Nightstand: Leafing through a little darkness by Berdene Owen

Opening with an epigraph from Emily Dickinson, Nightstand is a chapbook preoccupied with the different kinds of darkness we can be enveloped in, playing spacing, words, and even beautiful page design to explore them. This is a beautiful chapbook, serving the words inside with the care and artistry they deserve.

This is a dark set of poems, and also a playful one. In “Dark Seams,” a wink at Elizabeth Bishop,” Owen writes:

At its bitter end,
my brother's
much-mended teddy
could be described
more as patch
than he could, bear.

A wonderfully neat bit of wordplay that I was so tickled by – and the kind that Owen uses in multiple poems to great effect.

“Doublespeak,” a poem entirely in wordplay, is the peak example of this playful darkness in Nightstand:

Amusing ourselves to death.

A muse sings our hells to deaf.

A me-you string of vows, till death.

Immune zing of ow's drew breath.

Nightstand is a quirky chapbook, but one that works very well. The irreverence sheds light on the darkness Owen is exploring.

Berdene Owen is a graphic designer and co-founder of Spot of Poetry. Her nightstand is a shifting cityscape of book-pile highrises that she reads until she drifts off dreaming. Berdene lives in a bright blue house on Nova Scotia’s South Shore with her husband and two kids. Nightstand is her second chapbook. Website: alivelihood.me

Publisher: Spot of Poetry (October 2024)
Chapbook: 5.625 x 8.5 inches | 20 pp
ISBN: 978-1-7383766-5-0

Alison Manley

Website

Alison Manley has ricocheted between New Brunswick and Nova Scotia for most of her life. Now in Halifax, Nova Scotia, she is the Cataloguing and Metadata Librarian at Saint Mary's University. Her past life includes a long stint as a hospital librarian on the banks of the mighty Miramichi River. She has an honours BA in political science and English from St. Francis Xavier University, and a Master of Library and Information Studies from Dalhousie University. While she's adamant that her love of reading has nothing to do with her work, her ability to consume large amounts of information very quickly sure is helpful. She is often identified by her very red lipstick, and lives with her partner Brett and cat, Toasted Marshmallow.