaker has described the absence of one with such clarity that we see the parts of speech rub up against each other. Those aggressive adjectives, how they attempt to steal the show; all the while, the noun sits in spite, knowing that a better noun to replace itself is always around the corner. Such is the poet’s struggle, ordering the ornery parts of thought. Nonetheless, the speaker of DAYS burrows through, delineating their thoughts into what I think of as “image-options.”

Early in the book, this plan is laid bare: “I treat words like boxes too,” Kearney writes, “ones with folding parts made of glass, too clear even when folded up, too clear” (12). As if to say, hey reader—we cannot do this right but shall we and yes. The tenacity of these images and their incessant tumbling forward makes it difficult to choose the right moment to quote, but one of my favorite lines encapsulates what I think readers will find most enjoyable about this book— those image-options I mentioned: “your voice like graffiti on an icecap, icosahedron or truncated cube, in a room, this split hair lifting off the ground, ‘I really like you’” (78). Let’s check out the too-clear boxes. If each phrase within this 108-page comma series is a box within a seven-line box, we can track Kearney’s method, like a choose-your-own-adventure of images until it feels right, until the speech act comes boldly.

“[Y]our voice like graffiti on an icecap” is a colorful picture of longing and dissipation. Nothing can be saved there; the voice cannot be held. This longing and dissipation, this “icosahedron or truncated cube.” Will your longing be twenty solid, triangular faces, or will it be a cube with no ceiling? No floor? I choose a cube with no ceiling—that’s how I like my longing.

And so “in a room, this hair lifting off the ground,” the reader suspended, I’m suspended, in longing, with my lover’s unreachable voice, thin as split ends, “this split hair lifting off the ground.” And then—

“I really like you.” My adventuring through these boxes, from icecap to levitating hair, leads to what I’ve wanted to say all along, what the reader has wanted to hear.

I just really like you.

In its own tumbling course, DAYS becomes the act of thinking, of free association among the finnicky and lovely images that result in the too-clear speech.

“You wish you could be specific,” Kearney writes, and I think she is plenty.

Lauren Burgess is a writer from New Orleans, LA. She received her MFA from Louisiana State University, where she served as Poetry Editor at New Delta Review. Her work has appeared in Bodega, Dream Pop, Epigraph, and others. Find her @poemdaddy on Twitter, if you’d like.

DAYS is available from BELLADONNA*