The brilliance of Millennial Roost is Pearson’s ability to explore dark, difficult conversations, but with the consideration and wherewithal to do so without perpetuating pain.
So far their task has been simple. While a narrative might stray a bit in one telling, or embellish or neglect a detail in another, they’ve received and recorded the stories without substantial disagreement. But now, in this moment, a woman sits in front of the Grimm Brothers, telling them a story of siblinghood that offers a bit of concern.
The feat of the poet to narrate their own departure from this conscious earth is rare and poignant. As distorted and masticated as the imagery is, Ritvo is a reliable guide, treading equally the known world, the unknown, and the ethereal.
This absence of certitude about home—what it is, where it is, whether it is a noun or a verb, a being or a becoming—runs through the various essays, fictions, and poems that Buchanan collects in the Go Home! anthology.
When they finally arrived in San Ysidro, California, she climbed out of the coyote’s trunk, where she was reborn, right there in the corner of a McDonald’s parking lot, parallel to the gargantuan 405 freeway, which looked that night like the tentacles of an electric octopus—bursts of white headlights and red taillights, swirling and whizzing by, right across the chain-link fence.
