Soft Boxing
by Mary Leonard

In Russia, ordinary people, or "the workers," line up to hear poetry or visit the graves of poets long gone like Pushkin or Pasternak. In the United States, the mention of a poem sends ordinary people to retreat to sitcoms or the backyard barbecue. But this "worker" just heard Celia Bland read from her book of poems, Soft Box, and was led into a familiar territory of domesticity, cut open with sensual and erotic images. I was pulled in by the people who landscape her poems: the father who is the "sideways Jack" in the tarot deck; the stepfather, "a small man....his skin so thin the ropes of purple pulsed as his heart beat;" the mother who paints prosthetics and the young daughter, Avis, who calls her vagina "her china." But what makes these characters at once tender and surreal is the language. In a love poem, "As you Speak" the poet says, "I can smell my wetness rising to my sense,/ like bread rises on a back porch in Florida/ beneath the handkerchief of a dishtowel." When Celia finished reading this poem at a recent reading at Brooks Books in Tivoli, the audience wanted more, more.

(Soft Box by Celia Bland was published by CavanKerry Press this spring and is available at local book stores in the Hudson Valley for fifteen dollars or through www.CavanKerryPress.org)