The Catch Newsletter
October 2023
Welcome to Talon Review’s October 2023 edition of The Catch newsletter! This month’s feature is a poem highlight by Hannah Frison & and a book review by Julia Croston.
Poem Highlight
Winner of the 2022 Zócalo Public Square Poetry Prize:
Chelsea Rathburn’s “8.A.m., Ocean Drive”
By Hannah Frison
“8 a.m., Ocean Drive” is a free verse poem that focuses on a world hidden in plain sight. According to Rathburn, perusing around Miami Beach in the early morning revealed to her “all of [the] invisible labor that makes [the] city, [the] paradise, [the] vacation spot run”. She was fascinated by how the hustle and bustle of restaurant owners and street cleaners juxtaposed the quietness of the Miami streets. With only one continuous stanza, Rathburn immerses the reader into a slowly waking Miami using a slurry of eloquent metaphors, similes, and visual imagery. A line that stuck out to me is “...what I mean to say/ is there is a gradual unfolding, /everything golden green: sunlight/ on the palm trees and hibiscus, /parking spots glittering like gifts.” Here, I really enjoyed Rathburn’s interpretation of her surroundings; she always elevates a basic description with color, sensory language, and intentional diction.
If you enjoy free-verse poetry and watching words paint a moving picture with every line of text, check out more of Rathburn’s work at the following website: https://chelsearathburn.com/
Book Review
Brutes by Dizz Tate
Review written by Julia Croston
Often compared to Jeffrey Eugenides’ The Virgin Suicides, Dizz Tate adds her own layers to the dark portrait of girlhood with her debut novel, Brutes. Published in February 2023, the novel follows a nonconformist group of thirteen-year-olds as they navigate the brutalities of girlhood. The narrative is set in the swampy terrors of Florida, reminiscent of the author’s own childhood.
Refreshingly, Tate’s disorienting portrayal of girlhood rejects glorification and embraces the absurdities of childhood. The group of girls are inseparable. The individual does not exist––the group moves and speaks collectively under one pronoun: “We.” They do not fit in at school, yet embrace their barbaric nature with ease: “We would not be born out of sweetness, we were born out of rage, we felt it in our bones.”
After the preacher’s daughter, Sammy, goes missing, the townspeople repeatedly cry out: “Where is she?” This question becomes a rhythmic mantra increasing tension as the plot progresses. Careless adults search for more than a lost child, perhaps even a lost part of themselves. They seek to understand why a girl would run away from what seems to be a loving home. With this plot, Tate does not write a conventional story of children being “misunderstood.” Instead, she takes a more complicated path through dissecting the haunting emotional landscape of girlhood in contrast to the fragilities of adulthood.
Nostalgic, Tate sets the novel in Florida. Her childhood was anchored in Orlando before moving back to England at eighteen. Set in a fictional small town, the novel yields a ubiquitous portrait of the state as a whole, understood by all who have felt the suffocation of Florida’s humidity. A monstrous creature looms in the town lake. The town deeply fears its existence; it is unknown to them. However, the girls are the true “brutes” of the novel, embracing the rage and cruelties of girlhood as a survival mechanism. They become more dangerous than the setting.
In an interview with NPR, Tate reminisced on the “bewildering” nature of Florida with its bright theme parks and spray-painted grass. Additionally, Tate expressed that her fascination with her own Floridian childhood feels much like an obsession with a first love. Brutes encapsulates this obsessiveness through language, endlessly reaching towards something that can never be grasped. The novel’s vivid setting roots the story, yet much of the writing depends on what feels abstract. Tate captures the setting through venomous, sensory imagery––fire ants bite the children, the water in the lake is blackened by pollution, and an arsonist reduces a house to ashes.
Structurally, the writing jumps forward in time to give agency to the older versions of the friend group, now divided as individuals. Their stream of consciousness often returns to childhood memory in a forceful reckoning of past trauma. The time jump allows for deeper realizations about humanity: “I used to think people only lied to make their lives mean something. Now I think people lie to make their lives meaningless because, it makes them so much easier to live.” These moments allow Tate to explore the evolutionary changes that occur between the ending of girlhood and the beginnings of adulthood.
The hypnotic language of the novel imposes itself on the reader through a violence in both the rhythm and word connotation. For instance, Tate often draws an uncomfortable attention to the body: “I am flesh to them. They would be terrified to think of my bones. I want to show them their mother’s skull.” At times, Tate’s use of language, while poetic, becomes easy to get lost inside. The consuming nature of her language tends to distract from the overarching themes. The search for Sammy becomes dizzying, and the occasional uncertainty of language generates more confusion. However, this lack of focus in some places of the novel embodies Tate’s perception of Florida: “The whole state seems to wobble with uncertainty.” Brutes creates more questions than it answers, crafting a more authoritative position for the reader to determine what to make of the words.
Through its language and structure, Brutes suggests that it is impossible to fully reconcile the child with the adult. Once girlhood ends, it is gone forever. The haunting retrospect of memory leaves nothing but an echoed question in the mind of a woman searching for the remains of girlhood: “Where is she?”