Downtown by Nicole Callihan

“The energy of Nicole Callihan‘s new chapbook, “Downtown” is kinetic. Image to interwoven image, the poem shouts out a revelation, then moves around the corner to find another: “I wander the sky until morning. / Oklahoma floods./ My mother drives home from her 12-hour shift at the ER. / What gets washed away?/ I am an old dirt road./ Washed away, out, up.” Callihan is a master of juxtaposition.  A crane seen from a hospital window that’s lit up with lights forming a heart becomes just a few lines later, a reminder or a beloved, dead poet: “Heart. Crane.”  Callihan’s images in this beautiful book resonate, stay fixed and return to your mind again and again: a man leaning against the blue wall, an apartment high in the sky, the Ancient Greek chorus of the people on the Brooklyn avenue below.  “Downtown” will pull you in and not let you leave its dreamlike trance until you, like the speaker, transform.”

–Iris Jamahl Dunkle, Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2016-2017

“It’s tempting to imagine we’ve surpassed the era described by Sexton and Plath, but in “Downtown,” Nicole Callihan takes us into the broken heart of Brooklyn, where to be poet, wife, mother, teacher, Southerner, and resident of a tall glass building is to wrestle, as those earlier poets did, with invisibility, loss, and “disgraceful appetites.”  Fragments and layers, lies and secrets, jokes and unanswered calls—Callihan makes a world, between earth and sky, in which nothing is as it seems and the person whose poem we’re reading is too distracted or wounded to truly inhabit her own attitudes or identity or body.  But the poem she writes—or rather, it “writes itself”—is magnificent, knows itself perfectly, and tells the entire unsettling truth, so that everything important can begin.”

–Matt Longabucco, author of The Sober Day (DoubleCross Press) and Everybody Suffers: The Selected Poems of Juan García Madero (O’Clock Press 2014)