Record Player Life (the b-side)
by Rachel Turney
“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
“Rachel Turney’s poetry collection Record Player Life (the b-side) is striking in its love for the world. The opening poem “The Grid” is exceptional in its portrayal of a city as a collection of seemingly separate boxes inhabited by people that are actually eternally connected. Turney’s admiration for cities is a consistent theme, as seen in the poem “Give Me City,” with imagistic descriptions of the sights and sounds of New York: “I want a nightclub at 3 a.m. that has cigarette butts on the floor/ Beer spilled on my black dress/ Schnitzel under the bridge by the water.” By the end of the collection Turney brilliantly shows the reader how to be unafraid to take the past on their voyage into the future with stunning lines such as “mistakes are like poppies for remembering.””
— Natalie Marino, author of End of Revels
In Record Player Life (the b-side), Rachel Turney invites us to dive into her collection of 45’s, those mini vinyls with the hit on the a-side and another song on the b-side. The constant truth of this hierarchy, it turns out, remains the same from when I was a kid who relied heavily on 45’s - the b-side was often richer, more layered, and shook me in ways that the hit never could. What Rachel masterfully shares, in these poems, are observations and perceptions, ranging from banal to electric, played in stereo, in a way that consistently challenged me to decide which side was which: a or b? As often as I knew-in-my-gut which was the b-side, I allowed the needle to play each poem again and kept finding that Rachel had flipped them, challenging me to think again, which I did, hearing and feeling more after each flip! I’ve already replayed them all and will do so again, hoping to plant the needle on the b-side, knowing that in truth, I’d prefer to keep searching for the b-side amongst Rachel's poems because there are, thankfully, so many of them in her work!
— Adam Breier, author of An Odor of His Own
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