You know the feeling of losing someone? The feeling of being discombobulated as you try to navigate through the harshness of life when you no longer have someone or something that was so deeply rooted to your very being. d-sorientation by Charleen McClure is an ardent accumulation of poems that tackles the strong relations one could have with oneself, a mother, a lover, and a place. It’s sensual in some ways and heart wrenching in the rest. It shows the toll that caretaking can have on one’s psyche while also drawing in the bittersweet nostalgia.
The lines in these poems will wrap around you like a warm blanket and speak to you in ways that only a loved one could. Yet, it also contains the grief of what it’s like to no longer have the very thing that meant something to you. To grieve is what makes us human, just as to love does. These two emotions, that feel so far apart, are connected and so intertwined in these poems that it makes the reader feel everything and all things at once.
If I could recommend one poem in this book to fellow readers, it would be “A Study of Human Effort” (pictured below). The poem is about the loss of the speaker’s own sounder, their pack, their family. It’s a sorrowful poem and the lines that stick out to me the most are “Forgive me, we sang. / Forgive us since we couldn’t forgive ourselves as much as we tried.” These lines alone encompasses what it’s like to grieve. Everyone grieves at different paces and stages, but this right here just shows a main thought everyone has when grieving-- the blaming of themselves--the bartering voice in our head that says “if only you did something different,” or “if it was you instead.” THAT guilt that comes with grief. Overall, this collection as a whole has an agglomeration of poems that hit you so hard in the feels that you’ll be completely absorbed.
Jabrie Johnson is a student at Finger Lakes Community College, working toward her associate degree in Creative Writing. When she isn’t writing short horror fiction, she often picks up a different hobby involving creation. Painting, sewing, knitting, video-making, you name it.
