Description: A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage "was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess)," if aging brings the hateful labels "OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE," every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. "Bereavement status" engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as "then you lose your losses." Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. "America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us -- / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us." Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: "You don't seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes." Amen.
Review Quotes: "Sentences are the magic fabric of these marvelous odes and anti-odes. A prime Adrian Blevins sentence is both warpath and crossroad catapulting us from anxiety to ecstasy to lullaby on a bridge of ampersands. An Adrian Blevins sentence is a live wire, an electric lasso, a clairvoyant conveyer belt containing multitudes. Her poems curse, woo and storm 'the sleazy codswallop of the muck' of Memory. Every enlivening line has the cadence of a brilliant, stupefied heart. Status Pending is terrific."
--Terrance Hayes