Ilan Mochari explores the natural world and the thoughtless harm-and joy-with which we inhabit it. Candid, vivid, and musical, the poems in Playthings are rousing meditations on subjects ranging from moons to miscarriages, gum trees to Georgia O'Keeffe skulls. Clarity and compassion shine through, as does a world-weary pathos that elevates the riveting material at hand.
About the Author :
Ilan Mochari is the author of the novel Zinsky the Obscure. His short stories and poems have appeared in McSweeney's Quarterly Concern, Salamander, Hobart, J Journal, The Louisville Review, Juked, FOLIO, Valparaiso Fiction Review, North Dakota Review, and elsewhere. His work has been nominated for multiple Pushcart Prizes.
Review :
Ilan Mochari's voice in Playthings is exquisite in its range, its responsiveness, its singing. These are poems to be savored and read many times. Whether he is writing about trees native to Mexico, spiders native to his bathroom, or memories native to boyhood, his engagement with the world delivers poems that praise and lament, remember and contemplate. Several are small masterpieces: "Playthings," "Fiancé, Fiancée," and "Weekday, City" are jewels. What a treasure. What a pleasure.
-Richard Hoffman, author, People Once Real
With lush imagery driven by precision subtext,
Ilan Mochari's Playthings astounds.
It is a bounty of music, forms, and lyric and narrative beauty.
-Quintin Collins, Author, Claim Tickets for Stolen People
In Playthings, Ilan Mochari offers the natural world not as a retreat or possession, but as a charged field of presence-intricate, resilient, and often overlooked. These lyric poems, crystalline in form and musical in their restraint, explore the uneasy tension between reverence for nature and the quiet violence we inflict upon it. With a keen eye for minute detail and a deep attunement to rhythm, syntax, and vibration, the speaker seeks alignment-of thought, feeling, and act-in a world that resists such coherence. Whether telescoping into a pine needle-"we hadn't noticed the beige blades beneath our feet / as if we expected needles to be spry in response"-or listening for the unspoken in wind or station, these poems invite the reader to attend: to the seen and the unseen, to transgression and forgiveness, where "bones bloom like blessings from holier lands."
-Dzvinia Orlowsky, Author, Bad Harvest and Those Absences Now Closest
There's a frisky lyric language to the poems in Playthings, a playfulness that belies the dark urgency of their underlying themes. Ilan Mochari skillfully jump-cuts from vivid particulars of the urban quotidian, say, an epic rendering of a spilled Starbucks latte, or a sketch of a coatless teenager waiting for the bus, then swerving into strange realms of animalia: a litany of spiders, the bestiary of pollinators inhabiting a Mexican gum tree, a museum exhibit of haunting deer skulls by Georgia O'Keeffe. In precise, irreverent braidings of texture, musicality and pathos, Mochari's words remind us of how important the practice of play can be to grasp the wondrous, disorienting, and sometimes terrifying nature of the worlds we find ourselves inhabiting.
-Robbie Gamble, Author, A Can of Pinto Beans
