Design by Theresa Burns
Terrapin Books, 2022
The poet Theresa Burns layers familial and environmental motifs—at times humorously, at times solemnly—throughout Design (Terrapin Books, 2022). Burns’s alluring metaphors and visceral images of both the private and public spheres enchant me. Indeed, each poem invites me to discover more about the poet herself, whose charming, sophisticated verse scintillates on the page like rain-speckled flower petals.
Design highlights several key motifs, including nature and its colors. In “Green,” Burns talks about her childhood with a pal named Teddy:
The first time we got high
was here, clouds purplish at midday, and where
the grass line set against the next mountain
glowed lime, and we laughed our asses off,
thinking it was the weed making things
extra green and alien. Now I see it’s that way
at dusk too, the horizon lit and even more
lemony flowers I can almost taste, though that tree
on the right seems somehow diminished.
Burns uses different colors to paint a vivid scene of the past, from the “clouds purplish at midday” to the “lemony flowers” whose yellow overtones complement the other lighthearted, yellow images throughout the book.
Besides nature and color motifs, Burns writes about complicated family dynamics. In “Knights of Columbus,” one of my favorite poems in the book, Burns presents a father getting into a car accident, suggesting a toxic mother-father relationship:
He’d gone out to find my mother, he told us.
She might have been wandering
again, knocking on
strangers’ doors without her teeth,
though she hadn’t walked
the length of the block in years.Maybe they quarreled. Maybe he
threatened something and left—
then in the middle of it, forgot what he’d do
if he reached that place alone.
He woke with a scratch on his chin.Let him think what he thinks, we know
why it happened.
It terrifies me that the father could have died in the car accident or that something more sinister or devastating could have happened had the father found or confronted his wife. Even though the poem does not provide much background information regarding the father’s marriage, the dread lurking between the lines more than makes up for the poem’s general open-endedness.
Burns also balances the sinister with humor. In “Aubade with Rare Bird,” Burns utilizes metaphorical, sardonic language to characterize the quirky bond between herself and a mysterious creature:
Harebrained and morning-breathed, I ache
for your paws on me before you make the coffee.Plague times, I’d swap spit, give up my last clean
sheets for you. Anyone messes with you, I’ll get up at dawnand Alexander Hamilton them for you.
Literally nonsensical though delightfully hyperbolic, the poem exhilarates me the most when it uses “Alexander Hamilton,” who was shot in a duel, as a verb, intimating violence: “I’ll get up at dawn / and shoot them for you.”
Burns bares her soul to wonderous artistic effect, revealing trepidation and whimsy. I strongly recommend Design.
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Jacob Butlett (he/him) is an award-winning gay author from Dubuque, Iowa, who is pursuing an MFA in creative writing. Some of his work has been published in Whale Road Review, The MacGuffin, Colorado Review, Lunch Ticket, Into the Void, The Hollins Critic, and Plain China.