Solar Inverter, by Serena Solin

Poetry, chapbook, 28 pages, from Bottlecap Features. Apocalyptic, lychnoscopic, ecologic, and literally electric, Serena Solin’s collection is a ceremony that becomes “terribly loud” amidst the sound of a woman rolling shopping carts, a screening of Boyz N the Hood, a short monologue by a dead kitten. Yes, here we are in hissing cacophony. The living and the dead seem to be invited to take up residence—sometimes inside, sometimes outside—me, I, a truck, a uterus, a church. The veils that keep one side of the world at bay are broken down inside these poems, in what at times seem to be errors of manufacturing and other times through a window’s soft void. This is a book about lawless grief, or, perhaps, the lawlessness of grief (when has grief ever followed directions?). In the end, the “narrator” becomes not a master of language but is made a polyglot by it: Solin speaks what is impossible to say, in a poetry full of new locutions. Serena Solin lives in Maspeth, NY. Her poems have appeared in Cutbank, FENCE, Sixth Finch, and elsewhere.