Thursday by Chad Redden
plain wrap
press
release: May
2012
58 pages
If you’ve
gotten down with plain wrap press, you’ve probably read Janey Smith’s Animals, and if you’ve gotten down with Animals’ aesthetic, you probably like
what plain wrap does. And if you still need convincing (which, let’s be honest,
is kind of silly), these very same people have been kind enough to give us
another small, simple nugget of sad radness, Chad Redden’s Thursday. Less prosey but no less ballsy than its press’s
predecessor, the book is a careful, quiet meditation on memory deterioration,
companionship, and
time-as-revolving-door-being-pushed-by-a-metal-armed-figure-in-black, not to
mention Scrabble and the possibility of a shyster of a husband or non-husband
named Omar (“Do you have an S and an N? / If you do, / you can spell Sonar. /
S-O-N-A-R”). There’s Margaret, for whom every day is a Thursday, which might
not sound like such a bad proposition, except when she starts un-thinking a
whole mess of other things until her visitor has to prove, once again, “I’m not
Johnny Cash / even though I wear black.” Redden (of NAP fame) orchestrates an
unassuming fill-in-the-blanks wordscape of Alzheimer’s-brittle verse that
builds and rebuilds at a board game’s pace, all the more eerie and powerful
because of what those gathering blanks signify. Certain sections where there’s
just “THURSDAY” followed by an empty page are more devastating than most of the
poetry I’ve read this year. But alongside the potentially frightening
realization of what’s going on, there exists a constant and patient tenderness
hovering within the text and in the spaces between it. Because empathy’s great,
right, both on the level of, I want to keep you and what’s left of your
fragmented consciousness as alive as possible, or sometimes it’s just cool when
someone’s nice enough to care about the little things: “I can’t remember what /
you said the crows meant.” They probably meant you should pick up Thursday. Well, not really. But you
should.
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