Forthcoming Book Review on Falling by James Bourey
in The Broadkill Review (Winter 2025 Edition), an imprint from the Braodkill River Press in Delaware.
https://www.broadkillreview.com
Falling – Released March 2025
Stubborn Mule Press (Spartan Press). Devil’s Elbow, Missouri.
Made possible by Osage Arts Community.
Falling takes on the ethos of being earth-and sky-bound, freefalling and falling apart, falling in love, falling together, and falling within the deepest and most vulnerable halls of the soul. The spirit-essence in the poems fearlessly skydives amongst ancestral memories of the self while windsurfing along twisted and illusionary skyscapes—only to land, after a series of unexpected descents, where brilliant pockets of suspension of identity can finally reveal themselves. The poems embrace the universal, triumphs and tragedies, when the heart finally opens, mixing with an earthly-confusion of injuries, tracing the infinite lines of a traveling show — and the lessons of dust devils in an attempt to leave the heart unscarred, unbarred. Unbound.
Falling
Poems
Vuong Vu, Publisher – Tourane Poetry Press – in response to Falling
The poems in Falling are of another multiverse. The layers of meaning, and experiences, behind the rhetoric can be traced along the line breaks and the use of white space on the page, which serve as silences, even sighs. These pauses rhythmically work on a multitude of various representations—transforming from a literal poem, to an almost a series psilocybin-like interpretations, as if from the subconscious level, reaching yet, another layer within the poetry.
In the poem, “Dating Tree Rings,” the reader has to fight in the inclination, the intuition, to read it as “when I could not wait/for love.” There is literal movement throughout this poem, perhaps of the beetle itself, metaphorically moving within the poem, carving out its path and revealed with the white spaces; thus, emulating the drive to survive, to love. This poem ends with the word “vulnerable” between two white spaces, offering another motif within the gravity of this collection. The language is gorgeous, while embracing a softness, and earthliness to it.
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- Cover photo by US Geological Society – US Department of the Interior. Earth as Art 6.”“Irritated.” Source Landsat 6. February 6, 2019. Public Domain. ↩︎
PILAR GRAHAM 