Shameless Magazine, February 2005
by Damian Rogers
In this collection, Sandra Alland gives herself permission to live in the world just as she is. The poetic self in these poems is still developing, testing the possibilities of language as a tool of self-discovery and invention.
Alland plays with the image of the poet as political and sexual outlaw in the manner of Audre Lorde, Adrienne Rich, and Wanda Coleman. But the voice in these poems, while making a case for her own needs, is gentle and compassionate, more often reaching out towards others or nursing her own lonely wounds than taking an overtly strident or hard-edged tone. Alland is strongest when she inhabits physical memories, allowing her natural rhythm to create a warm and immediate body of poetry that shines in simple lines like “a woman I lost like a train.”
While a sense of fear permeates the book – landscapes defined by nuclear plants, the threat of rapists behind street corners – this powerlessness is countered by a clearly expressed longing for human contact.
Alland is known as a performer, and many of these poems undoubtedly have a fuller life on stage. Still, there are lovely moments here, like the image of her riding her red, fish-shaped skateboard through the sewer system, her survival seeming at once impossible and heroic.