Neurotic Love Baby

<p class=ql-align-justify>Marie Conlan's newest collection <em>Neurotic Love Baby</em> spans five intoxicating sections composed of entropic spaces hues of wilderness and piercing questions that are at once ephemeral and funny: How many things do you own? Jutting images and gritty testimony collide to embody intimate fields wherein you are a sepia rinse & I keep seeing your face bloom from inside my mouth. Conlan's prose-like poems in their varying incarnations culminate into a landscape where bodies decompose and mix with blood dust with sweat inside an urgent syntax that does not let up. These moments arise as a glimmering compost of contrast and tension which are both feral and refined electric and emboldened: you rub the line of my spine you tenderize me into a pulp I am waiting for you to discard at the bottom of your morning juice. Here the segments live as a coating of sediment and sentiment of leaking petals we wear together as we peer into a three pastel sunset.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Heather Sweeney</strong> author of <em>Dear Marshall Language is Our Only Wilderness</em> </p><p class=ql-align-justify>(Spuyten Duyvil) and<em> Call Me California </em>(Finishing Line Press)</p><p class=ql-align-justify><br></p><p class=ql-align-justify>Marie Conlan's poetry has an aperture that widens & compresses in neurotic palpitations. With a psychedelic tenderness Conlan guides us through a spinning vortex launching us into snow puddles smearing us with cacti snot crumbling us into seed. Questions are posed & answered through the wild mundane. God is found in trembling fists. Through bodies through bloodroots through morning smell of bacon grease & kaleidoscopic landscapes we feel the raw yearning of a young being attempting to get even closer to her lover; attempting to weave her life her love her fear her reverence & her dreaming into a kind of beauty. For Conlan any kind of beauty breeds the realest kind of meaning.</p><p class=ql-align-justify><strong>-Gabrielle Joy Lessans</strong> author of<em> Bread Of </em>(Ornithopter)</p><p><br></p>