Neurotic Love Baby by Marie Conlan

Marie Conlan’s newest collection, Neurotic Love Baby spans five intoxicating sections composed of entropic spaces, hues of wilderness, and piercing questions that are at once ephemeral and funny: “How many things do you own?”  Jutting images and gritty testimony collide to embody intimate fields wherein “you are a sepia rinse & I keep seeing your face bloom from inside my mouth”. Conlan’s prose-like poems, in their varying incarnations, culminate into a landscape where bodies decompose and mix “with blood, dust with sweat” inside an urgent syntax that does not let up.  These moments arise as a glimmering compost of contrast and tension which are both feral and refined, electric and emboldened: “you rub the line of my spine you tenderize me into a pulp I am waiting for you to discard at the bottom of your morning juice.”  Here, the segments live as a coating of sediment and sentiment, of “leaking petals” we wear together as we peer into a “three pastel sunset.”

–Heather Sweeney, author of Dear Marshall, Language is Our Only Wilderness (Spuyten Duyvil) and Call Me California (Finishing Line Press)

Marie Conlan’s poetry has an aperture that widens & compresses in neurotic palpitations. With a psychedelic tenderness, Conlan guides us through a spinning vortex, launching us into snow puddles, smearing us with cacti snot, crumbling us into seed. Questions are posed & answered through the wild mundane. God is found in trembling fists. Through bodies through bloodroots through morning smell of bacon grease & kaleidoscopic landscapes, we feel the raw yearning of a young being attempting to get even closer to her lover; attempting to weave her life, her love, her fear, her reverence & her dreaming into a kind of beauty. For Conlan, any kind of beauty breeds the realest kind of meaning.

–Gabrielle Joy Lessans, author of Bread Of (Ornithopter)