Grocery List Poems by Rhiannon McGavin (Not a Cult Media, 2021)
There’s something hypnotic about Rhiannon McGavin’s sophomore poetry collection, Grocery List Poems. These poems will open your awareness to the organic shapes and movements of our lives. Whether it’s through the seconds spent on the tile of a bathroom floor, the train station platform, a botanical garden, at the feet of an ever-growing city, or between the bittersweet movement of our dreams. These details make you become more aware of the found poetry that is waiting to be crafted in the many different corners of our lives. McGavin is hyper aware of the passage of time. She highlights the flexibility of memory, the strangeness of dreams, and the patterned interactions we can have with strangers. Each poem seems to occur in the present moment and acts as a surreal image, a painting that slowly waltzes to the edge of a canvas. In “Persimmon season,'' she writes:
Our days slow with sex,
the thick yellow curtains always drawn
against the heat so that the light falls
through the color washing the bedroom
in a gold we could swim through, honey
spilling under the door as if every hour
was that time just before sunset.
McGavin’s appreciation to the late french filmmaker, Agnes Varda’s films is apparent in the poems, “Elsa La Rose (1966)” and “Mur Murs (1981).” McGavin highlights the artificial connections with the actors on screen against the backdrop of humanity and the real lives of the filmmakers and actors creating these films. We are also simultaneously observing these films while presently in the scene, like a two sided mirror so that we’re fully immersed in the cinematic experience while simultaneously looking back on these landscapes.
A stand out moment is in the way that form and enjambment is manipulated in the “Dream Diary” sequence. The fourteen poems resolve to a pleasing ending when the ghost lines of past poems come back to haunt the reader in the fifteenth and final poem “(nightmare theory)” by citing previous lines and creating a whole new verse. It’s a powerful finale to the section and makes you want to return to the previous moments to see how she chopped and reinvented her own words. The whole landscape is fueled by a vivid imagination and the leftovers of her conscious mind and what pours into the dreams.
McGavin writes that memory is not always a place we visit, but a living and breathing creature that seems to be untamable most days. In “Engram,” she writes that memory is like a rabid dog at her side, and as she navigates through life, she is always brought back to the past. She writes about how memory can be a destructive force, how when we want to build something new, memory tends to make a mess of the loose edges. But despite the mess that the past can bring, we still want to hold on.
I’ve got to follow the zigzag tether of memory
through town, whistling myself numb
for dates and times only to find memory
running down the middle of the road.
This whole neighborhood howls if memory
whimpers.
Many of these feelings that are encapsulated in these poems are universal and there's a comfort that is present in this collection which can be attuned to the title, a place we all frequent despite the many differences in our lives. McGavin expands on what it means to trust with the reader. Each poem is intimate and familiar as if we are members of her inner circle. Each line is a whisper, reassuring us that we've been here before, with her, as she takes us through liminal spaces, into her dream world, and into the past. Through the reoccurring images of flowers and fruits, McGavin not only brings attention to the anchor of desire and bliss that comes from being alive, but also tells us that these things are worth our attention. The images ground you to the moment and activate the senses. We are reminded of the weight of a lover’s body through plum colored hickies and the softness of apartment walls through the surface of a magnolia petal. These images linger with you and remind you to find the beauty in your own life. In the poem, “Love Language” she writes:
Oh best best friends, split this
pomegranate and an hour with me, call me when
quiet is too thick to cut, call me
rabid with gossip, call me when you get home.
Sweethearts, did you know friendship & freedom carry
the same root?
Grocery List Poems is an unreplicable experience, just like each day that we inhibit on earth. We wake. We fall asleep. We do it all over. But nothing is born in the same space as before. We get older, our lover’s leave us, the film ends, the dream concludes. Grocery List Poems breaks your heart open, tells us to slow down, remove the bounds and barriers around us, and to internalize the expansive nature of life. And as we’re halfway through 2021, the first day after the summer solstice, poet Rhiannon McGavin reminds us that there is beauty in the small details of our day. She reminds us to not be tricked into the politics of time because we are the ones crafting each and every second of it. McGavin reminds us to be easy on ourselves, hold on to one another, and harvest the small memories — even if they are untamable. In “Resolution,” she writes:
Let us be better than our lost days.
Grocery List Poems (Not a Cult Media, 2021)
Rhiannon McGavin has failed the CA driver’s license test three times so far. She has performed from the Hollywood Bowl to the Library of Congress, as well as on NPR. Her work has been published by Tia Chucha Press, Teen Vogue, and C Magazine. As a YoungArts Finalist in Spoken Word, she was nominated for the Presidential Scholar of the Arts. Rhiannon was the Youth Poet Laureate of Los Angeles in 2016, and recently graduated from UCLA.
Kailah Figueroa is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and an enthusiast of fresh flowers, overgrown gardens, and coffee. She is a recipient of the Arts, Activism, and Social Justice Fulbright Award. Her writing has appeared in homology lit, Anti-Heroin Chic, Perhappened, and others. You can keep up with her on Twitter or on her Website.