It feels like a sore nose and trying not to throw up. It smells like bile. It tastes like the thick saliva in your dry mouth when you can’t breathe through your nose. Green is inevitable. While Hyre, D. J. Savarese, Tito Mukhopadhyay, and Nathan Spoon do not refer to synesthesia, explicitly, their works differently demonstrate synesthesia as a poetic form. Perhaps all poetry is at least partly syn-aesthetic, since even in its most cerebral illustrations, it resides oftentimes in a sensory realm exceeding description, a space both affective and embodied. In “King Orange,” Pamela J. Kincheloe tells us: “The clouds — they’re all the people / peering down at us / through a smeary blue window, /marveling at our graceful arms / and lithe, lizardy tails.” In this collection, replete with writing about myriad embodiments and consciousnesses, the “lithe, lizardy tails” feel, to me, like a joyous secular blessing—marvelous, indeed. As Raymond Luczak describes, in “TheDeafBoy fromAtlantis”: I was all legs and bones when you appeared covered with kelp on TV. A storm had appeared, flinging you from the bottom of the sea onto the shore. A father and son appeared and called for help. You found it difficult to breathe there in the hospital. Yet Dr. Elizabeth Merrill appeared to figure out what needed to be done. You were brought back to the ocean, where you finally appeared to revive with your webbed feet and hands... One doesn’t have to be Deaf and gay, or have watched Man from Volume 7 - Page 27
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