Reversing Paradise

Reversing Paradise is a collection of poems by lyrical poet, JCWatson.  Her other collections include, Mercy, The Journey of Lost Things, The King of Bees, and The God of Pittsburgh, these last two titles are as yet unpublished.  

Generosity, Hillcrest Street, and Our Mother are from the full length manuscript The God of Pittsburgh.  They are autobiographical pieces as are all of those in  “Pittsburgh” where the poet was born and grew up among hard scrabble poverty, raging Catholicism, dark humour, and passionate music.  The observations in these poems emerge from JCWatson’s dead center position of being the third oldest of seven children and living in the heart of Steel Production’s and thus the city’s demise.  These poems inhabit a world and a place and a deeply realized experience, powerfully rendered.

Many of the pieces in this collection are love poems from The King of Bees and can be understood to fall along an arc—the initial discovery and delight as in In Love with the Magician, Dessert, Pumped, and on to the apex of the affair—Building the Chapel, Mercy, Not Just a Dream, Like a Native, from which the title is derived, “she slid beneath his rib, as if reversing  Paradise,  but then . . . at last the lover is rejected and this experience is reflected in After That, Fall, Winter, and Wild.  Each of the love poems seems lit from within and to vibrate on the page, perhaps because of the vivid detail, “she thinks the moon is a florescent tube she could walk through,” as in Winter and  “the refrigerated air around them heated with the delectable friction of word on word,” from In Love With the Magician.