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![Taste of wild cherry
A Contrary review by Shaindel Beers
Taste of Cherry
Kara Candito
University of Nebraska Press
2009
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The Prairie Schooner prize is one of the most coveted book prizes in poetry, with a monetary award of $3,000 and publication by one of the most prestigious university presses in the United States. It’s also among the most competitive, given that the guidelines welcome any unpublished English-language manuscript from any living writer. That being said, Taste of Cherry, Kara Candito’s debut collection, beat out more than seven hundred other manuscripts, and thoroughly deserved the win. Candito’s slim volume of 22 poems doesn’t contain a wasted word. To steal a phrase from fellow poet Anne Mul’s bio, it is “like a hand grenade—tiny and explosive.”
Candito opens her collection with an epigraph from Anne Carson’s Autobiography of Red—“Sometimes a journey makes itself necessary”—and this sets the tone for the collection. Readers aren’t so much carried along by the narrative thread of Candito’s mostly autobiographical collection as they are pulled along. One minute readers are in a New York subway “being jostled by so many limbs” (Self-Portrait with an Ice Pick), and the next, they are in a baglio in Sicily, “emboldened and drunk / fuck[ing] on the ancient floor and pass[ing] out / with spumante fizzing over the sides of our glasses” (La Bufera: Our Last Trip to Sicily).
Taste of Cherry reads as a travelogue not only of time and place but of understanding, love, and desire. Candito’s world is all-encompassing, including everything from the “dark chocolate Christ in the lobby of the Waldorf” to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Simple Man,” and the poet shies away from nothing, including such difficult-to-read poems as “Barely Legal: Upon Finding My Father’s Porn.” In this poem, the author plays with various lenses of understanding: as a girl who emulated the women in porn, hoping to excite desire in:
. . . boys
with names like Dave, Scott, Ryan, Matt.
Though I can’t remember their faces . . .
I wanted to be fucked and fucked back
into my body when I lifted mine.
then, from the perspective of one who sees the sadness of the girls’ objectification. The speaker writes of them as “instruments, tortured or bored, [who] hammer / out their little mimicries of pleasure.” Finally, the poem reaches a somewhat comfortable but unsteady resolution as the speaker remembers her father comforting her when she was a young girl, “Don’t worry, tesoro, it’s all a movie.” This, of course, is made problematic by the fact that the father’s method of comforting is a lie, just as much as the women who are mimicking pleasure. It isn’t all a movie; when the power has goes out during a blizzard, the father is trying, and the speaker recognizes his effort:
. . . I think
of my father in the backyard with a flashlight,
pulling the tarp back from the woodpile—
Dazed with cold, his hands exposed and the snow
effacing his tracks. Brave and vulnerable
as a girl watching herself undress.
It is Candito’s skill at walking the knife-edge of discomfort that makes Taste of Cherry a must-read. What is oftentimes most interesting in this book is the speaker’s discomfort with herself, her self-consciousness as she decides what type of young woman she is to become. In “Egypt Journal: Christmas at the Great Pyramid” Candito writes:
I am laughing because later all that will remain
of this place are the sores blooming beneath
the camel’s saddle, the bomb mirrors they swept beneath the car
each time we returned to the hotel, and what your father said
when we were introduced, the part you didn’t translate, which I
understood: Ayoon otta. Cat eyes. And later,
when you explained his question: How can you trust
a woman with eyes like an animal that is loyal to no one?
Even if Candito’s second collection is more of the same—full of world travels and self-exploration—I’m along for the ride, but I have a feeling that Candito’s work will only grow exponentially, and readers will be in for new adventures as her poetic voice and vision mature.
Shaindel Beers is Contrary’s poetry editor. Read Kara Candito’s “Epithalamium” in Contrary.
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© 2010 | all rights reserved
about us | xml feed | Contrary ® is a registered trademark of Contrary Magazine | donate $1 | contact us