The Blog

Anna Journey’s second book takes its name from an exhibit at L.A.’s Museum of Jurassic Technology called “Vulgar Remedies: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.” The exhibit comprises folk cures and rituals predating modern medicine; the poetry collection features hypnotic fabulations on memory, fauna, and the body. At times tender and anecdotal, others grotesque and nightmarish, Vulgar Remedies explores the boundaries that divide—or fail to divide—the past from the present, the dead from the living, and the self from the object of its love. If these poems are remedies, they treat symptoms of heartbreak, pubescence, and the vertiginous business of being embodied.

In this volume of thoughtful, reflective, lyric-narrative poems, David Rigsbee's deep psychic engagement with perception, memory, culture, and the politics of human interaction, in all their expansiveness and limitation, is on full display. The poet's sensibility—guided by compassionate reflection and seared by loss—discovers its way forward through the inland waterways of memory to reach for difficult epiphanies. Lyric immediacy alternates with reflective expansiveness and melancholy, and with economy of diction and startling appositions of image and interrogative, Rigsbee breaks open the factual planes—the faits accomplis of events, of names and dates—to re-construe the connections between them.