Poetry Review: Home and Other Places I've Yet To See

​Home and Other Places I've Yet To See 

Written by Dan Flore III

Review by Julie Carpenter 

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There’s something light and clean about Flore’s poetry, even when he talks about stints in psych wards, homelessness, or other traumatic events.  Reading one of his collections is like sitting at the beach watching the ocean wash over the garbage, cleaning the detritus wave after wave.  

​Taken as a whole, this book presents a struggle for redemption, a pieced together tale of a life disrupted by mental illness, broken relationships and the little absurdities that make up life. But small clean moments provide anchor in the swell of distress.  For instance, this line in the poem AT A FOODBANK:
 
            outside I let the sky
            rub into my eyes like I’m asleep
            in a robin’s egg
            ready to crack open
 
Flore’s poetry is the clean wet smell after a storm leaves a path of destruction, a perfect shell washed up the beach after a hurricane, the feeling of terrible lightness after you escape a fire with nothing but the clothes on your back. 
 
Perceptive and beautiful, this chapbook is well worth the read.
 
 
 

Julie Carpenter is the creator of the Sacred Chickens website.  She is       dedicated to telling stories and making sure that indie writers and publishers have a way to be heard.  She uses narrative, her own and others’, to help interpret the world. She has a Master of Professional Writing from the University of Memphis, with an emphasis in Composition Theory. She wants to bend reality one story at a time.  Julie’s work has appeared in Fiction on the Web and will be included The New Guard. She is currently working on a novel.

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