𝐃 𝐗 𝐌 𝐈 𝐍 𝐈 𝐐

Notice it’s another year where spring is over and summer has a way of making an entrance. And here I am, on my bed, listening to Lana Del Rey when I should be rereading Violet Bent Backwards Over the Grass. I say “should” not because the poems require discipline or rigor, but because they seem to ask for attention in the same way her music does: languidly, moodily, with open arms and a sideways glance. They reward being looked at again.

I have lately begun reading poetry written by pop singers. Not in search of literary heights, exactly, but out of curiosity—an aesthetic curiosity, the kind that leads one to touch a seashell simply to know its texture. I used to scoff at the idea. I am protective, perhaps childishly so, of what I think poetry is meant to be: the obsessive interior monologue made crystalline, the undercurrent spoken aloud.

When I think of contemporary poetry, I think not of melody but of knives. I think of Louise Glück’s flint-hard clarity, of Mary Oliver’s shy devotions, of Anne Carson’s erudite riddles, of Adrienne Rich and Margaret Atwood and the way their work feels both constructed and cracked. I like crazed women who speak plainly, bluntly, or else whisper in images.

I kind of like Lana Del Rey because she is also a crazed woman. Not wildly so, not grotesquely. But hers is a madness softened by aesthetic, veiled in palm trees and Ferraris, dressed in Americana and aching motel lights. California. Always California.

She always plays the role of ingénue and narrator, pop star and penitent. Her music already verges on poetry, her lyrics embroidered with longing and doom, stitched together with color and repetition. The poems, I expected, might be extensions of that sensibility—repurposed lyrics or abandoned song scraps. And some are. But others surprised me with their rawness and charm, with the way they seem not to try to be poetry at all, and by not trying, become something closer to it.

In “LA Who Am I to Love You?”, she writes: “You’re safe with me, I’m not that dangerous.” Then, later, she confesses, “I ask myself this question all the time / if I met you on the street would I have looked you in the eye?” She addresses the city like a former lover, or a wayward twin, or a god. The line between address and confession blurs, and it’s unclear whether she seeks redemption, revenge, or mere recognition. She gives herself away and folds herself back in, like a tide circling its own withdrawal.

Place is persistent throughout the collection. California appears as myth and altar. Her poems drift between the real and imagined terrain of Los Angeles, San Clemente, Topanga, Venice. These names do not ground the poems in realism so much as float them in atmosphere. They become emotional proxies, spaces to haunt. They remind me of how Anne Sexton used rooms, how Carson uses myth. Not allegory exactly, but architecture for feeling.

Some poems feel diaristic, unfinished. A few border on indulgence. There are moments when one hears the echo of a voice too familiar with its own cadence. But to demand polish from a book like this is to miss its spirit. These are not declarations. They are moods. And sometimes they are beautiful. In “The Land of 1,000 Fires,” she writes, “I left my notebook in the backseat of your jeep. A suicide note that didn’t mean it.” The line is melodramatic, yes, but achingly human. The kind of thing we might think in a moment of solitude and never say aloud.

“My bedroom is a sacred place now,” she writes in “SportCruiser,” “there are no others allowed.” This line feels central to the collection. These poems come from a bedroom, not literally perhaps, but spiritually. They carry the half-sleep intimacy of 3 a.m. revelations, the kind you tell only to yourself or someone you once loved. They are tender, self-conscious, and oddly unpretentious.

I returned to this collection not because it feels like a nice place. Sometimes, I have to remind myself living in California is a nice place to live in.