The Rainy Season Diaries

Poetry. In THE RAINY SEASON DIARIES, Jennifer A. Reimer speaks from the far-flung spaces/places of diaspora and migration, not only the geographical and physical, but also the emotional and literary. Playing loosely with the diary form, each page can be read like an entry in a journal that doesn't so much narrate or map location as it does explore the potential of an lyric (but acidic) voice that finds itself washing up on multiple shores of metaphor. The voice is fretted with narrative traces, which minutely examine the manner in which the stories we tell and the titles we give each other are themselves forms of treachery. In probing the intimate dislocations between interiors and exteriors, genres, relationships, and the familiar and the strange, THE RAINY SEASON DIARIES aims to reveal what ideas like "story," "poet" or "history" cover over, leave out or cannot account for. The poems stress the way careful domestic surfaces conceal anxieties. Reactions are--like the crumbling tales of the poems--desperately imbricated acts of preservation and interpretation.