Book Review: Some Churches by Tasha Cotter

Some Churches
Poems by Tasha Cotter
Gold Wake Press, September 2013
ISBN-13: 978-0985919146
$14.95; 88pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

Tasha Cotter draws strength from the personal lyric in Some Churches, a collection full of desolate quietude. Meandering forms to the condensed prose poem speak of longing and regret in the face of self-reflection, past loves, and family. While touching on a breadth of experience, these poems always orbit around the speaker’s relation to self and others, utilizing silence and the unsaid rather than the conversational. In the title opening poem, the speaker remains unnoticed amidst the pilgrims with “Their measured footsteps hemming me in this empyreal contest / offering a maze of contemplation” upon realizing “the empty, uncurled air that announced I’d missed you.” Even in a place of reverie, there is always a search for the other who always seems to be one moment ahead, or behind.

But with that uncertainty and inability to reach the other also comes a deliberate and focused voice. “Poem as Litany of Songs I Knew You As” keenly expresses a directness, as the speaker addresses the absent: “Dear other half: I am every piece you are, / so repair the collage of us you dropped // acid on.” The speaker intimates the struggles of lovers through myth, where in “Lovers, We Find Ourselves at the River of Lethe,” the speaker considers “Maybe, water-cupped, you won’t consider / the result, but I know I’ll rock myself to sleep wondering what I did, / letting you taste something like that.” Here is a sense of eminent regret, which is further exemplified in “The House of Regret,” a lyric that in quick succession interrogates the self and other: “Will we ever wake up / and not search ourselves for holes / that weren’t there yesterday, / for some mark to live and die by?”

Cotter excels in this brief, flashing lyric, where ordinary objects turn into far more meaningful symbols of desire. In “Entomology Room,” love is personified among the speaker and the you mistook “for stars, those lakes / of hungry carp, hoping we lose our way / to the moon.” In reaching upward, Some Churches works to reenact the cathedral is has constructed—rooted on the earth, but looking up and out.

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