The Daily Glance

Matina Stamatakis' Metempsychose is an aptly titled book, for the poems seem to be pulling from something beyond/behind the present and fading in and out of the space between the reader and the speaker. The inclusion of visual poems helps with that because it adds to the sense in which we are dealing with words/images/dreams crossing over from one person to the next. In "A Nook in the Pavement," the speaker tells us that nothing misplaced is ever missing, and I take that as a commentary on the transference of text/writing into the consciousness of the reader. The first few poems in the chapbook are my favorites, but the "Coma" poems are also interesting in that they just give us fragments of coma dreams so that we can imagine 37 new poems emerging from the dreams alone. By that I mean, that we are left to imagine the poems that accompany the list.

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