The Magic Of Isaura Ren’s Poetry
A review of the chapbook Interlucent
If you’re in search of poetry that kicks and yelps and loves and dawns, you are in luck.
Superbly crafted, Isaura Ren’s debut chapbook Interlucent shines with daring forms and a dexterous musicality. Her work exudes wonder at every step of the process. Reading her is like stepping into an advanced laboratory where all the chemicals are out to play.
With electric language dressed in verve, these poems are explosively unpredictable and radiant in their range. Ren’s lines are punctuated with never-ending surprises that move from lovely observations and light humor to piercingly dark twists and wild reframes of prior sentiments.
Ren’s poetry is of an inventful form. Both oddly personal and oneirically relatable, her zany voice is filled with zigs and zags that will leave you touched by the color of lived experience. In other words, she’s a true poet who works wonders within every facet of a poem’s shape. She bends the space of lines and stanzas for a sing-song effect that will leave you changed for the better.
Reading Ren is a delight. These poems should be required reading for anyone looking to advance their own poetics.
Sonically delightful, I can assure you that these poems pair well with jazz and marijuana. Her line breaks sing with staccato allure like “mouths / under the / lapping / of tide / tongues” to strike your noggin into the crispness of immediate experience. Her mystical speeches are complemented by melodic arrangements of text to achieve a soft, dream-like quality that is simply enchanting.
Isaura is a mythical force operating within the dichotomies that guard our lives.
Joy-sadness, light-dark, self-other — this poet is like a reporter coming back in the aftermath of insight. Or, if I may quote Mike Shiner from Birdman just this once: “she’s wrestling with complex human emotions.”
As every poet should.
Isaura Ren (she/they) is a poet and writer from the San Francisco Bay Area. She is the editor-in-chief of perhappened mag, an online monthly literary journal. She believes in the power of lowercase letters and naps. You can check out her debut chapbook here.
Zach Klebaner (he/him) is a writer based in Tamarac, FL whose work has been featured in literary journals such as Oddball Magazine and Wax Poetry and Art. He’s on Twitter @ZKlebaner where you can find him investigating the idiosyncrasies of our society.
