Life as a Moving Target review

Today marks the released of Life as a Moving Target, by Erin Zarro, a chapbook published by Turtleduck Press.

The publisher site describes it:

Life as a Moving Target is a poetry chapbook that explores living with fibromyalgia and intractable vertigo, from onset of symptoms to getting a diagnosis. Also the aftermath, learning to cope and manage the condition. Poems of hope, courage, and strength of spirit.

I know people who suffer from these problems (as well as others), and I know there can be beauty in our experience of suffering and our reaction to it, so I looked forward to reading this collection.

Some of Erin’s poems hark toward looking for that beauty in the pain, using imagery such as a chrysalis to describe how she felt, hibernating away from the world that she’d grown accustomed to. After reading lines like “I have no voice, no clean perceptions. / Lobotomized, silenced by the bell,” I will never look at a cocoon the same way again.

The lines that most affected me:

I tiptoe upside down
on the tightrope
of life.

Again and again, she uses metaphors for balance, for movement, for focus — tightropes and pirouettes, crawling, tops, the world pulling her along with it. Other images appear, rainbows and fog, medical terms and magic, shadows and shapes.

Overall, this is an incredibly moving and personal collection of poems, that deserves to be lingered with, reread, and shared. I encourage everyone to check out the excerpt at the Turtleduck Website and consider buying the chapbook.

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