A riotous yet deceptively serious addition to Adrian Blevins' oeuvre, Status Pending exquisitely leverages the lyric to fathom the liminality of human experience. These poems comprise a stenography of our lives as the buffering consciousness between voided states. Blevins straddles various faultlines as a woman who writes and mothers, who emerges from a second divorce as an Appalachian transplant in New England, who sees from midlife the stringent but unspoken socioeconomic strata framing class conflict. If marriage "e;was a rope across a twilight abyss (an abscess),"e; if aging brings the hateful labels "e;OUT OF ORDER / & LATE FEE,"e; every disappointment uncovers rejuvenating clarity. "e;Bereavement status"e; engenders both heartbreak and hope, somehow, as "e;then you lose your losses."e; Blevins triumphs in her reclamation of the spectacular in the mundane. "e;America is a flub. // A hack. A crime! America, fuck you for making // despondent bandits of us - / for blinding & hooding // & chaining & gagging us."e; Even perched on shifting tectonic plates, Blevins wins the last word: "e;You don't seem to know it, // but there are foxes / crossing meadows // out there fast as disco lights. There are loons on your lakes."e; Amen.
