At 19 pp, MK Chavez’s VIRGIN EYES is almost too small a collection to hold all the pain and bitterness that the words contain. These poems are things of beauty, to be sure. They are tiny monuments to human weakness & frailty. They are more proof than you will ever need that everything good (and everything bad) comes with a price.
In these poems, sex is money, sex is meat and sex is pain. It’s filled with guilt, with regret and, occasionally, it’s very, very good. Love is fleeting & insubstantial, like dreams, yet it remains a possibility. For all of it’s intangibility, it’s a dangerous animal – something to be approached with caution, and always with the knowledge that it can scar. The hope of finding love, of hanging onto it, is what keeps the poet going.
Chavez, despite the darkness of her subject matter, is a good enough poet, a powerful enough voice, to make the reader sometimes forget how harrowing these works really are. Nobody writes about the erotic side of sex more eloquently than her. The heat from these passages is a palpable thing, as is the mystery. Chavez is a master of blurring the line between observer & participant. She knows everything beforehand, and then she knows nothing.
Equally effective in this collection are the quieter passages, the introverted soul-searching moments that read like whispers. For me, the pivotal moment in VIRGIN EYES is Hancock, Upstate New York, a beautifully written piece in which human interaction is almost mundane, in which it takes a back seat to the disposal of a tiny dead mouse. This is a poem that puts all of the others into a truly human context & gives them added depth. Quite simply, it’s a perfect poem.
In VIRGIN EYES, Ms Chavez has, more than other poet I’ve read in recent memory, made a real case for the validity of poetry in the 21st century. Her words sing. They scream. The courage it took to write them can only be equaled by the courage it will take to read them.
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