Each poem in the Cobain series is written as prose. With Knapp’s conversational diction and syntax, the form suits her well, allowing her to manipulate and contradict the lyrical “I” and challenge conventions in contemporary “self-portrait” poetry. Many self-portrait poems function by bringing the speaker and the vehicle of their simile into proximity, nearly erasing that barrier. However, the first of the Cobain series “Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain Wrestling with the Angel” begins, “Here, the biblical allusion is a metaphor for the speaker’s internal struggles, and since Cobain is the persona, one can infer that the speaker may be alluding to her own struggles with depression and/or addiction.” This sentence might be one of the least poetic first lines I can recall reading, where “and/or’s” are rarely seen, and I love that I encounter it in this poem, especially after the Blakean and baroque title. Moreover, the “I” in the Cobain series helps complicate, stabilize, and deepen the lyrical “I’s” that appear in other poems. Here, the speaker is most bare but also most guarded. “Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain Wrestling…” concludes with a sense of possibility in poetry, asserting, “The beauty of metaphor is that the angel can be just an angel if you let it.” In this poem, the motion from sublime to personal shown in “The Cemetery Is Full of People…” reverses, and instead begins with the personal and broadens into the spectacular.
Holding the book in hand, I can’t help but revisit the book’s full title: A “requiem” means a solemn chant or a mass commemorating the dead while an “amulet” implies adornment and protection, and a “beak” connotes flight or theft. Much like in “The Cemetery Is Full of People…,” “Fourth of July,” and “Self-Portrait as Kurt Cobain Wrestling…,” ideas of ceremony, mortality, preservation, and escape recur throughout Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak. While many of the poems tackle disparate subjects and use a variety of strategies, the themes stay consistent and overlap or are restated through different individual, personal, and societal lenses. In “Threnody with a White Ford Bronco Inside It,” Knapp writes, “I can tell you / the exact moment America died, // but the truth is it had died / many times, we’d just never bothered / to look.” Balancing playful irreverence and deep concern, Requiem with an Amulet in Its Beak is a collection that abounds in entertainment, inspires mindfulness, and, at bottom, wrestles with a hard-to-master but seemingly simple lesson: Whatever else is happening, life goes fast. Don’t forget to look.