Kaleidoscope of the Uncanny: Dereliction by Gabrielle Octavia Rucker

Layla Benitez-James
| Reviews

 

While the speaker in Dereliction maintains a hazy remove, we do glean something of their desires and anxieties, their insistence on staying apart from the mainstream, leaning toward truth and away from the artifice. In the collection’s closing poem, “My Serious Generosity, Unclipped,” the prose takes on a more overt thesis, even as these lines are quick to trouble any easy equations: “(Note: I’m projecting. This is not a thesis.)” Even if this is not a thesis, the final poem’s seemingly straight-talking sheds brief snatches of light on the unease floating through the rest of the collection; “[t]hrough some unnamed and potentially uncertain violation I have been rendered unreliable to myself.” This spark of violence, the poem explains, leads to “various neuroses” enumerated almost clinically so that we are unsure what the speaker might be experiencing specifically, from the more benign “vacant staring” and “ritual cleaning” to “flesh burning,” and “sudden wailing” … “[t]he list goes on. A memory passes overhead.”
The fragmentation and kaleidoscopic effects woven throughout Dereliction take on a heavier tread in light of this different species of lighting strike, and even if we are not to take this final poem as thesis or manifesto, the final lines allow for a satisfying circularity with the collection’s opening ideas. If we land:

[…] Wholeness, you see, is
not my goal. This monologue has no end. If it seems whole it is only
because of the fact that is never-ending.

We cannot help but be drawn back up again to “Murmurs” opening fragment:

Never-knowing never-optional.
Occupational, the air of everything around me.
Out the sky a voice starts singing, closing in on the life-force below

Coming full circle in this way allows for the quality of incantation to draw through and inspire rereading. Rucker’s is a voice stirred by magic in conversation with spirits hovering just out of sight. I am left attempting to peer around corners, looking for where this voice might travel next, claiming as it does its untethered status:

I own nothing in this world, dare I speak of the next & its canyons
or the groping waters it feeds running parallel to this life—

 

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.

Next
Living Out of Time: Flux by Jinwoo Chong
Previous
Fata Morgana