Neurotic Love Baby - Marie Conlan - Bog

Marie Conlan's newest collection, Neurotic Love Baby 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."-Heather Sweeney, author of Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness (Spuyten Duyvil) and Call Me California (Finishing Line Press)
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.-Gabrielle Joy Lessans, author of Bread Of (Ornithopter)