Fabulosa

Karen Rigby

“The future pivots—all of us witness— / a magician’s wife home from the void / mouthing it’s nothing, nothing.”

More than 10 years after her first award-winning release, UMN alumni Karen Rigby returns with “Fabulosa,” a poetry book bound in a lick of fire, and strangled in a bouquet of silk. Within, deadly glamor and art history race headlong into a crash course, colliding masterfully with floral imagery and gently with quiet personal details. 

Rigby’s keel is even, each poem certain and directed, always established and confident. Within the first poem, “Why My Poems Arrive Wearing Black Gloves,” the names of the book’s three sections and their trajectories are revealed: “Noir & Glitz,” the dramatic and femme-fatale-focused; “Wolf Behind the Saint”, the land-centric and sanctified; and “In the Director’s Cut,” a dark and revelatory autobiography. 

By creating intrigue, this structure becomes increasingly gratifying as the book progresses. The cultural contexts, inhabited locations, and personal circumstances underlying the previous poems are revealed and elaborated upon in good time, just like when earning the trust of a new friend.

Additionally, each referenced artwork is easy to understand without background knowledge. Each source is exposed and explained, avoiding the presumptuous pitfalls that other ekphrastic poets so often fall into.

Though at times some poems may feel a little too tangential, stream-of-consciousness, or focused on literal interpretations of an art piece, Rigby continuously revitalizes each piece with her surprisingly distinct diction, using images like “the painting is fabling / a crosswind in the trees,” “the beast sings a / river to bones,” or even “nipples / rivets on a gunwale.”

The best poems within this collection include “The Roses,” “Tangelo,” “Young Lady With Gloves,” “To My Chinese Emigrant Mother Who Asks How Much Do You Weigh Now Every Time She Calls,” and “Welcome to Our Learning Farm…”