Say in the end

Author: Carolyn Ferrucci

Publisher: Spiral Editions (2024)

Carolyn Ferrucci's poems in Say in the end present a tender, yet adamantly beautiful and strong constellation of refusal. There's a lot of “NO” in these poems, but nothing to dismay over, and nothing to decline in a traditional sense. This no is the holy no, the sacred no, the necessary no to phalanx and then begin to disarm the saturating perversity of our uncontrolled world, the no that might allow us to communally luxuriate in our bodies, with the bodies and hearts of our friends and lovers. To “wake up again and belong / to the desert screen / saver, here I am, wildly / contained, into myself / there is no space / on the dance floor / which is an ocean, irony / is my way in, until I’m less / afraid of what I am,” and she breaks the line over and over again to prove just that. These poems seep into you and disperse not unlike how they seep into each other in the pages of this chapbook.