SUNNYLYN THIBODEAUX : THE WORLD EXACTLY

Poems moving as music, first thought the first chord, playing with trust to a notion of free improvisation, rhythm guiding the tongue to an ending fade. Each page seems as if news from a day, a report made magic by poetry's promise, a devotion—in love with a world thought safe, yet entirely askew. Sunnylyn's voice is on the radio, some mystic Southern station, and it sounds beautiful.

— Thurston Moore

How can there be pleasure amid personal and societal dread? How can there be such beauty when one must constantly “survive/ another night in this body, mind/ racing with its tickertape?” Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s poetry knows that this intermixture, in its idiosyncratic detail, its weather, temperament, tragedy, is the one thing there is. “The things we know/ know us first.” So there’s a surprising amount of radiance and pleasure; San Francisco is real; the family is individuals; politics just there. You go on, shaky and graceful (full of grace).

— Alice Notley

Sunnylyn Thibodeaux’s poems hold an almost indescribable quality of intimacy, of nearness. In its freely melodic subtle though acute turns and shifts her ardent, lucky readers have come to cherish, The World Exactly carries a meditative, keenly perceptive, loose and wily music. Accompanied by an ever-expanding world vision, these vulnerable lyrics are freshly carved as today’s mango as the world burns. Lest we go too far along her cosmic reach into infinity, she has us put on some folk music, or some Lou Rawls. We could put this book on a turntable. Faithful to the actual, inherently political, “we are in desperate search of a back-up planet”––Thibodeaux traverses global disaster, family, motherhood, illness, death, all while living on the brink in our urban, infested, corporatized scapes. If you can only buy one poetry book this year, buy this one, or sneak it in your pocket. The World Exactly arrives just as our trust in the actual is under so much scrutiny. Thibodeaux is brave enough to tell us why we must stay alive: “that we make it to know love in its boundless array of faith. That we make it to know love.” 

— Gillian Conoley

The events of Sunnylyn’s poems are quotidian transubstantiation. We are brought into a communion where the phenomena of the apparent becomes an apparition of what’s been communicated to us. Musical and spiritual resonances arise as absence is invoked in the remains of what’s left. The impersonal traumas of the body meet the personal traumas of the world. “What would it look like/if we left this place” sings the ghostly chorus.    

— James Yeary