Book Review: Her Dark Everything

Reviewed by Nikolas Mavreas

A dexterous collection of personal poetry tinged with tragedy

Tied by themes of friendship and loss, of weakness and strength, Courtney LeBlanc has delivered a substantial collection with Her Dark Everything. There is complete honesty in these poems—“because those goddamn words have to get out.”

Throughout the collection, LeBlanc grapples with the suicide of a close friend and her own failure to help. Her treatment of the subject is illuminated not just by the white fire of emotion but also by the steady lamp of the writer’s desk. See, for example, the elegant contrast of the metaphors in “forgot to call, wrapped up in my own life as hers slipped away.” Or this little sparkling marvel of alliterative resonance, placing the image of a dead friend suspended in water on the peaks of miniature tragic art: “your sequined skirt swirling around you like iridescent seaweed.”

Along with these intricate poetic constructions, LeBlanc is also moved to more straightforward expression, which, in its lyrical garments, lets out pure sentimental tones. If we are underwhelmed by one platitudinous climax like “To finally find the dark embrace of death and call it home,” we are again lifted up and allowed to glide down smoother slopes:

“I ask her:

what would you name the moon?

Death, darkness, the end of everything, 

I want to die, she says. Tears crowd

my eyes but I say, I’d name it hope.

Wonder. I’d name it stay one more night.”

As in the above, it is often that the poetic crux and flair of a poem is delayed until the closing lines. And while the poet works out her thoughts and emotions on the page, we also see the working out of the poetic process, the idea hammered on the anvil until success is struck on the last line. 

“she

wanted to die. To follow the map that led to 

X: the place she no longer existed, the

yellow brick road leading to the 

zenith of her life.”

The line breaks disrupt the obvious rhythm, but they do so with purpose, as long as we notice each line’s first letter: w, x, y, z. It is the end of a life, a poem, and of language, and as close as literature can come to musical counterpoint.

This art of the ending is also skillfully employed in the two poems concerned with the bleakness of current affairs, titled “We Live In America, Here’s How We Survive” and in “Apocalypse Poem.” The latter finishes with a bleak view of “tomorrow,” only to be followed by two poems whose closing lines offer alternative views and prospects of the same word. Here is the verbal continuity which defines poetry.

LeBlanc’s poems are not formal, but they abound in standard rhythms which tighten and hold them together, exemplified in “Again, My Dog Saves Me” and “Antilamentation.” Rich in traditional poetic devices though it is, her work remains intensely contemporary, with messages being left unread and with women suffering mansplaining at the gym.

The collection opens with the author’s laments on a late friend’s death, and it closes with two paeans to her living best friend. That is only the last, uniting instance of this book’s recurring hopefulness. Taken together, Her Dark Everything shows a fierce and powerful process of coming to terms with oneself, flaws and hazardous emotion included.

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