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Well, Life Inspired Me
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is an emotionally-centered collection focused on themes of romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, & mental illness. What inspired you to write this collection?
Well, life inspired me to write this collection, as pointedly, and as honestly as I can articulate. You see, while I certainly read and always loved poetry as a kid and as an adult in college, I have to say that my actual poetry instructors in college played a larger influence to me, upon me, as a young adult and later as an older adult; because they were there, literally and metaphorically, in my face. And what I got from my poetry instructors, meeting Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, was more than just “write what you know” but also write what haunts you, what you vividly recall, what you yearn for and why, be bold with it and don’t hold back. Let it all out there on the page and acknowledge that it just isn’t for everyone. It’s for the select few who get it and want to get it. So in a long answer, life inspired me to write this collection, albeit alot of it in hindsight.
Were there poems that were especially difficult—or especially healing—to write?
Most were difficult, some more than others. “My Grandfather’s God” was about how I perceived this nearly mythic man, who was the first man, perhaps only man, who showed me through his actions, that a man doesn’t have to bully others or even necessarily manifest physicality (although he did) to be a man, and that a man can be quite kind, shockingly gentle to the point of perhaps seeming feminine at times, but able to do so and be very secure in that overall encasement of masculinity, humble yet confident, small but strong, empathic but able to go a few rounds if need be. Other poems were more difficult to write, such as “Bicycle Rider,” because even typing this response, I can feel the stiffness of my back against the car interior as I pedaled. But it’s through releasing and sharing that we ultimately grow and creativity is espoused and concurrently strengthened.
Do images usually arrive before the poem’s meaning, or does the meaning lead you toward particular images?
Oh, absolutely! And this is as true, if not more so, with fiction, as it is with poetry. But I remember my poetry instructor in college, whom I can’t and won’t forget, told us once that a poem, a single poem, should strike the reader in the head like a sudden, shocking bolt of lightning. That bolt can communicate love, compassion, awe, a stark memory, whatever, but a poem should carry and give at least one vivid image the reader can’t shake even if they wanted to. And if I did that, than I did my job in poetry. For fiction, it’s tougher, to me at least, because each scene should function as a short story in a way, that’s part of much broader, wider thesis about the human cycle. But we learn through imagery, we communicate through them, we absorb them on social media, on TV, online; and if we write, we tell stories through images written out and when we read we absorb images that the brain creates. And those images we create in our brains are often stronger and more long-lasting than anything we could ever see literally.
What do you hope readers are still thinking about after they close the book?
Well, I hope they come away feeling moved, maybe angered, maybe saddened, maybe enlightened or entertained; but I don’t want them bored or apathetic, because you can get that anywhere; and if something I’ve written or will write, causes fear, than I want that fear married to reflection on where that bottomless pit exists for them and why its so dark for them. The best poetry, I think, and the best fiction, too, is like a mirror the author holds up to you and says “Look into this. I’ve been where you were, where you’re headed, where you’ve thought and I get it. I want to share the both sides of this mirror with you. Let’s both dive in, from our own sides.” I want readers motivated to feel. And that’s the very least, the very least, job of anything any writer writes whether it’s poetry, fiction, or even non-fiction.
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Where long, black rivers shine like tarred-out wine.
Sunflowers hold bold gold; with winter’s bite mighty tight,
Icicle tears fall and break with each breath of brittle night.
Here love is an iron, barbed, and rusted key;
It cuts, then brightens, binding readers to see.
A hammer-fist on glass makes spidered pain anew,
And memory rains, then dries to ash-streaked stain.
Rocking chairs, once meant to soothe, turn to dread now;
They swing like storms above a child’s cold head.
Birdsong with beeps; crows counsel, sharp and rough;
They ask what you will bear, and how much is too much.
Roots drink red blood; the silent forests pray;
A Grandfather-God lifts stars like lambent clay.
A Tall Man waits there; streetlights blink and fade;
The searing needle steers your will through shade.
These poems are matchflames in the midnight room;
They stitch your heart with light, to loosen doom.
Pray, Muse, let broken visions rise,
To summon forth rising sea tides deep within inspired eyes.
Love Her Blind & Other Poems
Love Her Blind & Other Poems is a restless, emotionally exposed collection that moves through romantic betrayal, childhood violence, family memory, aging, faith, mental illness, and the strange negotiations required to survive all of them. David Somerfleck’s poems often begin with an ordinary object or encounter, then push it into a more charged psychological space. A rocking chair becomes part of a child’s understanding of violence, a bicycle becomes both escape and resistance, and a grandfather becomes something nearly cosmic. The collection’s range is clear in titles such as “My Grandfather’s God,” “Bicycle Rider,” “What I Didn’t Know About Love,” “Tall Time,” and “Mum.”
Somerfleck writes in a dense, image-driven style, piling physical detail onto memory until the past feels immediate and unstable. His strongest poems let metaphor deepen the experience rather than simply decorate it. In “Bicycle Rider,” reading and riding give the speaker a way to move beyond family cruelty, even when that cruelty follows him into sleep and imagination. In “My Grandfather’s God,” ancestry, nature, grief, and belief merge into a vision of blood moving through soil, roots, trees, and stars. These poems don’t treat memory as a tidy record. Memory becomes a living environment, full of weather, animals, wounds, voices, and figures that appear larger than life.
The book’s emotional center is its ongoing attempt to understand love without simplifying it. Love appears as tenderness, obsession, protection, grief, dependency, and renewed possibility. “What I Didn’t Know About Love” begins with harsh, dangerous images, but gradually makes room for a love that can be delicate, clear, and newly understood. That movement gives the collection more than darkness. Even when the poems enter frightening or surreal territory, they keep reaching toward connection, whether through a partner, a parent, a grandparent, an animal, a remembered landscape, or the act of writing itself.
What makes the collection memorable is the sense that every poem has been wrestled out of experience rather than calmly observed from a distance. Somerfleck’s voice can be raw, funny, grotesque, affectionate, angry, and unexpectedly gentle, sometimes within the same piece. The result is a book that feels intensely personal while still opening outward toward questions many readers will recognize: what families pass down, how pain changes perception, why love survives its own damage, and how imagination gives us somewhere to go when reality closes in. Love Her Blind & Other Poems turns bruised memory into fierce, strange music that keeps sounding after the page goes quiet.
Pages: 90 | ASIN : B0GN54HFYQ
