RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, reviewed by Sylvia Van Nooten

RANK by Kristine Snodgrass, is in part glitch after glitch of contained and potent shape and color.  Each piece hums with an understatement that can only be understood as pressure—emotion, thought, intellect, experience—waiting to burst out.  Burst out in song or poetry, in ART—I found myself held within this pressure. 

The second part, Snodgrass' poetry, resounds with a lovely tension:   

“Object of art! Lumps from a freezer going to work in absolutes.  Pushed down in hieroglyphs and then pregnant again...” (pg. 72) 

Each written image frames the visual images, a beautiful balancing of the two.  With this book Snodgrass captures a moment in time when nothing is certain, in the personal and the political.  There is the pain of uncertainty as she speaks from the past to the future.  Endings begetting beginnings and perhaps, those beginnings are too late.

  “There are few variations that our mothers have also imagined. Like weeds majestic and quarreling, thoughts like you lure into the dancing light.  We are imagined and then you left. Past burns, stripped and pressed.  A grind and flood—darkness glared.  As I paint the road, afflicted sobbing peaks.  Blue fills a partial page, black enters this year. Long live the pain and its slow ending.  We are wicked, after all.  How we roll on floors and watch ourselves splinter into the Milky Way. And we can’t stop it.  Prayers as nourishment. Spells as sacrifice.  Yesterday, I looked into a camera.  I’d like to speak to him.” (pg. 92) 

 The explosion and release of the line, “splinter into the Milky Way” has me wondering if this art, this poetry is about the unintentional joy of unexpected futures.  A beautiful, powerful book, and one I will return to again and again.

RANK, published by JackLeg Press, can be purchased on Amazon 

Kristine Snodgrass is an artist, poet, professor, curator, and publisher living in Tallahassee, Florida. She is the author of Rather, from Contagion Press (2020) and the chapbook, These Burning Fields (Hysterical Books 2019) as well as  Out of the World (Hysterical Books 2016) and The War on Pants (JackLeg Press 2013). Her poetry has appeared in decomP, Versal, Big Bridge, 5_Trope, Shampoo, 2 River View, Otoliths, and South Florida Poetry Journal among others. Kristine’s asemic and vispo work has been published in Utsanga (Italy), Slow Forward, Asemic Front 2 (AF2). Her work was just featured in the Asemic Women Writers Summer Exhibition Online. Snodgrass has collaborated with many artists and poets.