Book Review: Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It by Natalie Lyalin

Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It
Poems by Natalie Lyalin
Ugly Duckling Presse, June 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1937027339
$14; 72pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

Blood Makes Me Faint But I Go For It, Natalie Lyalin’s second poetry collection, amasses a steady stream of exclamations and observations that coalesce into familial loss, an overarching specter of continuous labor and remembrance. Where the speaker notes plainly of life’s seemingly ordinary objects existing

…..in my archive
…..Of tragedies
…..mixed with gladiolas
…..and other life mulched into soil

in “Resuscitations,” there still remains a desire to face the world head on and fearless. The title poem “Agrarian” juxtaposes farm animals with the speaker, who claims “Hello, I am a new type of animal / There are gaggles of us in this country / We are singing in our mother tongues.” Throughout the collection, the body is ever-present and exposed to the world, hardened and shaped through the everyday. The dispossessed stand their ground, ever restless and wanting to continue forward. Whether packed in prose or in short lines that race down the page, these poems remain relentless and entrenched in the belief that those with resilience will also have the power to persist.

Alyse Bensel is the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Shift (Plan B Press, 2012) and Not of Their Own Making (dancing girl press, 2014). Her poetry has recently appeared in Mid-American Review, Heavy Feather Review, and Ruminate, among others. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas