Poetry Review: Candied Pussy

Candied Pussy
by Nooks Krannie
 
 
Review by Julie Carpenter
 
 
In the author’s own words this “chapbook is full of poetry that deals with sexuality, comfort in your own skin and color, relationships, confusion about all of these things and trying to basically survive”.
 
The poems are short musings with a stream of consciousness feel to them.  Some of the poems are written in paragraph form with sharp, individual thoughts divided by slashes, a fitting format for the stream of thoughts and ideas that form instantly and play off each other. Some are arranged more traditionally in lines. 
 
The entire chapbook is an experience that feels like nothing so much as stepping into someone else’s mind for a few moments.  We see out of the narrator’s eyes, with the history of her experiences hovering in the background, implicit in most cases, but still forming the unseen foundation of experience.
 
There are many lines which are sharp and directly to the point. For instance, this line on page 23 in “a poem about cher”: i’m suffering from ego love/ it’s sort of like self love but more for the idea of me instead of the real me.
 
Sometimes the reader feels the same confusion of mind that the narrator must feel.  Thoughts crash against one another and become tangential, barely touching.  The book is at once personal and universal.  Most readers will recognize the immediacy of thought and the notion of the brain producing a stream of ideas which must be observed, sorted and ordered.

The book is thoughtful and experimental. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

---

​Nooks Krannie is a Palestinian/Persian female writer from Canada. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Eunoia Review, Alien Mouth, The Airgonaut, Fluland and other online and print journals. She tumbls at http://nkrannie.tumblr.com/ and instagrams @nookskrannie.

---