Brynn Saito's The Palace of Contemplating Departure, the 2011 winner of Red Hen Press's Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award, is by turn angry, questioning, knowing, personal and political--but always lyrical and fearlessly imaginative. Saito's startlingly juxtaposed images reveal the layered complexity of her material. In the six-poem sequence "Women and Children," she writes: "My children as they wandered from me took on the shapes of beauty. I was proud of the way they suffered though I know they were undone by the sharpness of the earth's asking: Do you know... the color of grief?" This technique allows her to explore difficult emotional truths without collapsing into them: "The color of grief is the bright amber of wasted honey."
At her best, Saito's associative lyricism recalls Laura Kasischke's enigmatic and powerful Space, in Chains while keeping the same tight control over her imagery and personas. Some of the poems feel confessional but Saito is after something deeper. "And the Lord said Surprise Me so I moved to LA," she writes in an early poem that quickly becomes a commentary on America itself:
"I drove through the South
with its womb-like weather...
and the century unspooled
like a wide, white road with lines for new writing
and the century unspooled like a spider's insides.
The country was a cipher so I voted with my conscience."
Not all of the poems here are equally successful, but they all aim high enough to ask the big questions in this beautiful and unusually inventive collection. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer