I’ve been thinking a lot about heat waves. The thick summer weather has felt like a wall of fire that must be bravely pushed through to order to exit from an air conditioned office building and make my way to the corner to board a bus crowded with sweaty citizens. So perhaps it’s no surprise that the words that kept jumping out to me in Kara Candito’s debut collection of poems, Taste of Cherry, (University of Nebraska Press, 2009) were weather words. The poems of Taste of Cherry are often shocking and intimate. Intrigued by both sex and travel, the speakers in these poems, whether feminine or masculine, are consumed by the dangers and risks of both. Sex and travel offering an immersion in the other, whether person or culture, while at the same time making the very boundaries of entrance and difference palpably obvious. But, what interested me when reading Candito’s poems was how often these moments of intimacy were associated with or precipitated by the weather.

The heat has the power to evoke the memory of a lost lover:

because it’s August in an ancient city and I want to
tell you about this heat that hangs like the mind

of a landscape in which everything is still and irritable
as the stray cats that nap on the ruins of Pompey’s theatre.

Because the man who served my espresso this morning
looked like you. In a certain light, I peered through

the bronze keyhole and saw the Basilica framed by fire.
Because I miss you even as I try to efface you, (from “Postcard/I’ve Been Meaning to Write-”)

In “Girl in the Grass,” Candito writes from the perspective of Caddy Compson from Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Here, the weather is the oppressive summer of the deep south, which brings out a certain human darkness that gains hazy momentum in the heat:

You think if you listen long enough
you might understand anaphora?
Men and their codes of honor,
the minute clicking of little wheels
that says summer again and honeysuckle.

Here is the vine. Here
are the nauseous berries. Here
is the blade against my breast.
Here is the nectar, so sweet
it stings the tongue and the sound
of ticking, the long diminishing
parade of everything that was.

Taste of Cherry asserts that the extremes of weather mark the honesty of these experiences and speak to something completely real and genuine about them. In contrast, she describes the truly fictional world of soap operas in “A Necessary Fiction,” as being “always between seasons.” Yet, In “Epic Poem Concerning the Poet’s Coming of Age as Attis,” the speaker acknowledges: “Nothing here, / but truth and hot.” I’m not sure if the poetic truth is a consolation for all this late summer steamy weather, but I guess I’ll have to take it.