Everyone knows the old canard, “Don’t judge a book by it’s cover.” But it was the exquisite cover design, embellished with a lavender cicada emerging from its case, and the glittery lettering, that drew my attention to Derek Berry’s poetry chapbook, Glitter Husk. The cover, featuring the art work of Roberto Jones and the graphic design of Anniebelle Quattlebaum, captures that ineffable spark of wonder that insinuates itself throughout the book - even into the darkest corners.
Glitter Husk, with its unconventional structures ( Who would have thought to write a redacted elegy that looks like a page from the Mueller Report?), and raw confrontations, is a self-effacing lamentation on living in uncomfortably challenging spaces for body and mind:
“Owning a body becomes unmiracled,” - from “hangover.”
Throughout the book, the reader is engaged in a search between the lines for that which shines. What exactly is this luster that is sprinkled among the text? Dressed in drag becomes a glitter sacrament. A glitter husk is the fleeting joy of a firefly. It is memory made translucent like an overly handled photograph. We find it in drink, and in the epiphany that guilt is gilt. Perhaps the glowing is hidden in bits and pieces among Goya’s black house and in his painting of Saturn Devouring his Son. Maybe it can be teased out of the words and phrases that escape from blackened elegiac redactions, or in the stars one sees from the top of a Ferris wheel on the night of a county fair. The glow, the glitter, is something that shines out as aliveness against all odds.
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