Red Death, Purple Dark by Thalia Geiger
By Taylor Payne
Thalia Geiger’s poetry collection Red Death, Purple Dark (Thirty West Publishing, 2026) explores themes of life, death, and the “tremors” of personhood in run-down sushi restaurants, dying gardens, and post-breakup baking. The body is central to the ways in which family, love, and loss linger, with Geiger marking the body as a site for color and darkness to take root. Geiger’s pieces evoke images of witchcraft, blood, rot, and claw marks, gracefully hinting at themes that lace together race, grief, desire, and true connection in a modern world. Geiger’s poetry asks: can color hunger? And answers: yes—and here’s how.
This collection begins with a bang. Geiger’s second poem in the collection “Nothing’s Gonna Hurt You, Baby” grapples with the statement itself, cleverly alluding to the gendered and racialized nature of desire. The poem opens with the lines “I was born wanting. Things soft like sweets / that melt in the mouth, dolls in princess / dresses” and turns to the speaker describing themselves, ending with “Eyes brown, skin black, sex female.” These identity markers are relayed with such clarity, directly in conversation with the soft, sweet, princess-like ideals of femininity Geiger opens with. The poem successfully turns the poem around to highlight the everyday-ness of this speaker’s life—“For a while things go right, humming along”—with the next stanzas detailing a fissure in the speaker’s ability to work within these foundational “cracks.” Readers can hear the flatiron sizzle as Geiger describes the scorching of hair as a burning of identity to ash, a backlogging of desire. The ending story of gendered harassment only reinforces Geiger’s assertion of the way one can find “laughter inside slaughter,” a nesting doll of changes in the self to conform to gendered, racialized, and acceptable forms of being.
The collection’s titular poem “Red Death, Purple Dark” is a darkly colorful poem which both reaches for the stars and grounds itself in the very real, present pain of grief. What this poem does well amongst the dying, thirsty garden is evoke the body as both a site for constructing meaning in both grief and wanting. The lines “The banana peppers / curl like witch fingers / or human toes in ecstasy” successfully paints this poem as one of desire, creating a unique meditation on the grief of witnessing death. The strawberries, “whose red death / only bore white fruit that browned,” point to the thesis of Geiger’s poem, the assertion that “everything / lives by dying.” A poem that is at its core a meditation on perseverance, “Red Death, Purple Dark” marks this collection as one of survival. Geiger leaves us with an acceptance of transformation, or more accurately, the constant metamorphoses required to live, and does so with a level of unflinching clarity that separates her from other poets in this vein.
The final poem in Geiger’s collection, “End of a Poem I Have No Beginning To,” drops us straight into action, with this abruptness softened by the mundanity of our speaker “swirling milky Thai sauce on the stove.” As sauce begins to bubble, our speaker hears her father’s crutches tip-tap upstairs, and Geiger’s use of sound—gurgle, stomp, splash—emphasizes the fragility of this space. We are reminded that everything requires constant, painstaking care—that everything is in strange balance—as the poem morphs into one of desire, of hunger: “I could drink this whole boiling pot. / Burn away the hunger sitting thick in the throat.” This realization leads to a “shared pitch” (a hissing, a tapping) culminating in our final, brightly sardonic image of a runaway bride, and “All the blisters her cold feet must hold.” The poem ends as it begins, in unresolved and sensation-laden action. “End of a Poem I Have No Beginning To” subtly yet expertly weaves together some of the collection’s most visceral themes of grief, connection, and hunger amidst intense underpinnings of resilience and survival.
So, Geiger asks: can color hunger? And after reading this collection, I’d respond: yes, it can. Color is not just a tool in this collection, but an embodied sense of grief, desire, and survival which are inextricable from the world Geiger constructs. Red Death, Purple Dark moves us physically from realms of domesticity to fruitless gardens, letting us hear a cauldron bubble, a kettle erupt, all with the intention of leading us not to resolution, but to endurance. Geiger’s writing is for failed gardeners, caretakers, daughters, lovers, and for those who understand how intimately connected death is with life, and struggle is with joy.
New Ohio Review 