A Review of
Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment
By Caroline Reddy
In Caroline Reddy’s Shake the Atmosphere to Reclaim an Empty Moment she emerges from the skull of modern warfare and violence a fully grown Athena, in her “steampunk space suit / underneath the human skin” wielding her weapons of language: “I release my daggers / after years of betrayal / molting into a warrior.” Being of Iranian and Ghanaian heritage, she brings the power and songs of her elders as a way to unify the world’s discord: “My ancestors / who protected mountains, / climb on opposite / sides of the world / to bring me harmony.” Through her poignant and powerful verse, Reddy triumphs in her goal to preserve the holiness: “After our last dokusan / when I told you about / how music had been murdered / you requested / that I keep the legacy / of the world alive.”
She has been through terror herself, in Tehran: “Hold still child / to the fuzzy blanket / until the siren stops” and she knows the fear of the children in current conflicts, Ukraine, Gaza, and how to somehow heal and transmute these atrocities into song of spirit: “We have learned that harsh moments / can be alchemized into particles of light / that unfurl from Indra’s net / to help us on our ascension.”
In this way, her book becomes timely and crucial to somehow processing our present grief and anger at the continued killing of innocents on this earth. Reddy, in assuming the role of poetic warrior and magician, allows us to ride the brightness of her robe, the glint of her spear, the clarity of her words. We feel this with her because we have been there: “but i had been beaten / and belittled by so many / that i didn’t believe / in my own myth.” But this is an intimate battle done in the darkest places, and this is what makes it even more transformative once the light is found:
I closed my eyes and let the tears drip
and dreamt of the quartz crystals to pour,
for the light of Earendil appeared
and the planets smiled
as I began to widen:
beyond the shadows
beyond the bitter wind.
She transforms ashes into fire, necrotic tissue into stem cells, violence into compassion and unity. As she states:
Songs rise from the ashes as Qoqnoos burns away debris of thistles and last bits of sterile soil from the chambers of my heart. The spring Equinox brings Nowruz as I tumble through tombs and burst from beneath the snow like a lustrous tulip. In this collection, Reddy takes in all of the rancor and cruelty she has faced, and others continue to suffer, and reanimates them as feathered things which guide us also to emerge from this torment as changed beings. She becomes a mother of birds, of hope: “I dream of a womb / where the ashes of a wondered bird / do not spoil.” With much of the poetry written being one of victimhood and being caged within a sadness or a trauma, Reddy’s work elevates to a level of one who has walked the desert for forty days and forty nights and who has come back with these ethereal and thunderous truths, this glowing body and this glowing sword. This is a wonderous book. Reddy invites us to all to once again believe our own myths.
About the Author: Scott Ferry helps our veterans heal as a RN in the Seattle area. His book Sapphires on the Graves is coming out from Glass Lyre Press in late 2024.
As It Ought To Be 