Dalton Day’s To Breathe I’m Too Thin bravely extends its hand at the beginning to its reader—a constantly re-scaled you—to step along with the speaker through a land of mountains, doubling moons, skies that shed feathers, and wilds wherein trees spread into woods. This in an invitation to enter not just the speaker’s world, but their inward look at the self. Neither male nor female, neither prey nor predator, the speaker is at once tied to nature and hungry to incorporate its beauty. Eschewing binaries, the desire to invite in the external muddies the chapbook like a delta, allowing multiple branches of self to converge without settling.
I hand you a knife. It’s okay to cut me open, I say. I will
not be hurt. You trust me.
Published in 2016, To Breathe I’m Too Thin is available from Hyacinth Girl Press for $6.00 + shipping.
Rhiannon Thorne 