The riveting poems of Carla Drysdale's All Born Perfect distinguish themselves with candor and craft. Combining the inspired voice of a word-musician and the matter-of-fact tone of a survivor, Drysdale's poems depict a working mother bringing up two sons. Bold, yet understated, the poems reveal that the mother's acts of love and labor provoke her own childhood trauma of sexual abuse. Drysdale never shrinks from the complex presentation of these issues in her tender and shocking stanzas of parenting and office life, childhood and climate change. The marvel of this collection, abounding with unexpected metaphors and driven rhythms, is the deep understanding of time reached by the epiphany of the title poem: "All Born Perfect." Molly Peacock, author of The Analyst: poems.
These soulful, searching poems understand the necessity of "taking things apart to live." In All Born Perfect, Carla Drysdale delves childhood trauma in order to illuminate and transform adult experience, asking how to craft a life from a painful, complicated inheritance. By including everything, is one answer to that question, and Drysdale does, splitting open the worlds of motherhood, work, love, and spirit to reveal the troubled radiance, the wild and human range of emotions, at their cores. I am so grateful to this book for the truths it tells, and for the passion, intelligence, and courage of its telling.
Kasey Jueds
In All Born Perfect, Carla Drysdale explores family dynamics from her place as daughter, worker, lover and mother, and grapples with the toxic secrets and muddled memories of a traumatic childhood, which is to say every childhood. God is in these poems alongside self-love and self-doubt. It is through faith not only in a divine power, but in the power of the human soul, that Drysdale seeks to heal the inevitable traumas of living, growing, and loving, and to regain contact with that perfection with which we are all born.
Michael Broder