Rinse

The title of Elaine Terranova’ s eighth collection implies a cleanse, a refresh, not unlike the kind a body undertakes in sleep. Rinse charts inner landscapes in poems that read like memories surfaced in reflection and refracted through the lens of dreams. As the poet enters sleep’ s “ dark passage” a synesthetic language emerges, in which sounds hold colors, and colors reflect sensations. “ Clashing sounds splinter the air, a red bird’ s worth of agitation,” she writes, “ that or the sharpening thorns of roses.” The result is disquieting, at times dystopic, but ultimately transformative. The poems in Rinse are like prisms that we, her readers, pass through. On the other side, we are not the same.