Forcing a Need
a review by Micah Ling
October 2009
- A Plate of Chicken
- Ugly Duckling Presse, 2009
- Paperback, $15.00
- ISBN: 978-1-933254-55-5
First, this book is simply a nice thing to own. It’s handsome and square: pleasant to hold. Will Hubbard, Paul Killebrew and the folks at Ugly Duckling Presse made a fine package. The poems inside fit together like people on a Greyhound or in an elevator, but they also fit together like foodstuffs in a grocery store. Groups of seven-line stanzas marry mountains and city things. This book is hot. There are crows, a wife, sex, things to drink like whiskey and coke, things to eat like black beans and Jello salad and candy. These poems can be read over and over and always seem new. In one poem, Rohrer writes,
I would rather be lost in a snowfield than a desert.
This is called “Embracing Limitations.”
My head is too full, full of tiny hot stones.
Rohrer not only appeals to all of the senses, he forces his reader to crave their senses: he forces a need to taste the hard cider and feel the sun’s burn.
A girl in a purple dress coasts by on her bike.
The best thing is to be very small.
Take your enormous love for one woman into the street.
Rohrer answers every question out there, and himself admits, “All my questions were answered when I saw two crows / walking to school.”
Micah Ling lives in Bloomington, Indiana during the academic year and teaches at Indiana University and at DePauw University. During the summer she and her husband and their pet boxer live in south-central Montana. Micah's first full-length collection of poems, Three Islands, is recently out from Sunnyoutside Press.
