Don’t be afraid. They’re only words. These things that move our limbs: engines of a kind. You can climb in, and rev it up with me, and watch the terror fill the windshield. It’s our right, as apes, to see just what it is the sky can do, and these trees, before they both collapse. These words being the journey. death songs is a quiet protest against divisions created by attempts to silence the dark consuming humankind. In an anti-lyrical fashion, Dunn reminds us how much of life is sustained by aspects of our nature under political scrutiny today. From baking bread to pounding meat, cannibalistic violence is omnipresent. This poetry mourns for the fallen self, expositing the death rattle of chains sustaining our slavery to a bored world. These poems are a voice for the lost despair that once annulled life freely. By creating spaces between language and loss, Dunn is a voice to the world a shallow culture shuns for values that do not emancipate. By seeing life’s dungeon as inevitable, Dunn sets the reader free from mental bonds that restrict individuality. These poems do not appear personal and view the personal through a lens that is almost anonymous. Dunn’s use of language is not elaborate but can sew with threads from multiple looms. His vocabulary is unusual for contemporary poetry, but it is life giving. Nothing else reads like Robin Wyatt Dunn. From tribute to protest, Dunn’s poetry is illumined and sharp. In reading, one can connect with the silence of mourning and the chaos of structure. Dunn’s use of language is asexual; it is regenerative. The words meet each other in isolation yet are whole themselves. Syntactically, the poems develop from an inner chaos into a complete organic fate. One cannot make sense of them, or even relate entirely. However, the feeling arising from each poem is one of residence in suffering intellect. The mind is its own place-and like Samson Agonistes, we will tear that building down and reinvent from the ruins. Each word is a liberator, a full thought, a pulmonary grief sifting the autonomy of the wreck of beauty.
