Review: Lynn Finger's "The Bicycle Rack at the Beach"

by Elizabeth Joy Levinson.
​(art pictured by Sara Blaske)


“The Bicycle Rack at the Beach” by Lynn Finger is a poem of unlikely juxtapositions that take the reader into an underwater dream built around deft language and stealthy turns. It begins simply enough, the human relic of a wayward bicycle rack that ends up underwater, the “ribs” of which become a home for seahorses. We know how a shipwreck can become an underwater city, but a bicycle rack is something far less tragic and for that, almost more compelling as a ship was never so mundane; the transformation of the bike rack that much more magical. 
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And "the petal shavings from the moonlight" reveal more than they should; the narrator herself stitched to something as fluid, as elusive as the glassy ripples. This is the nature of all relationships, isn't it? As difficult for us to understand from within as they are to understand from those outside of the relationship. This is a poem I will return to again and again, as each reading reveals something new, a surprise of language or a surprise in the self.

read finger's poem in issue 1