Into The The by Robin Reagler
Backlash Press, 2021
In this unusual, moving collection, Robin Reagler makes her own kind of music from a topsy-turvy Texas— full of memory, sorrows, stereotypes, archetypes, Hollywood, grit, and truth. The epigraph by Wallace Stevens shows us what’s to come while explaining the title, “Where was it one first heard the truth? The the.” From there, we are in for a wild ride through the Texas landscape of Reagler’s mind, as in the opening poem, “Damage”:
After miles of road and rolling plateau, you might reach a fading white adobe
Church…
Maybe you’d walk inside that place of worship, dip your finger into an urn of
Cold water, and make a bullet-shaped drop on your own forehead…
You could drive through the sun.
You could write down a version of everything you’ve done…
You could turn the page.
We are invited into the speaker’s world from this first “you” and thereafter as she navigates painful memories, remaking her experiences, as in the poem “My Own Bible Story”: “What I say is true. And then / The cry—it leaping from my throat, I spy / A picture spilling holy lights all moving / around. I close my eyes.” And in the poem “The Yellow Store,” she asks of her family/childhood/memory/self, “What have you done / with the children / who made you?”
The language that Reagler uses to create and recreate her world is wonderfully original, with metaphors and similes turned upside down, like in her poem “Everybody’s Autoerotica,” “Sick people darken the insects like sidewalks.”
This collection is a unique work by a talented poet working carefully to find new truth and beauty in old places. As she artfully says in the poem “Dreck”: “More often than not, I / dig it. The the.” And so do we.
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Meghan Sterling’s work was nominated for three Pushcart Prizes in 2021 and has been published or is forthcoming in Rattle, Colorado Review, Pinch Journal, and others. She is an associate poetry editor of The Maine Review. Her collection These Few Seeds is out now from Terrapin Books.