In the picture on the back of this chapbook, Lori Maleea Acker looks about 12. She’s probably older since she’s at university getting her BA. However old she is, though, she looks way too young to be writing these poems. Acker goes beyond herself, manages to escape self- consciousness, so that the images she creates give her little vignettes a life of their own. This isn’t an easy thing for any poet to manage, let alone someone who looks like she must be pretty new at the game. “Through the spring the ceiling continues./Paint is hauled up with pulleys and ropes,/vines and flowers grow/from the tips of brushes the men hold./The colour starts from one side of the church/and works its way across the way a rainstorm/crawls across a valley.” Acker’s poems inhabit that space beyond the self that I guess a good religious commitment might achieve. Not that the rituals referred to in the title have anything to do with religion. The rituals here include fire-breathing, the handling of various items with hands suited to the purpose, or not, and the burning of the dead in boats. Lori Maleea Acker definitely has her own rituals, and her own beautiful way of telling a poem. (KS)
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