Femme au chapeau

In Rachel Dacus´s poetry collection, Femme au chapeau, the textured worlds of her sounds and incredibly dense images create a new poetry that is–like Wallace Stevens´–constructed of the private symbol and metaphor. Once conquered, this is a realm of dazzling strangeness and beauty. In the offbeat and almost surrealistic way Dacus manages to thrill us with her poems. Femme au chapeau, whose title is taken from a portrait that Matisse painted of his wife–a painting that presaged French Fauvism–is really more like a Frida Kahlo painting: gorgeously off-putting in its metaphoric twists, mesmerizingly complex, startling and horrific in its images, and yet so unique that it lives on its own terms after a while and demands that the reader accept them. Dacus´s subjects are far-ranging, from the metaphoric spins she puts on an art-obsessed father who slides into brutality (one poem, "Ocean House," evokes him–or at least his mouth–as the ocean itself) to a simply rendered yet no less complex poem on the narrator´s mother making apple pie. One reviewer called it "thrilling, one-of-a-kind poetry".