Echo Light

A novelist and librettist as well as a poet, Gale evokes the world of Southern California in her poems. Her subjects include love, sex, family dysfunction, and substance abuse, with many of the poems depicting a rough childhood. She's best when capturing the sensual by using a rush of words to evoke the moment, as in "The Mouth Under the Mango Tree": "he found her lips first skirts light/ mouth wet open let's stop here." In other poems, including "Joe's Napa Girlfriend," the author employs repetition to good effect, "She licked the rim of the glass./ She licked the rim of my glass.// She gave me room in the bed./ She gave me. She gave me." The finest pieces, including several prose poems, are focused, with nary a wasted word, but too often the tension slackens, and Gale resorts to clichés or overblown language, for example, "To the/ white pillared beauty of her girlhood before the gods/ spanked reality into her bones leaving her speechless." An enticing element of mystery hovers over a few poems. "Shura" begins, "It wasn't a face any more. A broken thing./ Opened wide by time, cavernous washes of memory."