Black series

by Laurie Sheck

.".. It was like something I dreamt, a whispering I might have heard/ in the long-ago of light and mist and rain/ imprinting unreadable coins on the rooftops ..." These words, spoken by the narrator of the dense, gorgeous, and unsettling book entitled "Black Series" could serve to describe Sheck's poetry itself. In long, undulating lines, she lays forth her vision of a fitful world that exists in parallel to our own, building a commentary on the broken but often beautiful circuitry of our mental and physical lives. Reading this book is a near psychedelic experience. But Sheck's universe is not just a virtual one; throughout these poems, the ordinary is the jumping off point as well as the final destination of her eye and ear. "What does the orange hawkweed do inside this dark -- its radiance/ secretive but not extinguished?" she asks, suggesting that what exists in darkness can be lit from within, as her verse is.