‘Instantaneous Combustion Mother Fucker’
— Reneé Bibby
Yesterday in class, I talked with my writing students about how often we keep our writing clean. Not meaning profanity-free and kid-friendly, but bright and somewhat safe emotionally. Fear of conflation between the content and the writer, a fear of exposing ourselves and risking unlikability, a sense of propriety-whatever the reason, on the road of writing, if we don’t pay attention, we risk steering ourselves into safe, well-worn lanes of traffic. Leah Clancy is not afraid to go off-road. Her poetry is a verdigris 1980-era jeep Wrangler wheeling you up the mountain to the best view of the city. Using colloquial language and loose grammar to create a sense of intimacy with the reader, we are invited into the murky corners of the human soul. It’s not taking you to the abyss, not the ink black of evil where you cannot see a glimmer of yourself, but the gray, complicated venial sins of being human where you definitely overlap with others. In driving us to the greatest lookout point we see the vista of sky and earth, smeared by the trash and smog of people. See, she waves her arm to the view, “isn’t it so goddamn gorgeous and awful?” Yes, the way she writes it-it is.