From California, On: Jennifer Denrow

When I was in high school, I dreamed of California, a place I'd never been, but a place I believed would somehow make everything in my life better. Tonight after reading Jennifer Denrow's 2010 Brave Men Press chapbook From California, On, I feel like this might be a common delusion.

Consisting of long lines and fragmented thoughts, the twenty-two page poem is a disjunctive narrative about a trip to California, an idealized place that doesn't quite align with how the speaker imagined it would be. Or perhaps the speaker doesn't quite fit how she imagined herself would be in California--that things would be somehow different and that she herself would be somehow different:

"In California, I look like me but with a better person inside.

I scratch myself. I scratch I'm here into me.

I thought it would be like everyone else to be here. They are. They're meaning it. I mean to be with them."

The poem is a journey, not because it involves an actual trip & time spent traveling in a car, but because it involves a mind at work, thinking & re-acting & going somewhere with the reader along for the ride. There is a quietness to the collection, but also occasionally a subtle humor: "We say everything once in French and once in English. We don't know French so it's hard to understand us during that part." However, overall the poem is melancholy; the speaker describes her environment--encountering a doe and a fawn in the wild, sitting by redwoods, and frequently staring at the ocean--but she remains disconnected from it and from the people around her.

Overall I enjoyed the book and I am looking forward to reading her full-length collection, California. I'm also looking forward to seeing her read this Friday in Atlanta.