Everything is Quiet by Kendra Grant Malone
Review
by Stephen Tully Dierks
Everything is Quiet is the first print book by Kendra Grant Malone, a poet living in Brooklyn, but her work has been widely published on the Internet, including several e-books. She writes autobiographical poems that seem sincere and very personal. I have had a recurring, irrational thought that she is somehow “the standard” for contemporary “confessional” or “sincere” poetry. I feel this is rhetorical hogwash (what is “the standard”? why should anyone be called that? what is “sincere”?), and yet the extent to which her work moves and strikes me provokes hyperbole, and that by itself seems like a more meaningful compliment. Labels like confessional and sincere are reductive and maybe even a disservice, in the critical sense, to her poems. The poet herself puts it this way, in the poem, “Quiet As Death”: “…i want you all / to be quiet / very quiet / quiet as death / so I can think about / myself / without your cries / and wails and fits / of interpretation.”
These poems present events, thoughts, and emotions from a very real-seeming life. They also contain many lines that surprised me, such as “i never told you […] one day / while you were / at work / i accidentally / kicked a pigeon / to death.” This sort of quietly menacing line, coupled with the forthright emotions of the narrator and the direct-from-life-seeming material, make the collection feel charged and interesting to me—not only am I interested in learning about this person’s life, but also I’m excited and ever so slightly apprehensive of what she will reveal to me next.
There is sex and sexuality of various kinds, a dead kitten, friends who are assholes, friends who are wonderful, a disabled brother, cocaine, the kicking and chasing of pigeons, a lot of drinking. But it’s the shaping of the poems that moves me.
“Little Girls Are Women Somehow In Some Way”—the last lines toward which it moves, painfully sad, inexorable. “I Never Believed In God”—the mindless, uncaring universe summed up in seven stanzas. “Sylvia Plath At Sixteen”—the way a beautiful friendship is described, and the passage of time, joyful, wistful, and sad, until a closing so heartfelt and moving it made me tear up on a public bus.
Everything is Quiet contains insightful, playful, and heartbreaking poems. It is easy to read, but it is not easy to feel all these feelings. I am very glad this book exists.
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