Orang by Christy Bailes

“ ‘I want to make it clear / I enjoyed your work,’ ” an anonymous editor tells Christy Bailes at the end of “Unfortunately, Your Poem Is Not the Right Fit.” So what a delight it is to read all the poems in Orang and realize that each one is the right fit, with subjects as varied as cycling, iguanas falling from trees, clarinets, and love. Wildly imaginative and carefully crafted, from free verse to sonnets, the poems take us on a journey through time and place, inviting us to be, like this free-spirited, talented poet, “bad”—a word, she tells us in “To Deny Which Is,” that “really means free.”

–Lynne Knight

With Orang, Christy Bailes makes her poetic debut with a singular voice. Linguistically playful, phonically brash, these remarkable poems are at once both hilarious and heartbreaking. Such are the emotional struggles of learning to live with one’s inner beast, often misunderstood and maligned, but essential to the wholeness we call human. Grab a drink, sit down with Orang, and prepare yourself for a wild and bumpy ride.

–Joshua McKinney

I loved riding full throttle with Christy Bailes through her “poetic coma” of enthusiasms: “salsa music,” “solar sauce,” “cat talk” and the “dark wood of the clarinet”; then creeping cautiously as ”iguanas fall from trees”, and a “warty frog lounges on a plastic chair”.

Excess is applauded in Christy’s Orang and so is the “urge to be bad” because “’bad’ really means free.”  Oh, to be with friends in the Suisun Valley, where they make up eulogies and declare “every day should be a holiday.”

Christy’s poems are sly, uproarious, challenging, irreverent, witty, fully realized, and dangerous.  Holding a can of soda, she says, “My lips warm the softest metal, with a thousand sexy sips a day,” and ascribes “holy blessedness to the last drop of aspartame.”

Read these poems at your risk.

–Sandra Dutton, Award-winning fiction writer, poet, and playwright.