Blood Or Explosions; Debbie Kirk's
BLEEDING FROM MY PALMS reviewed
by David Barker
Debbie Kirk's work always does two things to me.  First, it surprises the hell out of me.  The things she chooses to write about.  Her uncanny assessment of herself and her situation.  The unlikely and apt images she comes up with.  The unflinching honesty of her statements. The raw emotions she juggles like flaming batons.  Secondly, it makes me feel terribly dull, unimaginative, and unperceptive; so pedestrian, so mundane.  There are a whole bunch of things in this life I never thought of writing about, a whole bunch of approaches I never considered trying, and here's Debbie, a poet two and a half decades my junior, doing them, and with incredible style.  Although it may sound like some form of envy, this actually is a positive reaction because it makes me feel like getting off my ass and writing some new stuff I never dreamed it was allowable, or even possible, to write.  There are very few poets, living or dead, mainstream published or small press published,  who have these two effects on me.  Debbie's one of them.
Bleeding From My Palms is Debbie's fourth book, and in it, she proves that it wasn't beginner's luck that made her first three chapbooks so exceptional.  The poems in Bleeding are strong, expansive, wide-ranging, powerful, intensely autobiographical, and as good or better than anything she's written to date.
The woman knows what she's doing.  She understands how art works, and how the artist creates something that is genuine and fresh.  She even has the nerve to describe her method in plain language for all of us literary dolts who can't quite figure out why she's so much better a writer than we are -- a tremendously ballsy thing to do and one that would be foolish for a lesser artist who couldn't make good on it -- and she gets away with it because she's got the track record of having pulled it off in so many poems.  In "Terrorist attack on the words", she writes, in part:
"You really have to dig.
I read poetry people send me
Day after day
Poems about love
Poems about hate
I've seen almost everything.
But never enough guts.
You gotta get your hands dirty
To carve out something
That will stand up
Stand out
you should construct a poem
Expecting a terrorist attack
To happen at any moment.
And sadness isn't special
And self-deprecation is only chaming
When followed by blood or explosions
Otherwise its just more words
Words without guts"
Debbie writes about loneliness, drugs, wasted days and nights, lost innocence, not being young anymore, her violent father, being raped in an alley, leaving a job for no good reason, and other scenes of chaos and confusion with an authenticity seldom found among the so-called street poets, the neo-beats and the disciples of Bukowski.  Once you get past the surface similarities between Debbie Kirk and that whole crowd (mainly having to do with common themes of drink, drugs, sex, alienation from the mass consumer culture), you realize she's not really one of them.  She's far smarter, moves faster, and is deadly seriously.  Likewise, she's about as far from being an academic poet as possible, but not because of any lack of formal education or intellectual inferiority.  My guess is that she has more native intelligence than all those academic poets put together.  Debbie has a deep and clear wisdom about life, herself, and her art.  It's something she came up with on her own.  You don't find that at college, and you don't find it in the literary quarterlies.  Debbie doesn't need college, but college might need to pay attention to Debbie.
There are stories woven into these poems the likes of which you won't read anywhere else.  Two that stick with me are "The fucking desert", a bizarre tale about driving through the heat, half nuts, singing Johnny Cash songs with a wife-beater tied around her head, and  "Who says I have no life", about the day a 13 year old boy crawled through her window and asked her for drugs and sex.  The bio in Bleeding says she's working on her first novel.  Now that's going to be a hell of a ride.
Bleeding from My Palms is handsomely published by Hand Print Press in a limited edition of only 50 copies, so you'd better grab it fast before it disappears.  Go to www.handprintpress.co.uk in the U.K. and www.debbiedkirk.com in the U.S. for ordering information.  Do yourself a favor and hunt down all of Debbie's books now, before she's a goddamned legend.  You might already be too late.
Hosted by www.Geocities.ws

1