Thalia Geiger’s searing, questioning poems explore the pains and pleasures of “worldly things,” of making one’s way in a body, in a life, with presence and courage. ‘And the trees will bloom just the same,’ she writes, ‘a hundred-thousand small bombs in white & pink / will be the color of all our deaths.’ Imagistic, psychological, Red Death, Purple Dark is a remarkable confrontation to the world’s gorgeous fragility—its poems linger in my mind.

[D]efine the world as this, Red Death commands: always at a tremor. In Geiger’s debut excavation of our eternally shaking ground, she unearths the divinity in fainting, the simulacrum of flesh, and the appetite of color. Hers is a spell for the starving girls — the stranded and the starry-eyed. A sage for the most hollowed chamber of the heart, to restore what spirit the weight of living has buried. 

Thalia Geiger’s Red Death, Purple Dark, moves like the pages of a modern grimoire, gathering the ingredients of memory and lyrical imagery to make potions of poems that might heal or sear or simply delight. Drink deep in the mirror is the incantation each line seems to sing, reminding anyone, who dares to see, “how thin the line of separation is, from taut to tetherless.” Whether confronting literary traditions, personal traumas, disquieting landscapes, or nuanced origins, Geiger’s poems anchor their intelligence and craft in a terse truth – we are spells ourselves and should not forget it.

Thalia Geiger’s lyricism stuns in Red Death Purple Dark, poems woven in dim places & bright ones too, archeology & [de]construction, introspective observation, all extremely important in Geiger’s work, but more so poetry is always revelation, Geiger’s work too all illumination, evoking rainbows, strawberries, vibrancy & dark altogether, impossible colors bearing witness on the page. Fantastic read.

These poems are delicate and raw: poems with the skin off. There is an accomplished level of innovation and technique, particularly in the pair of sushi poems with an initial long poem followed by a stripped-down version of the same poem: brilliant work. There is an admixture of delicacy and power at play here that, at times, smells like Sylvia Plath, in a good way.

At its core, Red Death, Purple Dark crackles and pulses with rotting, devouring, and nature in its many temporal and fragile states. In her debut collection, Thalia Geiger masterfully wrestles with an ever-changing earth, how apocalypses take many shapes and forms, the dualities of desire, hunger, and worldly griefs: “Nothing grows right, not even the / strawberries, whose red death / only bore white fruit that browned / before it ever blushed,” she writes in the book’s titular poem. “Don’t you see everything / lives by dying?” With surprising voltas and a speaker who holds nothing back, Red Death, Purple Dark is both the disturbance and the salve. Like a ripe strawberry swiped across one’s mouth in the middle of summer, this collection will most certainly leave an indelible mark on any reader who is lucky enough to pick it up, devour every line.