Kaleidoscope of the Uncanny: Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker

Layla Benitez-James
| Reviews

 

The magic in Rucker’s Dereliction creeps in quietly, helped a times by deities associated with moons: “Io points to a bat trapped in the chimney. / We sing up the red brick until it clears,” and this singing is later mirrored in the sonic power of laughter, leading to asking for help from a Mayan moon goddess:

Laughter guides the spindle’s spear.
Give me back to fire, that the whetstone of Ixchel might
claim me, rid me of any holiness learned.

 

As a debut collection, Dereliction is exciting in its energetic command of language and expansive expressions, calling to mind ethereal and futuristic poets like Will Alexander and Dionne Brand who seem to write with at least one foot out in the ether. While Rucker is perhaps more uncertain in this first collection, Dereliction shows us what was always already a spell, revealing to us the breathtaking magic of quotidian rituals, inspiring a more meditative trance to shift how we view our place in the world. At times, I found myself wanting to be grounded in more specificity, even within ephemeral flights of fancy. Shiftier, nonspecific words like “something,” “thing,” “nothing” and “everything” cropped up often, and while they enacted a search for words to explain the unexplainable, there were iterations which felt better served by abstract image. For instance, in “Poem as Excerpt of an Unfinished Bibliography,” the speaker recounts how “as a child I liked to read music then one day something like a voice / spoke over me.” I could not help but feel that there was an image or near-sound hovering just beyond “something like a voice” that we might have heard more specifically. In “Windowview, or Better Yet, Bookmark,” I similarly found myself wanting more specificity as I was well-prepared to take poetic leaps:

She noticed silly things, always useful, and abandoned the notion
of mystery, convinced she existed on a threshold of sorts where
mundanity meant nothing

However, there were also passages where this inability to nail down a thought worked to the collection’s advantage when alliteration flowed back through: “something more akin to a low lit ‘awareness,’ a soft puerperal simmer.” Elsewhere, the repetition of “something” echoed the traditional wedding rhyme “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue” to wonderfully uncanny effect:

I was just singing to myself something sad, something yellow
that moved like a duckling sure-footed out her pond—

 

Layla Benitez-James is the author of God Suspected My Heart Was a Geode, but He Had to Make Sure, winner of Cave Canem’s 2017 Toi Derricotte & Cornelius Eady Chapbook Prize. Her writing and translations have been published in Poetry Magazine, Black Femme Collective, World Literature Today, Virginia Quarterly Review, and Copper Nickel. Layla served as the Director of Literary Outreach for the Unamuno Authors Series in Madrid and is now an editor at Apartamento Magazine in Barcelona.

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