Rituals

Praise:

“Pale stars wink jealousies at my feet and I walk godly.” Lorcán Black’s Rituals is the restless, roaming lovechild of Neruda and Trakl, with some fiery genetic material borrowed from Plath, as well. These poems walk toward and through wreckage at once ordinary and surreal–a family, an asylum, a body learning fraught desires, the “eerie / whiteness” of Antarctica, and a “window suck[ing] its slice of moon / in the mirror of its mouth.” Piercing in its vulnerability, this book often achieves a magical authority at the same time. Black dares to speak in the voice of a sorcerer, an oracle, a god: “Watch: I shall call the elements, / I shall cast sacrilegious circles in sand.” This is a collection of dark yet gleaming marvels.
-Chen Chen, author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities

Reading Rituals, I am struck, again and again, by the power of music and imagery. When Lorcán Black writes, “a sea of poppies bloom in me,” and “two heads loom…loving and empty, / two balloons,” and “your face bathed in Paris lights…I have traced your holidays / night by night,” I am reminded how the lyric poem can both convey and transcend the profound burdens of illness and desire.
-Blas Falconer, author of Forgive the Body This Failure, poetry editor for the Los Angeles Review