Barrelhouse Reviews: Turn into the Water, by Dylan Krieger

Review by Cameron Lovejoy

Fine Print Press / October, 2020 / 10 mins

Note: Since these poems are not visual, quotations from the collection assume punctuation, for the sake of readability, that may not be the poet’s intention. 

For the record: sex, drugs, rotting goals—and water. Dylan Krieger’s fever dream on vinyl, Turn into the Water (Fine Print Press, 2020), confesses the traumas, twists, and turns of existence as she thrashes in their wake. 

Goals are foraged, plans are built—and then the dock is bulldozed into oblivion, all the little splinters unpicked from the water. Krieger begins this 8-minute collection with the word “remember”: Remember those sick nicknames we had for each other? I called your dick God, but now I am Nietzsche, and you are twenty-first century dead to me.* This opening line from “All That Shit Talking and I Don’t Even Miss You” lays out in a line or two the hurdles and burdens that run through this collection, and foreshadows the inevitable unwrapping of tragedy at the record’s end. From start to finish, the poet staples flyers full of obscenities the whole length of the river. 

Hydrology shows us that water flows in a straight line until it collides with something—a boulder, a bluff, an obstacle that shifts its course. Water moves in this way, one obstacle to the next, relentlessly turning, and eroding. The obstructions in Turn into the Water are the poems Krieger carves out from the dark caves of recollection, casting them back at us like a lighthouse pulsing in the fog. They aren’t pretty. But then again, they’re stunning. Krieger has a knack for warping the grotesque into something gorgeous, no matter what she (or her speaker) has endured: It would be torture if I missed you, but at this stage of denial, it’s just dull enough to kill my boner in the deep end of the skinny dip, where I’m rubbing my birthmarks clean off.

But this lighthouse is obsolete. As we listen, we notice the beacon molder[ing] atop a man-made peninsula of boulders. That is to say that memory is fallible, often to a degree far worse than the butcher horrors that made them. Each time a memory is relived, it has to be reconfigured, reconstructed, causing distortion. This is poetry. “Art is a lie that makes us realize the truth,” as a painter once said. According to Donna Bridge, author of a report published in the Journal of Neuroscience, “your memory of an event can grow less precise even to the point of being totally false with each retrieval.” The further we get from the (obsolete) lighthouse, the harder it is to see. 

Krieger’s reconstructions pulsate sinuously. Through her voice alone (without background noise or music), she weaves a variety of tones and intensities that both lift the heart and sink it. Her reading is not as energized or cathartic as a slam poet’s, for example, but it still courses with rage, tenderness, hyperbole, truth, sarcasm, wit, bitterness, and timbrous tongue-twisters you’re forced to untie.

Even without music, there’s an undercurrent of rhythm. The sleeve explains it well: “...her work and writing process have always prioritized sound over sight, relying on live performance and recordings to enact—like scored music—the geometric artifact of the page.” Her rhythm is rarely hard to find on paper anyway, but to hear the poet read with such acidic clarity compels melody from the otherwise music-less plastic. 

Whatever memory Krieger shares, her synapses scar us. She reminds us of impermanence, the hazards of expectations. Over and over plans were made—to visit Big Sur, open a restaurant, start an art collective in South America, setting grand pianos aflame for no reason across the nation—but over and over the deluge hocked its loogie, and the plans washed away.

She articulates this well in “Lucifer Foil”, in which a partnership of some kind has given up the ghost: ...where we’re googling shooting-star-eyes at each other from across an uncrossable room, just to poke fun at believing in anything, beyond my own kitchen island circumference, humming, all hail the noble failure of future plans, opening the fridge door, wishing you were domesticated just this once, ball of yarn bouncing between your paws, treating your fleas, while all the party balloons go soft. 

This is classic Krieger: ending with a nimble image that hurtles the poem far beyond the silence that follows, ringing, echoing, sticking to you like a leech. 

There are a few tender moments in this surge, one of which lives in the lung-filling eulogy, Death by Bohéme. In it, Krieger speaks fondly of an old friend whom she last saw alive dropping acid in her hand: you told me my poems took the pulse of the apocalypse, but I think I’ve lost the rhythm of that tender misdirection when I hear your father was the one who found you, not even 30, first Vegas, then rehab... And the memory keeps flowing, even after the needle lifts, the collection culminating in a briny trickle from the eye.

Hydrology also explicates the hydrophobia of oil. This separation is painfully obvious, say, when we turn on the news and see footage of the ocean swathed with whorls of blood-brown. We can think of Krieger’s poems in this way: instead of dissolving into her gray matter, these traumas and losses have risen to the surface—like the crude oil from which this record was pressed—to construct, with pain, the spillage of these poems.

I add this 45 to my collection. Just about every record I own is musical—Clifford Brown, the Fugs, the soundtrack to The Shining. Only a handful are strictly word-centric. Such records include the Last Poets, Dylan Thomas, and early George Carlin. And now Dylan Krieger—who, if you mix these ingredients, is kind of an absurd slurry of all of them: the polemical fervor of the Last Poets, Thomas’s cunning and control, and Carlin’s intelligent, belligerent map of obscenities—all stirred together to form her own compendium of sex-positive seditious assemblage.

There’s a game I like to play—or maybe it’s more of a treasure hunt—where I combine the first and last words of a book to see if the phrase evokes the art it came from. It doesn’t always work. But when it does, it’s like reeling in a fish. Frankenstein, the emotionally chasmic story of a monster bereft of love, contains the phrase: to distance. The two words in The Fire Next Time, Baldwin’s collection of woefully relevant essays, are fittingly: dear time. Ginsberg’s debut Howl is aptly: I world. And so goes the pairing in Turn into the Water, Krieger’s rhythmic seepage of reminiscence: remember burden.

Cameron Lovejoy is the creator of Tilted House, a small press in New Orleans, LA, and edits Tilted House Review. He hosts Rubber Flower Poetry Hour, a reading series currently on virus hiatus. In March of 2020, he co-founded Infection House, an online journal of plague and protest. His work has appeared in Poets Reading the News, Trampoline, and elsewhere.