Hard Candy

Kimberly Fahner is the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

Jill Battson renders the messiness and frustrating complexity of life,
love, and death with stunning clarity in this collection of poetry.

Some of the most emotionally jarring poems come in the form of a
tribute to friends who have died of AIDS. Battson gives voice to her
grief, “the one great emotion that equals us, that pulls us all
together,” in such poems as “In the Shadow of Things to Come,”
“Woodbridge Memorial Gar-dens,” “Goodbyes in a Cemetery,” and
“S & I.”

The subject of aging and ailing parents is tackled in “Five by
Five,” “Parasites of Age and History,” “Where are the
Roadblocks,” and—the most stunning piece of this group—“This is
My Mother Now.” As she confronts the inevitable reversal of roles, the
poet speaks of the frustration of having to care for an elderly parent:
“I am the grown-up and she the angry child.”

Battson has a dark sense of humor, which is particularly evident in
“Me and Baudelaire” (the poet imagines him sucking her toes or
“rifling for prozac in my bag”). The influential spectre of Margaret
Atwood makes appearances in “On Remembering Andy,” and in
“Sometime After the Third Time,” when the poet speaks of
“surfacing, like in an Atwood novel,” “bobbing to the surface /
face gleaming with the water of discontent / to be pushed under again by
circumstance.”

This fine debut collection is good medicine for the poetically
deprived.