Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul

Author: Marie Buck

Publisher: Roof Books (2017)

There is no other book quite like Marie Buck’s Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul. Its tight economy of language and demotic vocabulary imply an almost diaristic simplicity. Any normality you might expect is interrupted and overwritten by recurring images of fantasy, transfiguration, and violence.

Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul vacillates between the real and the not. Each poem turns on a dime between the logical and the illogical, with poems beginning in “a Room of Salted Flesh” and ending at the beach; or introducing a family having breakfast and culminating in a celebration over champagne in an in-between land of ghost and ghouls, desires and fears. Buck’s aleatory carrousel of subject matter and bizarre scenes creates a contradictory, complex subjectivity, “…the type of person who would… / eat part of a sandwich from a very legit-seeming Italian place / and immediately puke into a trash can / about 10 seconds after telling a chatty stranger how great the sandwich is.”

For all its oscillation, Goodnight, Marie, May God Have Mercy on Your Soul has at its center Grox, whose presence as a reptile-god-protector-provocateur accompanies and haunts the speaker throughout the text. His presence flickers through the book’s many changing parts. “So I guide Grox’s toes to the oceanside / and hold my sports bra up with my mouth and pretend it’s a megaphone,” Buck writes in “The Public’s Century,” encapsulating the strange pseudo-sexual partnership she shares with him. Grox’s mysterious presence coupled with his matter-of-fact appearances emblemizes Buck’s ability to be both pedestrian and mystical, hilarious and unnerving, hopeful and dark as she pulls at the cords of fantasy that tether our isolated daily lives to larger historical arcs.