Blood Dazzler

Reading the Blood Dazzler can seem like quite a chore after some time. The authors writing is very organized and uses a wide range of vocabulary, and captures the feeling of Hurricane Katrina from the storms point of view. When I say capture, I mean that she does quite an extensive job of bringing the feeling and emotion of the storm. The poems are written as the storm becomes a tropical storm, and then a hurricane, and the poems reflect these stages.

The only problem that I have with her reading is that the word usage makes the poems especially difficult to read aloud. Words that are not commonly used are placed together and sometimes when reading you can't help but feel like your reading random words placed together. The capturing of the storm and the storms "eye" are usually highlighted, but the problem of poetry comes back into the light.

Here we have poems, which are great in their light, and spread many emotional feelings, sufferings, and grievances. Then, in the real world we have a city that was built with very poor infrastructure, didn't receive proper support and funding to help the victims of this flood, and thus caused the results which are still being seen today. While the poems, as stated before, capture MANY of the devastating effects of a hurricane, I'm still more offended by the lack of planning and environmental care that actually made this hurricane a category 5 (or was it 4?). Either way, you can write a poem about a burning building, or you could build a building that's fireproof. Maybe it would take away from the actual poem, but the suffering would be minimal.

*Edit: Turns out it was a category 3, which considering the impact the city was built worse than expected :)