Everyone Here

Author: Cecily Iddings

Publisher: Octopus Books (2014)

In her debut collection, Cecily Iddings' poetry is always on the cusp of arriving at some destination where "one senses either tragedy / or striptease might be next." We never quite arrive, but it is not the speaker who is holding us at arm's length, but the failure of language itself. Up against unrecoverable narratives, this poetry attempts to find a foothold. It is the poet's dazzling sense of play that offsets the shadow-tinged backstories.

"Though not especially guarded, her poems are nonetheless prepared–spinning and flipping between unhappy, playful, and politically reflective moods, vaulting from domestic to demented to demonic, they always hit the ground precisely and decisively. By being direct, definite, open and unobtrusive, their performance of the first person singular become a conduit to shared experience."

–Frank Guan