Tallahassee writer Marda Messick’s debut poetry collection, “Feral Princess,” strikes a skilled balance in the assemblage of intense, life-shaping episodes that work to form a broader narrative.
Published by the relaunched Apalachee Press, Messick’s chapbook comes out Saturday, Sept. 7, with a reading event at Midtown Reader, 1123 Thomasville Road.
Rarely do we see a contemporary poet this bold in her use of narrative structure: we travel with a central speaker, beginning with childhood and onward through the myriad stages of life until mortality itself looms over the journey like a second character, sometimes nemesis, sometimes source of light.
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The larger arc of the book is one that trends toward at a hard-won, fully conscious peace with mortality itself. The book’s mode is retrospective and elegiac, but not ruminative. It is emotionally courageous, but not showy or self-indulgent.
Messick hits the ground running in the opening and titular poem, probing the myths by which our lives are so often arranged from childhood onward: “Am I not a maiden fair? / Where is my magic ring, my unicorn, / my satin gown? The beast with three wishes / has not appeared. Nor any prince”(“Feral Princess”).