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Dereliction
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
*Dereliction* is the debut poetry collection of Gabrielle Octavia Rucker, a self-taught writer from the Great Lakes now living on the Gulf Coast, published by the independent press The Song Cave. Built in two movements - "Murmurs" and "Dereliction" - the book moves restlessly from childhood into something like the afterlife, folding mythic material and the smallest daily acts (sitting, staring, writing) into what one reviewer called an apocryphal fugue that unmakes and remakes the world. Much of it was written during the first COVID-19 lockdown, and it carries that season's strange stillness and interiority. The result is electric and image-driven, with a taste for the uncanny and the split self. For readers who want contemporary poetry that is ambitious, otherworldly, and unafraid of strangeness, it is a striking first book.
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The author
Gabrielle Octavia Rucker is a self-taught poet and writer from the Great Lakes region, now based on the Gulf Coast. A 2020 Poetry Project Fellow and 2016 Kimbilio Fiction Fellow, her work has appeared through the Academy of American Poets, the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Sundance Film Festival, and various literary journals.
The book
Dereliction, her debut, is structured in two movements and ranges from childhood into an imagined afterlife. It blends myth with the banal textures of daily life into image-rich, incantatory poems concerned with wandering, transformation, and divided selves.
How to read it
Read it for atmosphere and image rather than plain statement; the poems reward surrender to their dreamlike logic. As a debut it announces a distinctive, uncanny voice.
For more context
The Song Cave's catalogue of adventurous contemporary poetry offers good neighbors; readers might also turn to the mythic, image-driven work of poets like Robin Coste Lewis.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Gabrielle Octavia Rucker
- ISBN
- None
- Shelf
- Poetry
- Location
- Colorado