Untitled Child
In her third collection of poems, Nancy Jo Cullen once again turns her questing and multidimensional mind to the nature of madness, addiction, impermanence and loss. This confessional collection takes an unflinching look at the path of a life’s destruction to create a harrowing chronicle of bereavement. As Zoe Whittall says, “Nancy Jo Cullen gets to the guts of grief, revealing its complexity with wit and poetic precision.”
In 2006 Nancy Jo Cullen’s life partner died after a long struggle with mental illness and addiction. Untitled Child examines the trajectory of the end of the marriage between the two women and the author tries to understand her role in a series of painful events.
The poems are confessional in the vein of poets such as Anne Sexton. Cullen tries to get inside the skin of the mess of what once appeared to be the perfectly suburban life. Untitled Child is part memoir, part rant and part lament as Cullen examines the rage, grief and surprise about the terrible havoc that addiction can reap on a life.
Reviews
Nancy Jo Cullen’s Untitled Child pushes the linguistic possibilities of the post-modern lyric with intriguing and powerful results…the book gingerly avoids the standard pitfalls of maudlin self-pity and sensational confessionalism through clever deconstruction of its own narrative structure and musical/linguistic leaps of diction, register, tone and its side-of-the-mouth use of allusion. Critical language melds with lyric tropes, and droll delivery with understatement and the quick, deft cutaway. I wouldn’t say that Ms. Cullen is a language poet, but her work is informed as much by that post-modern set of stratagems as it is by imagism or high realism…She’s never totally abstract or abstruse and she never sacrifices the music to the matter-of-fact tone or droll delivery. Her poetry offers good clean fun, even when dealing with painful subject matter. - Richard Stevenson
Reading Cullen’s poems is a little like drinking booze. Definitely not wine, because it’s not all that genteel, and not beer, because it’s not all that commonplace, but hard liquor because it’s edgy, fast-acting, more than a little disorienting and frequently mixed with something sweet…Cullen understands how we are entertained by our emotions, and this poetry is trained like a laser scope on our limbic systems. – Globe & Mail
Samples
Wherefore fly
Those were the days of holding on When omnipotence was a tree When heaven died Such a province of no geography Where the dead pray For pre-emptive action Unto the well endowed earthly As if defenses could cultivate desire When the narrow sky was located And we named it Communicate
Tanka
It almost broke me when you couldn’t fix yourself. But ain’t that Shakespeare, or it’s Buddah’s First Noble Truth. I thought you were untamed But you were nightshade.
