Jonathan Fletcher Reviews Record Player Life

Both self-aware and self-assured, Rachel Turney’s latest collection of poetry, Record Player Life (the b-side), is literature I didn’t know I needed. Narrative in nature (think Frank O’Hara), it is confessional at times. Wonderfully irreverent in many of the same moments, it is also serious, even meditative, at others. Turney’s gift with, and command of, language is on full display. Here, there is no dearth of lines I didn’t write but wish I could have, ones I felt to my core and know will stay with me long after: “I don’t believe in god. / This phrase could have saved me / from a multitude of Sunday mornings” and “In the United States the dead are put in carefully chosen outfits and people can come and look / at them in an expensive casket.” Not so much a read as an experience (and a rewarding one at that), Turney’s poetry, like any good vinyl, needs to be played again and again. What could be more fittingly said of a collection titled Record Player Life (the b-side)?

Jonathan Fletcher, award winning author of This is My Body