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By Lynette G. Esposito
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Rich Ives author of Light from a Small Brown Bird says of Laurie Blauner’s Come Closer that it is an assemblage of inter woven prose poems. He adds that fresh patterns patiently emerge in varied and surprising forms. Close Encounters, published by The Bitter Oleander Press in Fayetteville, New York, fulfills this promise.
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In the poem I’m Not Like the Others, Blauner creates a form that looks like a conversation with paragraph indentions that support the form and lines that indicate back and forth dialogue. The poem is in part one.
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…I’m Not Like the Others,
I tell the lost little boy wandering in the woods.
He hides behind a tree with long, wispy branches and leaves. When he asks, I
Allow him to touch my stray feathers that will soon turn into green scales.
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The poem continues with back -and- forth conversations and reads much like a piece of fiction.
The storyline progresses with the creature trying to show the boy the way to safety. but then something surprising happens to this creature who wants to be his better self.
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I am not like the others, I reiterate. Come, I will show you the way.
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…We saunter towards the edge of the trees before there is a field. The lost boy is slow. I move behind him, lick his neck to encourage to go faster.
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When I taste him, I can’t help myself, like the others.
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The poem is like a parable that reveals the conflict of one’s inner struggle and the reality of what one is when they collide. Blauner has excellent control all through this verse with her skillful ability to draw the reader into the woods and keep him there.
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The tome is divided into four parts: I’m Not Like the Others, The Books, The City That Knows Me, and he Guide for the Perplexed. This is a good organizing technique and helps to focus each section. In part two, The Books, the poem, A Memoir is constructed first with a prose stanza followed by eleven one-line stanzas each beginning with the pronoun I.
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…I’ve been told that the use of I is too prevalent in my writing.
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She then goes on with her reactions.
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I tell myself:
I enjoy complaining.
I talk and cry too much in my sleep.
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The reader gets to know her better in her defiance of overusing the word I according to others.
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In part three, The City That Knows Me, in the poem, Memoirs From the City, Blauner uses paragraph like stanzas that contrast the feeling in the country compared to the city.
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…I dream of going to the country whose space the city is jealous of,
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She uses the landscape surrounding the city as her comparison and skillfully reveals discontent in both. In part four, Guide for the Perplexed, Blauner explores the poem Aging in the Little Place.
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…Alive, he took me out to dinner with my tiny head. I whispered into
his enormous car that something was hurting me, something was always hurting
me for a while.
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The poem explores the physiological view of oneself as one gets older and the value goes down. Blauner ends the poem with the note that the little body would soon be gone.
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The book is a successful merger of prose-like forms and poetic creativity. The subjects are universal and handled in a fresh way. I would read this book of verse again.
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Come Closer is available from http://www.bitteroleander.com
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Lynette G. Esposito has been an Adjunct Professor at Rowan University, Burlington County and Camden County Colleges. She has taught creative writing and conducted workshops in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Mrs. Esposito holds a BA in English from the University of Illinois and an MA in Creative Writing and English Literature from Rutgers University.
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Naila Francis is a writer/poet, grief doula and wedding officiant based in Philadelphia. She is also a founding member of Salt Trails, an interdisciplinary collective honoring grief through community rituals. Her poetry has previously been published in “North of Oxford,” “Scribbler,” “Voicemail Poems” and the Healing Verse Phone Line. 
North of Oxford 