Savage Machinery

Karen Rigby

Savage Machinery is Karen Rigby’s second chapbook, and it explores 15th and mid-century art, eros, women, and the pleasures of taste.
I loved the first poem in this book, which describes a woman bathing in a burnt out house and the reactions of the neighbors. It’s oddly charming, and middle-class surreal.

I didn’t expect the book to get better, but it did. The poems weave connections between the concrete and the abstract, through time and space, with imagery that evokes a visceral response from the reader. For example, in the short poem “Bread”, Rigby ends with:

The first time a man
fed me bread, the pockets of air
were shutters opening.

The descriptions of bread throughout the poem are immediate. The reader can smell it, taste it, feel the flaking of the crust in her hand, and with this last stanza bread is freedom, and sin, a broadening horizon that made me take a deep breath of delight.

The words Rigby uses have great mouth-feel, as strong as the flavor of that bread, while the connections she makes, the interplay between abstract and concrete can be almost delicate, as in “Verite”:

The first line is the camera’s aperture.
If you find beauty it will rise

from the half-moon petals strewn
on the nightstand or the shirt

Or brutal, as in “The Story of Adam and Eve”:

I would know the beginning was the word,
but also the soot. Also the lie.

Possibly my favorite poem in the collection is “The Story of Adam and Eve”. Told through observation of the manuscript illuminator’s art, the preparation of the hide becomes abuse of the body. The painters are a part of the paint, and the story appears new from their brushes and yet was old before the illuminators turned to dust. The modern narrator, the illuminators in the cold, and their subject, first man and first woman, are connected through time, through experience, through pain and cold, loneliness and dark.

As in the palm turned
to the word flensed
from the body of God,

Despite how I might sound here, I don’t think every poem is perfect. “Song for the Onion” did little for me, and I found myself wondering what I was supposed to get from “Petrol”. Having said that, however, this collection is a feast for the senses and amply demonstrates Karen Rigby’s talent. Of the 16 poems I didn’t love two of them, but the others are well worth the purchase price. I would buy the collection for “The Story of Adam and Eve” alone.

Release date: September 26, 2008
ISBN 978-1-59924-287-3
ISBN 1-59924-287-7

$14.00. Pre-orders are being accepted between July 15 and August 27 with free shipping in the U.S.
for those who pre-order the book from Finishing Line Press.

Karen Rigsby was born in the Republic of Panama in 1979, where she lived until moving to the U.S. in 1997. She graduated from Carnegie Mellon University with a BA in Creative Writing and an additional major in English (2001) and from the University of Minnesota with an MFA in Creative Writing (2004). She currently resides in Arizona.