The Critics’ Corner

“Kali Meets Medusa”

No one really cares much how song lyrics look; we want to hear how they sound. Poetry is a little different: it can be sung or recited, of course, as well as read. But its disposition on the page, including the line breaks and punctuation, makes a poem more or less easy to read and understand.

A particular visual arrangement may be important to an author. Some authors place lines and punctuation unconventionally to suit their own purposes. But readers can’t know what those purposes are; all we know is what we see on the page.

Anna Ruiz’ “Kali Meets Medusa” is a case in point. As a song may be interpreted in different ways, one of our Review Editors proposes the following arrangement of lines and punctuation. The Review Board agrees that it makes the poem quite accessible.

Kali Meets Medusa

by Anna Ruiz

Oh how I have been seduced
by this
stale bread of life!
Billions of incarnations have left me awkward,
like a newborn fawn

guarded by secret,
lush thickets
of deeply
held animal lust,
but you see,

in my self-immolating
dragon’s play
passion’s embers seldom die,
fire is but the next breath away,

and the crown of thorns is a flower
that grows close

to the heart of bewilderment
transfixed

in the all-seeing eye

by the sea,

by that terrible torment of a sea.

... The wind came to me, tousled my hair,
lying in the still carpet of another dawn
as skin crawled over
raven bones,

whispered of fish drowning

in an avalanche
of jealous water.

But I am a woman now,

a crone hunchbacked
and pregnant with life,

serpents, like tender babies,

crawling over my
bowed head.