An Interesting Detail

by Kimberly Campanello

Genres: Poetry
Pages: 80
Rating:

Synopsis:

An important and timely collection spanning time and space, pain and power, from an innovative poetic voice

The poems in An Interesting Detail confront our shared, layered past (both planetary and human) and its knotty relationship to the present, stretching from today to prehistory, in a voice that is knowing and yearning, sincere and sardonic, and at times defiant. Campanello's prose poems, brief lyric outbursts, and poetic sequences ludically navigate catastrophe and sweep us up in the minutiae of everyday life, which includes pain and illness, machinations of power and moments of suspended connection.

Kimberly Campanello’s An Interesting Detail was a random choice from the National Poetry Library’s catalogue, which I’m using to help me try out new poets and broaden my horizons a bit.

The collection is mostly made up of prose poetry, and unfortunately I’m not a fan of the style at all: there are some interesting images, linked by non-sequiturs, and I found that deeply frustrating. It felt disjointed for the sake of being disjointed, unintelligible for the sake of being unintelligible, and I just couldn’t get into it — in theory, I like prose poems (and have always liked writing them), but these just felt like they went nowhere.

As ever, since this is poetry, it could be a defect on my part — failing to understand the poet, or what the poem in question was trying to do. Still, not my thing.

Rating: 1/5 (“didn’t like it”)