November 28, 2016
Reading these essays feels like stepping into a used bookstore crowded with cobwebs, kitsch, and stuffed owls, at once spooky and comfortingly predictable. With an air that’s equal parts Alfred Hitchcock and John Waters, poet Journey (The Atheist Wore Goatskin) floats across the macabre, the literary, and the damaged: graveyards and mental asylums; L.A.’s Museum of Death and Richmond, Va.’s tattoo artists; Rilke and Coleridge; a broken relationship with boyfriend Carrick (Journey cheated on him); her mother’s more literally broken back. In her strongest essay, “Birds 101,” Journey describes with precision the art of stuffing a starling, learned in a taxidermy class. (She is best when she moves from herself to the wider world.) Taxidermy, a touchstone throughout, becomes her Grecian urn, a way to meditate on art’s relation to life and death, and on how we inhabit our skins. Journey has the poet’s eye for detail and knack for taut sentences, strong verbs, and arresting images. The essays sometimes repeat information, as if a group of standalone pieces were gathered with no attention to the whole, but all the same, this is a fine volume and well worth reading. Agent: Chris Clemans, Clegg Agency.
December 15, 2016
Poet Journey (English/Univ. of Southern California; Vulgar Remedies, 2013, etc.) gathers 14 quirky, earthy, lyrical essays, a number of which have been previously published. In "Modifying the Badger," about the author's transforming a badger into a raccoon via taxidermy, she discusses C.D. Wright's poem "Personals" and how, "through accumulation and refraction, Wright's slivers of personal history...expand into a larger social matrix." So do Journey's essays, many of which are autobiographical. Each piece is like a "sliver" of a photo album in which we observe the author's grandparents, parents, sister, friends, and boyfriends. Sometimes it's not pretty, like when she writes about calling a suicide hotline or when she describes herself and her best friend burning their arms with the ends of cigarettes. There are many secrets in closets, and there's also glorious prose, beautiful images and metaphors composed by a fine poet. In "A Common Skin," about how a rider and horse "share a common skin," she describes her rigid calf muscles as "dried corncobs," her heels hanging down, "hard as rubber." Many of the titles are poetic: "Epithalamium with Skunk Pigs," "A Flicker of Animal, a Flank" and "Prologue as Part of the Body." Readers will learn intriguing tidbits along the way--e.g., how to stuff a starling, that "taxidermy is about life, not death," how to be a potter, give a tattoo. We also visit interesting places, like dusty Deyrolle, part Parisian taxidermy shop, part museum of oddities, and Los Angeles' Museum of Death, home to the preserved head of the vicious serial killer Henri Desire Landru. These elegant essays are sometimes-bewitching meditations and musings: a "unique mixture of pathos and humor, revelation and concealment, banality and wonder." Even though they get a bit precious at times and sometimes lose their way, the essays always come together "to resurrect and walk."
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Starred review from February 15, 2017
One night, poet Journey found herself calling a Houston suicide hotline. How she got to that dark place in her life is the subject of this exceptionally vibrant collection. A seven-year relationship broken by her own infidelity and a subsequent end of a mentoring friendship are repeated anchor events as she examines her life. Like the first essay, a detailed account of being a student in a beginner's taxidermy class taught by a former Disney employee, Journey carefully constructs a near-living creature out of her past and selective histories. She recalls her father being mistaken for a spy in South America; the uncontrolled vining of wisteria throughout the history of Richmond, Virginia, and haunting reminders of bad decisions. Zoos of antiquity, modern-day tattooed pirates, and ghost stories are all drawn together with Journey's poetic talent. Memories of Virginia Commonwealth University, Houston, and California are presented as though Journey was conducting a tour of her most intimate transitional moments. This retrospective does not alienate with its personal tone. Rather, the reader is invited to reflect on a life's many transitions and how they become part of the self.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2017, American Library Association.)