DINOSAUR HOUR by Biman Roy

In poems “passion-scalded” yet evanescent as “the breath of moon through a chiffon curtain,” Biman Roy plies language to stitch together our broken world. Lyrical and sensuous, these poems allow the negative spaces between words to enact the solitude between lovers who approach “the edge / where love turns bloody.” Roy’s questions throughout the poems (“What if you rearrange the chairs…?”) are affective in the way they make us complicit in their longing. Deeply engaging, Dinosaur Hour demonstrates how poetry, in its anxiety and ardor, might mend “this rancor,” might salvage the soul.

–Michael Waters

The poems in Dinosaur Hour impressed me with their engagement of the violence in pastoral. Poem after poem, Roy presents imagery of a brutal (or brutalized) landscape against which humans are silent, ambivalent, and torn. His pastoral violence emerges as the most apt articulation in the speaker’s interactions with others and with his own memories, anxieties around the passage of time, and concerns about what happens after this life ends, but also how articulating violence done to or by nature provided a relief from the strongest doubts of life, presenting a fresh, 21^st century ars poetica response to the Romantic view of landscape holding all truths. What more satisfying description of a domestic spat is there than feeling “as if someone had / slit the throat of the moon?” How better to describe a miscarriage and its accompanying medical instruments than “the cleaned bones of winter, / glint and stare as rarefied ribs / stripped of their pride?” When life is lackluster and middle-aged existence seems a promontory of nothingness, at least the sky provides a thrill, allowing a space for our speaker to project “perfect ankles, passion-scalded.”

–Kallie Falandays