A Ribbon with No Tail, by Alana Solin

Poetry, chapbook, 36 pages, from Bottlecap Features.

From the outset, “Like a ring / that hits the ground rolling,” A Ribbon With No Tail is athletic and precise. The strategy these poems employ does not leave them static; in fact, the opposite. Each poem grabs a cut edge and unravels, revealing: “The game is silken / scattered, alive. There is / a plan for me.” The speaker looks at the sun hidden behind her reflected silhouette, watches ink move in water, and plays The Sims, but beneath the banal these poems carve secrets with pattern and motion. Objects run together and emerge transfigured: “The door becomes a wing, / the room its battered crane, / & the drum a hum.” Some bell of faith rings through this collection; some god stands just out of frame for the poems to flit toward and flee. In its luminous shadow, Solin writes formulas for what otherwise cannot be calculated, sums made of more than their parts.

Alana Solin is a writer from New Jersey. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Touch the Donkey, TAGVVERK, Afternoon Visitor, Annulet, Second Factory, Tyger Quarterly, and elsewhere.