Natalie Eilbert

Today is Sunday and I am hungover from too much wine, and I think this too-too feeling is perfect for reading Alexis Pope’s debut collection, Soft Threat. I am beginning to become more comfortable with myself as a thinker reading work that I enjoy, though this has not always been the case. I feel a deep kinship with Alexis Pope’s work, though this has always been the case, and believe we share an obsession with subject matter and hard relentless music. Soft Threat has a severity to it that simultaneously shuns all who have hurt her while bowing her head to the axe. Needing to feel the axe’s deathwinds. I want that too for all the voices in Soft Threat.

Some of the poems in this collection riff off of Hole’s Live Through This. Today I read in the chilled sun “Miss World,” Love says “I made my bed I’ll die in it”; Pope says “I threw / up sand & you made the bed.” Not all the way through with this book yet, but I want to start bowing my head to the deathwinds of her forceful brain. 

• alexis pope
• soft threats
• coconut books
• reading poems out loud