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Review: Who Will Cradle Your Head by Jared BeloffELJ Editions
2023 Review by McCaela Prentice |
The anxiety of the climate crisis is a constant hum in the back of my skull, and it gets louder with every passing year. In Jared Beloff’s latest poetry collection, he gives that anxiety a voice. His words are urgent, and you will both revere and fear what they unearth in you. There is so much to be afraid of in our changing world, and still there is so much beauty. He does not let you forget either of these truths.
In Who Will Cradle Your Head, Jared invites you to grieve what is not yet lost. The unimaginable are intertwined with the inevitable throughout this collection, and in the end they feel as if they are synonymous. We are living through an endless torrent of breaking news. For those that can’t look away, it’s hard to understand how anyone feels like they aren’t drowning. I see that feeling in this work. As the world burns around us, how do we protect our corner of it? How can love be the most important thing, and still not be enough to save us?
There are no answers to these questions, but rather musings on life and decay. It flutters between the certainty that we are all doomed, and the fleeting hope that someone will survive us. Even as glaciers melt or magnolias perish from a late frost, he is holding his daughter’s hand. Even as radiation seeps into the soil and groundwater, hogs search for truffles in Chernobyl.
This past summer was one of the hottest I can remember , and I may at the end of my life remember it as one of the coolest. It is daunting to be a young person inheriting a world that, according to most climate models, will be either drowned or cooked in the next couple decades. This dread course has only been intensified by political turmoil and an ongoing pandemic. I often wonder if it is smart, or even ethical, to bring someone into a world that is on a collision course with disaster. I wonder if as my parents watch the news, they think that too. That is in the periphery of this work, but it is as Jared said- all we can do is wait for the thermometer’s report. As the world is now, we are all playing a game of “wait and see”. There is discomfort in that, and in navigating the world as if everything is otherwise fine.
These poems do not aim to comfort, though. They merely showcase the hope we must cling to, and the despair that could easily consume us if we do not. In this book, hope looks like a child. It looks like painting a room blue, or Sasquatch kneeling in a landfill. It is the hope that when the change comes (and it will), that what we have loved most on this earth will not be gone like the world we knew. I now ask myself over and over not what I must hope for, but who.
You can purchase a copy of Who Will Cradle Your Head on ELJ Edition's website.
In Who Will Cradle Your Head, Jared invites you to grieve what is not yet lost. The unimaginable are intertwined with the inevitable throughout this collection, and in the end they feel as if they are synonymous. We are living through an endless torrent of breaking news. For those that can’t look away, it’s hard to understand how anyone feels like they aren’t drowning. I see that feeling in this work. As the world burns around us, how do we protect our corner of it? How can love be the most important thing, and still not be enough to save us?
There are no answers to these questions, but rather musings on life and decay. It flutters between the certainty that we are all doomed, and the fleeting hope that someone will survive us. Even as glaciers melt or magnolias perish from a late frost, he is holding his daughter’s hand. Even as radiation seeps into the soil and groundwater, hogs search for truffles in Chernobyl.
This past summer was one of the hottest I can remember , and I may at the end of my life remember it as one of the coolest. It is daunting to be a young person inheriting a world that, according to most climate models, will be either drowned or cooked in the next couple decades. This dread course has only been intensified by political turmoil and an ongoing pandemic. I often wonder if it is smart, or even ethical, to bring someone into a world that is on a collision course with disaster. I wonder if as my parents watch the news, they think that too. That is in the periphery of this work, but it is as Jared said- all we can do is wait for the thermometer’s report. As the world is now, we are all playing a game of “wait and see”. There is discomfort in that, and in navigating the world as if everything is otherwise fine.
These poems do not aim to comfort, though. They merely showcase the hope we must cling to, and the despair that could easily consume us if we do not. In this book, hope looks like a child. It looks like painting a room blue, or Sasquatch kneeling in a landfill. It is the hope that when the change comes (and it will), that what we have loved most on this earth will not be gone like the world we knew. I now ask myself over and over not what I must hope for, but who.
You can purchase a copy of Who Will Cradle Your Head on ELJ Edition's website.
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McCaela Prentice |