Review by Booklist Review
Dooley's moving first book of poems is this year's National Poetry Series winner selected by poet Charlie Smith. Dooley's new voice is a full, grand-sweeping appraisal of the banalities that domestic life has to offer. And while the revealing of such triteness might seem dark and empty on occasion, Dooley's delicate, interweaving language affords the reader a new glimpse at every turn. Divided into three sections, with just over 50 poems, this frankly and openly erotic collection brings readers to the streets of the neighborhood and the home's closets, where family members are exposed to sexual releases and punishments. The titular poem offers, her voice her full life her adultness / and you touch her for six months touch her / around the house now touch the great / span and for once let her touch a man. Dooley plays with form throughout, but his knowledge of the sensual is captured in a book that puts us where we don't belong, but where we want to go. A masterful debut.--Eleveld, Mark Copyright 2014 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his National Poetry Series-winning debut collection, Dooley demonstrates a fascination with the ways in which human beings invade one another's spaces, and in doing so invade themselves. Enthralled by family mythos, his best work hinges on a father who "thought his body/ was small/ and quiet/ like a girl's," and later becomes the perpetrator of a sexual assault that drives the family apart: "Bobby, his sister says/ there are some accusations// against you." Tender, nuanced, angry, and answerless, Dooley's poems concerning his father and aunt are a brief testament to the power of writing about tragedy and taboo with empathy and disbelief. In the book's most arresting poem, "Snapshot," his breathless lines depict a woman searching for a picture of Dooley's father in order to cope with her pain by defacing the picture: "her therapist said find one put it/ on the bathroom floor so she searched albums/ for his face." Dooley falters, however, in his attempts to turn the experiences of people outside his blood and kin into poems of trespass. And despite several ambitious poems that deal with coming out and fatalist anxiety about sexuality, many of Dooley's poems attempt to "verb" their way into a narrative through action words instead of creating an arresting poem by building a small world out of language. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
