Darlene Silva Soberano reviews 'When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon' & 'wheeze'

Darlene Silva Soberano has penned in-depth reviews of poetry collections by Marcus Whale and Jennifer Nguyen for Cordite Poetry Review. Read Darlene's reviews over at the Cordite website. Here are some choice quotes we really loved:

On When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon by Jennifer Nguyen:

'Most of the poems in the chapbook talk back to the declaration of ‘Sometimes, pain is just pain’; they are filtered through it. One particularly striking dialogue is between the poems ‘Sometimes, pain is just pain’ and ‘Love at first laugh’. ‘Love at first laugh’ is a poem made of three simple lines: ‘On a date with a girl I liked, she said ‘Isn’t The Walking / Dead just Home and Away but with zombies ???’ I have / never fallen in love so fast before’. In the landscape of When I die slingshot my ashes onto the surface of the moon, if, sometimes, pain is just pain, then, crucially, joy is just joy.'

On wheeze by Marcus Whale:

'The title itself is named after air, which, in the language of the chapbook, means ‘the air of sex yet to come’, as Whale writes in his poem, ‘Like Pazuzu’. ‘Like Pazuzu’ is markedly referential; even its title is named after the demon in The Exorcist (1973). There is little room for the speaker to be active in the poem except to create a mosaic of observations about on-screen sex, on-screen intimacy. Whale’s speaker questions the artifice of on-screen sex: ‘I wonder if the moans are foley / or otherwise achieved through feats of gust’. What happens, really, to the corporeal in the wind?'