Louder Than Everything You Love

Poetry. Nicole Rollender's poems balance on the uneasy boundary between third eye and communion wafer. Beside an "old woman shaking fish skeletons to conjure the dead," the poet as body becomes a conduit for the generations in both directions, such that her "body is full of holes the dead / look in and out," while of her daughter she says, "my ribs / were her scaffolding." Rollender alternately glories and suffocates in her holy entanglement with her lineage, with her God. And when she comes up for air, she ululates a hauntingly familiar song.