Reviewed by Kathleen Bednarek

Temporary Beast
By Joanna Solfrian
Beltway Editions
April 2024, ISBN-13: 978-1957372075, Paperback, 88 pages

Welcome to the strange and wonderful world of Joanna Solfrian poems. Solfrian begins Temporary Beast with a standalone poem entitled “Don’t Go to the River.” The poem’s gentle, conversational tone (“Friend”) and intimate imagery guides readers towards the wisdom that understanding comes from self-knowledge rather than external seeking: You will have a good place to sit/while you watch yourself flow by.

This initial poem speaks to Temporary Beast as a whole. Solfrian’s casual tone surfaces throughout. The collection is playful, scattered with endearing imagery, with themes re-established through the repetition of ghazal and several poems entitled “Rorschach for Lorca” in which Solfrian conjures the duende of powerful forces at play in her visions of  loss and desire, effectively altering the collection’s flow. There is enough rigor to push the collection forward in meaningful ways as Solfrian grapples with heady existential subjects that at times distort abruptly such as in the poem, “Grownup.” The poem has a solemnity as the speaker is scattering both of her parent’s ashes, but devolves in an absurd scenario of literal blowback:

You scooped up handfuls of your mother one Easter Sunday.
You stood on a cold beach and tossed. The wind blew her
back onto your body, into the seams of your shoes (igniting,
you did not know at the time, a decade-long crisis re. what to
do with them). Thinking she was food, the gulls came.

The eclectic mix of suburban memories and contemporary city scenes, meditations on motherhood, poignant encounters interspersed with a shorter clip of found poetry; ars poetica adds levity before Temporary Beast resurfaces in longer form poems delving primarily into the specificity of memories. Her sister crashes the Camry outside the family home, the names of neighbors and the local pharmacist meander Solfrian’s poems and emotions surrounding her mother’s death. The house is no longer painted beige and there is no Christmas cactus alluding to the deeper question at hand,  that no matter the level of familiarity: what exactly is home anyway?

It’s these enduring questions that drift in obliquely while reading Temporary Beast. So difficult to pin down yet inescapable, Solfrian finds words for the nearly ineffable.

There’s a Mary Ruefle type nuance and quirkiness to Solfrian’s work. There are surreal aspects to the poems that meander without dissociating. Such as in the poem, “Rorschach Lorca: Desire”:

The still-brilliant teeth of the cadavers
are inundated with yellow secrets.

Or in “On Re-Reading Christian Wiman’s My Bright Abyss: Meditation of a Modern Believer”:
I don’t want heaven to be elsewhere, all-healing. I want to die/into life, so I can repair my relationship with paper plates.

Solfrian openly acknowledges in “Perimenopause” that she doesn’t know what a poem is. The poet states: I don’t know what a poem is, either. Sometimes it’s a/palpitation, a sugar maple bud or a bloody nose. There’s a willingness to express honest uncertainty in that question—what is a poem?—that speaks to what poets often feel, but hardly ever address. It’s valuable to consider because the question itself often sparks creative breakthroughs. It’s uncovering what about is, well, essentially about.

I felt connected to the collection because of this spirit of discovery, which resonates in strangely relatable experiences. Temporary Beast is filled with curious relationships, through cause and effect apprehended in new ways, powered through metaphor such as in the gorgeous poem, “Invitation”:

On the moon-road we weave through beams
of original thought, light so close
we can see its particles. Some of the motes
pause on our faces. In this manner,
we are our own moons, and our children,
long after we are dead, will look up to find us.

Wildly cerebral  yet grounded, Temporary Beast speaks through visions of daily life with an unusually gifted voice that continually surprises.

About the reviewer: Kathleen Bednarek is a writer living in Pennsylvania. She is a current MFA student and has a MA in Poetry from Wilkes University.