MFA Greensboro Alum Julie Brooks Barbour Reviews "Somewhere Below the Solar Plexus of Her" for The Rumpus

Somewhere Below the Solar Plexus of Her
A Review by Julie Brooks Barbour
The sculpture that adorns the cover of Veronica Golos’ collection Vocabulary of Silence is haunting: a man appears to be buried up to his armpits, caught in a pose of waiting for water to drop from a vessel that he holds almost entirely upside down. He is in a permanent pose of desperation. This image haunted me just as the images in the poems held beyond the cover.

In the book’s first poem, Golos sets up the image of war: “Litter ignites into funeral flares; the bread of the dead is breaking. / Above the moans of children, soldiers warm their hands” (“Dream: The City: Baghdad 2008”). This is a war we all know, either through soldiers who have fought in Iraq or by news reports, but this is not a war we have heard about from the residents of Iraq. We rarely hear this story from the other side.

Read the full review here: http://therumpus.net/2011/12/somewhere-below-the-solar-plexus-of-her/

Find out more about the MFA Writing Program here:http://mfagreensboro.org