When you stare long enough into darkness, you fabricate what you may need; what might need you. Smolen's compelling work does this enticing dance across the pages. Each piece falls into its own structure, rhythm-a movement that calls out to them. Wanting them, needing them in just the perfect two-step to make your eyes follow them from moving through "water" to the "beyond." In this intricate dance with words, Rebecca leaves us wrapped in possibilities of what love looks like in self and the love tango with others. -Nastashia Minto, Poet/Author of Naked
Rebecca Smolen's Excoriation is part declaration and part dream of a travel in the honesties of existence. From the spark that is "My Call to Verse," to the inner and outer travel of "{Body as Home}," to the closing call to endlessness that is "Moribund Happiness," this collection invites the reader to experience unalloyed entanglements of history, agency, anger, and love, and of hope that can reside at heart. -John Miller, founder of Portland Ars Poetica
In Rebecca Smolen's Excoriation, you experience alchemy, the transformation of a woman's raw loss into a dance, a music, a clear vision, "how the stars/are brightest in the northeast in winter." In poems addressed to her lost love, she remembers the first goodbye after the first kiss, how it "became the new snow smell/mixed with the smoke from each chimney," and you feel that relationship char in words, "raw and still bloody." Smolen's poems are "heavy with the life [she knows she has] needed to release." In rich language and provocative shapes, her poems are generous acts, each a form of healing, "to fall first, / to shine... to know how to rain," their "purpose to ease another's" pain. Read these brave poems to understand that the world "is merely attempting to find its own way back" through the mystery and science of this writer's voice. -Kate Gray, author of Carry the Sky and For Every Girl: New & Selected Poems