A Daily Glance
Melissa Severin's Brute Fact plays around on the page, but overall it has a narrative quality, even if it borders on the surreal at times. Oddly what struck me in the first reading was the number of classical references included: Mars, Pluto, Charon, Ovid. For someone trained in the classics, that's a welcome sight. Beyond that, the sound of the lines strikes me at several points:
The tongue went mosaic, a replica
of the replica; now I speak
when I'm spoken to. Wait
for a shirt to be lifted, compare
how sun passes through wounds.
In this passage, I admire the sound achieved primarily through line breaks and caesurae, and it works well with the meaning, the hesitancy of the passage. I picked these lines at random, for I could I say much the same of many lines in the chapbook.
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