CUTBANK REVIEWS: Echo Gods and Silent Mountains by Patrick Woodcock

Echo Gods and Silent Mountains Patrick Woodcock ECW Press, 2012

Review by BJ Soloy

At the end of the first section of Echo Gods and Silent Mountains, Patrick Woodcock’s eighth book of poetry, the poem “Fourteen Postcards” stands as something of a microcosm for the book’s greater project. Addressing (among other characters) feral dogs, sandstorms, and children laughing until they cry, the poem embodies a composite apostrophe: a collage of characters and scenes converging into a cumulative sense of a place and its people. The place, in this instance, is the Kurdish region of northern Iraq, and the people are its inhabitants: a woman with disappeared husbands and brothers, a stubborn translator, the deputy head of the dwarf society, the attentive and conflicted Canadian poet in the middle of it all. Through their voices and stories, Woodcock offers readers an accounting of a place that is often reduced to regional footnote of an American war, if noted at all. Woodcock, whose previous books have been written from locations as diverse as Colombia, Sarajevo, and Russia, seems determined to challenge the reduction used to enable such footnoting.

The thematic unity underlying the collection allows for a plurality of formal and narrative approaches. The first section of the book, simply “Echo Gods,” gives voice to its many characters by employing forms both rigid and loose, including a sonnet, a variation on a pantoum, adaptations of open forms with elaborate rhyme schemes, rhyming couplets interrupted by a chorus, and variations on blank or free verse. A standout in this section, “White Boots,” displays the tension and strange harmony at the intersections of form/content and insider/outsider. Its 56 tercets take the reader on an internally-narrated, hungover tour through a museum of atrocities, and the rendering of such an experience makes such a tour neither familiar nor easy.

“Silent Mountains,” the second section, decidedly takes a step back from the formal lyric to offer a nine-page prose poem, which claims that “dialogue here flies in / all directions like hail off a basketball.” This longer poem more concretely enacts the simultaneity of voices, events, and observations with the casual diligence and pace of a traveler’s log.

The third section is a persona poem elegizing a Kurd writer, “Sardasht Osman Is Not Dead,” which opens, “Mother, they put two bullets in my mouth / yesterday. Now I hold them both in my hands,” and ends with, “I am not dead. I am not dead. I am / only dead if our generators fail.” These declarations bookend a piece exhibiting the poet’s ability to negotiate both urgency of voice and profundity of political context while maintaining the ear and eye of an artist; no small feat.

Throughout the collection, Woodcock exercises a Whitmanian mobility of identity and scope while resisting the urge to play tourist or missionary. His social sensitivity and political acumen are tempered by a self-conscious humor and a bent towards the vulgar mundane that transcend platitudes and slogans. In “The Teahouse,” he says, “It is exciting to listen to the birth of a nation. / It is wonderful to absorb the several.” Through its amalgamation of voices, forms, and ideas, and through its earnest craft and composite apostrophe, Echo Gods and Silent Mountains refuses the reduction to the simple and delivers the excitement of the several.

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Patrick Woodcock is the author of eight books of poetry. He was the poetry editor for the Literary Review of Canada and has published extensively in Canada, the U.S., England, India, Colombia, and the Middle East. Because travel is so essential to his writing, he has lived everywhere from Iceland to Russia, Bosnia and Herzegovina to Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq. He currently resides in Fort Good Hope, Northwest Territories.

BJ Soloy is exactly 1/3 of the anachronistic prog-yawp outfit "Dear Sister Killdeer," and has had poems published in Colorado Review, Court Green, MipoEsias, Columbia Poetry Review, Starting Today (University of Iowa Press) and DIAGRAM, among others.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Nothing is In Here by Andrew Levy

Nothing Is In HereAndrew Levy EOAGH Press, 2011

"The United States of Andrew Levy"

review by Matt Reeck

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Constitution.

Both meanings of the word lead the way into Andrew Levy’s book. Nothing Is In Here is a constitution, in the sense of a document of profession, belief, and order—a binding to law, a cohering of a social body, as any nation-state must have. But it also investigates the idea of constitution as composition, as the content of being.

The title sentence “nothing is in here” is a primary tenet in this new state, the United States of Andrew Levy, and yet with its seeming negation of the book’s every proposition, what gives, Mr. President? Am I not to take you seriously?

Well, no. Or yes.

Every book of poetry constitutes at least one thing: a proposition about authentic experience, a proposition about authentic statement, or a proposition about both. Nothing Is In Here does both. As a polysemous text, it asks the reader to focus on their experience of reading; it asks the reader to reconstitute the text in a way meaningful for themselves. The book also asks the reader to be wary of language’s advantage: its ability to propose reality, to instate reality through its logic. (Logic is a feature of language.) This warning, then, is Levy’s own way of defining, or deferring, the possible authenticity of statement, language and voice. The question is shifted to the sphere of social reality, i.e. experience.

If nothing is in here, what does Nothing Is In Here point toward?

It points toward a Utopian search for an authentic experience of life and of language, not blinded by the beacons of convention—ideology and orthodoxy. It doesn’t tell us any one thing, but it does show us what an experience of looking for authentic experience (as a poet, as a citizen) looks like. It also shows the process of a writer trying to keep himself off-balance so as to subvert his own ideological routines.

But if the value of statement is that it leads quickly to action, what happens to the possibility of action within a failed public order and corrupt government—in our America? The possibility of meaningful action seems remote. Instead, in such conditions, the only realizable goal becomes imagining future actions, and likewise opening the future to imagination.

Nothing Is In Here speaks with the urgency of finding an anchor in social experience that will allow individual and social transformation.

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Polysemous Texts.

Every text is plural, or polysemous. Of course a writer can find ways to reduce or to exaggerate the open-ended nature of texts, especially literary ones. Those that constrain meaning, or reduce a text’s polysemous nature, are, as Roland Barthes instructed in S/Z, readerly. Those that promote the fragmentation of narrative and encourage diverse readings are writerly.

Mark Nothing Is In Here as an extreme example of the latter.

Barthes writes that a writerly text means to “make the reader no longer a consumer, but a producer of the text” (4). It wants the reader to “gain[ing] access to the magic of the signifier, to the pleasure of writing.” This is a cordial invitation: the reader as equal to the writer. It is an invitation that Levy offers as well: “I don’t think you’ll be able to read my writing without leaving some trace” (46). This is good. Not only does this statement recognize textual reality, but it also permits my desire to participate in shaping meaning.

But Barthes cautions that the writerly text is an abstraction, an ideal image that cannot live fully in the world:

The writerly text is a perpetual present, upon which no consequent language (which would inevitably make it past) can be superimposed; the writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages. (5)

Nothing Is In Here is, thus, not without content. It has its own constitution. And it has its own ideology (Utopian) and genus/genre (poetic manifesto). If the title suggests that the book is writerly, then Barthes keeps us grounded by pointing out the obvious constraints on writing. No text is entirely random; once writing begins, the writer’s consciousness shapes it in ways well beyond the writer’s control:

For the plural text, there cannot be a narrative structure, a grammar, or a logic; thus, if one or another of these are sometimes permitted to come forward, it is in proportion (giving this expression its full quantitative value) as we are dealing with incompletely plural texts, texts whose plural is more or less parsimonious. (6)

Nevertheless, Levy’s text struggles to achieve a fluid interchange between the constitutive elements of language and consciousness. It pushes against the forces that bind us into narrative, coherent (and, perhaps, sane) bodies. In this way, it is experimental; in this way, it is Utopian.

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Utopia.

After the failed Utopian schemes of the twentieth century, it’s hard to get too excited about future Utopias. Read Foucault for a thoroughly distasteful description of Utopia:

The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, observation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears a distinct way over all individual bodies—this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. (198)

This is the sort of nation-state Levy does not want to live in. Nor would I. But it is, in certain regards, reminiscent of our lives today: hierarchy, surveillance, the function of an extensive power (viz. money, social classism) over individual bodies.

If we live in a decadent state, if we recognize the earmarks of corruption around us, then we also suffer the chronic fatigue of hindsight. This is Levy’s world.

He laments the ambiguous freedom of language stripped from social context: “It has been easy to say anything at all for some time” (1). He questions the bureaucracies of intellectual creed and caste: “It’s not even disinterestedness, its exhaustion / What’s the problem? / Languages have betrayed their glorious beginnings? / Intellectual, social, and professional suspension?” (52).

He returns to interrogative reminders, asking us to overcome our torpor: “So what do we do?” (13). And, “Would we get used to it? Would we accommodate ourselves? / […] Be content with what you have been able to act on?” (38). He pushes us toward acknowledging our inactivity and our resignation within the status quo. And yet, what change is possible? What revolutionary change can we countenance, with the recent past being so full of Utopian errors?

In Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, Jameson suggests that within the contemporary world the impulse toward change itself, the Utopian desire for transformation itself, suffices:

The Utopian form itself is the answer to the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible, that there is no alternative to the system. But it asserts this by forcing us to think about the break itself, and not by offering a more traditional picture of what things would be like after the break. (232)

This is the leading edge, the onward search, that Levy is interested in. He locates the break in two things: the text, or the book as form; and beauty. First, the text itself hopes to furnish possibilities: “To act so that thought could possibly be read in ways different than one expected” (5/6).

Beauty is the key to understanding what might lead us toward a future of shared value: “[…] beauty focuses on inclusion, finding commonalities between objectives” (70).

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Beauty.

[1] Important here is the idea of social text—of a text not speaking merely for a private individual but a text that does that and goes beyond that to speak with a social voice, for social imperatives, effectual because the desires it expresses aren’t that of just one individual but rather represent the beliefs of many.

The text’s non-referential use of personal pronouns is the first obvious means of implying a social text. The text reinforces this through its meta-commentary: “Identity can be lost in the telling of the stories one knows or linking sentences in imagined collisions as if these colliding stories are not there” (70). The writer can hardly be located in the weave of the text’s pronouns and in the displacements of scene and attitude. But the goal is not to locate a particular individual—the writer—through the veil of the text’s words. The goal is to progress toward a consciousness capable of transformation.

[2] Beauty as abstraction, as motivator, as means, as Utopian ideal.

Beauty is Levy’s idea to shape action. It’s intimately tied to the idea of the book:

There’s something in my character that’s always pushed me toward the book. At the idea that I would discover, if my intentions and effort were spirited, the book that would satisfy a quest for everything I’d grown to imagine language, as rendered in books might provide. It would be a complete satisfaction, emotionally, sexually, intellectually, in every way. I would end my search for that book having come to the one that completed everything. And if it did “complete” everything for me it would by extension, though I’ve never bothered to think how this extension would manifest itself, complete every person’s thirst in the entire world. That has been part of my fantasy of beauty—of what beauty would be. (7-8)

This passage, the first in the book to deal with beauty overtly, declares the scope of beauty’s power. The writing is full of the language of Utopia: discovery, completion, total satisfaction. But it reins itself in at the end; it acknowledges what Jameson notes as necessary in our times—the understanding that Utopia is a fantasy, an imagining of what something could be without going so far as defining it outright.

If Utopia, if beauty, is not (and should not be) an end-state, then it might act as a vehicle to transform us out of stasis: “The beauty of something you can’t do even if the attempt toward that thing, thoroughly compromised, is penned to dissolve or recede from your hopelessly outdated history” (11). That is to say, beauty is a motivator toward something, and though that thing will never exist, the momentum will create a new landscape, a new history, and might create a new sense of possibility.

[3] Beauty quotes.

Beauty is the philosopher’s stone (that which can change metal to gold, human ambivalence to positive action). Beauty is the lynchpin to “[s]elf-transmuting in the reform of one’s own discourse” (70).

No eventuality, the text says, “[…] fails to diminish the belief in the inevitability of a beauty that can be attained” (16).

The text itself is a conduit for change: “What is beautiful must change. […] The unthinkably improbable hero of the plot, given so much time, makes the impossible become possible, the possible beautiful, and a good competitor emotionally” (23).

Beauty has been maligned: “Beauty isn’t a bed partner to envy, but it has been forced to act as one” (32).

Instead, we should acknowledge it as a shining hope: “There is a circle that goes from you to the world and back. That’s the way to go into a world. A thick beauty” (60).

Beauty is the key to linking the individual to the commonweal:

Beauty may first appear “an unblendable element … alien and unassimilable,” a desire that when you open it up it becomes a piece of the real you can live in. I disappear when I feel it and everything, every bit of everything rises before me. I am part of the bridge that is falling; I am part of the bridge that is being built. I imagine everything is still very rough going. I understand that it must be difficult to think. That incompletion in the imagined manifestation of the complete has been a crucial part of my fantasy of beauty—of what beauty would be. The site of many celebrations, in some manner self-arranged, it’s something that seems to be, at least for me, a required course of hope temporarily turned out and felt to be complete. (61)

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Postscript.

If a repetitive refrain (as refrains tend to be), “nothing is in here” asks us even at the book’s conclusion not to accept it. Not to accept this text. This answer. Nothing Is In Here asks us not simply to shelve the book, nod or shake our heads, yawn or smile. Rather, it really wants us to ask ourselves what we can do to change the real world we live in. This is a generous offer. It’s also an offer, and challenge, that this reader will continue to try to meet.

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Works Cited.

Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. NY: FSG, 1974.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. NY: Vintage, 1995.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.

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Andrew Levy is the author of Don’t Forget to Breathe (Chax Press), Nothing Is In Here (EOAGH Books), Cracking Up (Truck Books), The Big Melt (Factory School), Ashoka (Zasterle Books), Democracy Assemblages (Innerer Klang), Values Chauffeur You (O Books), and several other titles of poetry and prose. His writing has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies including Writing from the New Coast, The Gertrude Stein Awards in Innovative American Poetry, and Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. With Roberto Harrison, Andrew edited and published the poetry journal Crayon 1997-2008.

Matt Reeck’s poetry is forthcoming in Colorado Review, Interim, No Dear, and Verse. His reviews have appeared in Jacket2 and The Brooklyn Rail. A winner of PEN and NEA translation grants, he is the co-translator with Aftab Ahmad of Bombay Stories – stories from the Urdu of Saadat Hasan Manto – forthcoming from Random House India. He is the co-editor of the new magazine Staging Ground.

REVIEW: The Invention of Glass, Emmanuel Hocquard

Canarium Press, 2012

Translated by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith

Review by Brett DeFries

Since the early eighties, Emmanuel Hocquard has enjoyed a long and impressive list of translators into English, including Michael Palmer, Lydia Davis, Norma Cole, and Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop. Now, with his 2003 collection, THE INVENTION OF GLASS, recently out from Canarium Books in its first English printing, that list includes Cole Swensen and Rod Smith, both influential poets and editors in the American post L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E scene. Like his earlier collections, THE INVENTION OF GLASS is highly philosophical and e(al)lusive, and though concept remains integral to THE INVENTION, so too remains the lyric. To prevent any unnecessary confusion, though, about its being, the book's back cover reveals exactly what it is:

This is a narrative that tries to explain and to crystalize (the fourth state of water) a situation that has not yet been clarified. Under the guise of memory's particular logic, its play of facets turns to fiction because its sense takes shape only as a series of grammatical phrases unfolds, fusing shadows and blind spots. And yet, like glass, which is a liquid, the poem is amorphous. It streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing. What is the meaning of blue? No one needs to interrogate the concept of blue to know what it means.

However koan-like this passage may be, it matches the structure of THE INVENTION, which divides into three sections: POEM (itself divided into twenty sections of 48 lines each), STORY (also divided into 20 prose sections, each serving as lyric NOTES to a corresponding POEM section and comprised of both original writing and excerpts from outside sources), and finally NOTES, which provides full citations for STORY quotations. Put more simply, what we have is a gradual movement toward the bedrock of one of Hocquard's primary interests: the relationship between subject and object. The book begins with subjective utterances in POEM, continues with quotations and brief passages, which place the utterances in their dialectical context, and finally we end with the source of the source, the 'other' author in Hocquard's dialectic, who remains importantly separate from the text itself. Of course this backward sourcing takes place on present's still but forward arrow, and the more it seems to hurtle, the more we have behind us to source. It's a tautologous oscillation, and I'm guessing that tautology is what Hocquard means by "memory's particular logic."

Because its logic is time's logic, this book is also a narrative. That is, the book is the documentation of a process, in time, that turns to fiction, as true invention, on utterance:

This path came out of the ground under the feet of animals. Now it's an avenue. (THE INVENTION OF GLASS, pp. 54-5)

The ground is not a path unless there are feet above it. If the path is under cars, then it is not a path but an avenue. A note in STORY, quoting Gilles A. Tiberghien, explains that "Roads in the United States often follow old Indian paths, but this is also true of certain city streets. Broadway is the best known example" (100). Now we have the story of an interplay between the past and present of a place (Broadway), which "is not the one you saw here yesterday, but is exactly the same as it" (Wittgenstein, quoted in STORY on p. 103). Like Witgenstein's later work, this book spends much of its time clarifying how we use language, and here Hocquard reminds us with Wittgenstein that meaning emerges from context, which determines the words we use, and how we use them.

Learning what makes this book a narrative also gets us closer to understanding Hocqard's interest in subject and object, and the gap between meaning and void—a gap which some might say shrinks as the shadow of Wittgenstein grows. Here's a long passage from section four of POEM:

When one speaks of water, subject and object form in the phrases. [...] There is an abyss. Poetry does not speak of the world. World is a word that flaunts itself in order to be. The middle road is an odd place and it would be wrong to take the tepid for the wise. Given that a phrase is always clear ctenaire by analogy: one no longer wants to be defined. To say the spoken is within the speaking is to take the void's measure. Wanted or not he contrives to spread doubt across the land. Adventure also carries this risk. After the war a child bit into a glass. The parallel escapes no one. It has no exit. [...] I eat an orange. For the record, Robert S. W. Sikorski (grandson of the general who gave their name to the helicopters) wrote that one-line poem which is no small contribution to our understanding of citrus fruits. And so, a series of decisive encounters that makes vertigo switch sides. (21-4)

There is a lot to pick apart here. As the back cover says, "[the poem] streams off in all directions, but reflects nothing." It seems to me, though, that two broad sides get represented here. The first side (the Idealists), responding to meaning's contingency, "contrives to spread doubt across the land" and takes the world not on its own terms (whatever that means), but simply (or not so simply) as a word, beating its chest for chimerical authority. The second side (the Realists?) "[bites] into a glass" and counts the broken tooth as evidence for a rule—given a context, Hocquard might remind them. About what happens when biting on (hardened) glass, there is little room for doubt. Too, this second side, when asked "What is an orange," responds "I eat an orange," and calls that—for every day meaning and use—good enough. Hocquard seems sympathetic to both sides, but he also seems unwilling to compromise: "The middle road / is an odd place / and it would be wrong to take / the tepid for the wise." But there is finally a third strand at play, which makes space for a new position, and that is the "decisive encounter," the collision of an I and a you; a subject and an object; a one and an other.

If there must be feet to form a path, then there must be an encounter between ground and feet. THE INVENTION OF GLASS is all about these encounters, encounters that paradoxically and by their very grammar (I (subject) eat an orange (object)) are required for their constituent parts (subject and object) to have sense. "It's the traveler / that makes the region visible," says Hocquard, and then, in the corresponding STORY entry, quotes a passage in Wittgenstein about whether one can be sure one is in England, when one is in fact in England (75). What interests me more than the passage he quotes, though, is the passage immediately following, which closes the enquiry:

Then why don't I simply say with Moore "I know that I am in England"? Saying this is meaningful in particular circumstances, which I can imagine. But when I utter the sentence outside these circumstances, as an example to shew that I can know truths of this kind with certainty, then it at once strikes me as fishy.—Ought it to? (On Certainty, §423)

Note that Wittgenstein doesn't deny our understandable inclination to reach out of our frame and into some metaphysical absolute of certainty. Instead, he says such reaching strikes him as fishy. Why, I imagine him (and Hocquard) asking, are we dissatisfied with simply observing our being in England and then moving on without irritable reaching after some extra stamp of metaphysical facticity? For Hocquard, it's fishy for the Idealist to earnestly doubt whether she is in England, such that it prevents her from functioning there. We must be able to trust our encounters, to believe in an other. Similarly, though, it is fishy for the Realist to say "No, seriously, I am REALLY in England," while stomping her foot on British soil. Instead, Hocquard says "the didactic takes / off from the everyday / and leads to a marvelous / vision" (75-6). We learn by observing the same way we always do, and the vision that results is singularly marvelous and not 'minimal,' as the accusation often goes. Pounding one's foot and caps locking REALLY adds nothing but theater, which is interesting and terrific, but has little to add to the grammar of location.

I would say Hocqard lays out a contingent meaning, but that is a tautology. How could we say there is any other kind? Really what he does is clarify the language of meaning. Meaning emerges from the decisive encounter and is killed with an excess of philosophy. "Toss the pebbles in a bowl / color appears in the water," says Hocquard in theory of tables. "Don't sort out I and you / don't sort out blue and Aegean Sea" (3). To sort them out is to do away with them, such that 'them' or even 'each' becomes nonsense. That Hocquard actually performs this subject/object dialectic with his poem/story structure is truly a remarkable achievement and strikes a meaningful glow into even the smallest, most mundane detail in this book. To bite on glass and form a universal rule based on that experience is to forget that glass is also liquid and at another time might encase the teeth in glowing liquid sand. Glass is amorphous, like the poem, whose being depends on an other (flame to glass) no less than the other depends on the subject. THE INVENTION OF GLASS, then, begins as a book of logic but, through attention, and without saying so, becomes a book on ethics—fluid, like glass smiling.

Works Cited:

Hocquard, Emmanuel. THE INVENTION OF GLASS. Trans. Rod Smith and Cole Swensen. Ann Arbor: Canarium Books, 2012.

Wittgenstein, Ludwig. On Certainty. Ed. G. E. M. Anscombe and G.H. von Wright. Trans. Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe. New York: Harper & Row, 1969. p. 54

REVIEW: Already it is Dusk, Joe Fletcher

Brooklyn Arts Press, 2011. Reviewed by Matt Shears Jack Spicer famously likened the poet’s role to that of a radio—a conduit transmitting language.  It’s an apt beginning metaphor for Joe Fletcher’s “Already it is Dusk,” but a metaphor that requires one small update:  on this radio, the Martians have saturated the airwaves, and one of them (will we ever know who?) has programmed it to change stations when there is a new story to be heard.  Whether a highwayman lurking at the edges of our primitive forests of consciousness or some mantic daemon bending our ear an hour after closing time, the voices that inhabit this remarkable collection offer their stories as the static sets in:  just at the edges of sense, just at the edges of recognition.

“Antenna,” the opening poem, situates us in one such encounter.

Listen.  Watch for what comes out of cracks in the tundra, out of the sink in the demolished villa, out of you, who want so badly for things to be stirred, for breath to rise to your brow and to break in the salt-spray of an idea.

Fletcher’s speakers shift as their worlds shift, and one of the pleasures of this work is that we are not always sure which—speaker or world—produces the fiction.  In its most haunting moments, his fictions themselves open into spaces that we didn’t know existed: and they are all the more true on account of it. Take this section of “Thicket” for example.  What strange omniscience is this?  Into whose epiphany do we travel?

Beneath a sky recently shredded by thunder you follow the yellowing thicket past the city’s radius.  You follow into heavy silences some thread of dream the birds sense—they watch you as if through masks.

On the long late night drive through landscapes made all the more strange by their familiarity, Fletcher’s company is one that records dreamsense in sound and image, sharing with his readers the promise of the defamiliarized.  In what is ostensibly a nature poem, “Thicket” understands that description is both a receiving of the world and the creation of it.  Fletcher’s encounter with nature(s)—landscape or psychological interior, encountered reality or imagined—is often an act of intensification.  We are immersed into the language of these poems while what we know is slowly peeled away. “Thicket” continues:

You pick up a turtle shell still smelling of rot and peer through it at a cloud you will forget. Mushrooms sprout from soggy drums of hay. Here are some violet berries nestled in thorny tunnels. Sweet juice coats your throat.  The essence of summer is packed in those dark clusters you scar your wrists to reach, in whose depths open night skies swarming with storms that knock pinecones to slick highways lovers race down.

In Fletcher’s work, a “sky recently shredded by thunder” can recompose in “night skies swarming with storms,” and both image and speaker can unmake and remake themselves in these tissues of utterance.  And while Fletcher’s work is stunningly visual, perhaps its most tangible quality is its physicality.  Here, the roving gaze of the poem and its doubly conscious iteration fold into body, where “Sweet juice coats your throat.”  Here speaker and referent blur into one, and these blurrings in “Already it is Dusk” make available startling clarities.  Indeed, here, present mixes with past as it does with future.  And that sweet juice coats our throats.  “Thicket,” like many poems in “Already it is Dusk,” is a cosmos.

In the remarkable “A Night Out,” Fletcher’s speaker details one of the many fantastic encounters that comprise the work.  After a summoning within the poem (“A murmuring finds its hearer in me. / I follow it deep into a building.”), Fletcher’s next stanza answers, recording the following:

A funeral.  Whose?  I partake. In torchlight I see something dark scurrying around our ankles.  A woman passes ladling a drink from I don’t know what reserves. It goes through me like a hornet swarm. A priest slurs through a prayer. The coffin hacked from an enormous ash. We approach and tip it down a gleaming rail into gloom and the sound of gurgling pumps. We disperse.

Here, we are provided with neither intention nor resolution.  It is a scenario that the reader must navigate much as the “I” in the poem must navigate it:  without the benefit of foresight or hindsight, a phantasm moving about its phantasmagoria.  The strangeness hacked, like the coffin, out of the familiarity of this scene offers it multiple readings and allows it to register multiple tonalities.  Fletcher’s poems gather and disperse, and his readers are offered experience and beauty for the small price of their assurance that the world is flat, that the past is a site of contemplation and that the future, the future will answer all of their questions.

These are poems that twist and turn through their own wormholes, surfacing just long enough to catch the world by surprise, and to see it and record it before it puts its face on.  And they are poems where angels impart orders to figures inhabiting landscapes from Lubbock to Pioneer Valley, where the writer can disappear into the fiction residing under the floorboards or awaken in web spun inside his own mouth.  Fletcher’s fictions can arise from (and descend into) anything.  The longer one sits with “Already it is Dusk” the surer one is that the world is composed of fictions and that we, its readers, are better off for experiencing them.  A murmuring found its hearer in me.  I tuned in.

****** JOE FLETCHER is the author of the chapbook, Sleigh Ride, published by Factory Hollow Press. Other work of his can be found at jubilat, Octopus, Slope, Hoboeye, Poetry International, Hollins Critic, MoonLit, and elsewhere. He lives in Carrboro, NC.

REVIEW: Teahouse of the Almighty, Patricia Smith

Coffee House Press, 2008.Review by Tristan Beach

Patricia Smith writes with great fierceness and intimacy. Her collection of poems, Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series-winner, contains many of Smith's most striking and candid verses. She frames this brilliant little volume with an epigraph quoted from the late Gwendolyn Brooks:

If thou be more than hate or atmosphere Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves. Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

Taken from Brooks' sonnet, “god works in a mysterious way,” I believe the speaker calls upon God to assert spiritual power and order over a chaotic world. Smith's poems seem to invoke the poetic spirit of Brooks, who acts as guide and mentor in the younger poet's verses. Smith's keen attention to form, despite her use of free verse, as well as her constant themes of poverty, race, sexuality, violence, and the revitalizing, empowering aspects of poetry, each attest to Brooks' presence in this volume. However, these poems are Smith's creation—whatever her apparent influences are, each verse is recognizably, undeniably hers.

Smith's poem, “Giving Birth to Soldiers,” echoes the sentiment of the epigraph, as well as Brooks' famous “sonnet-ballad.” The poem begins:

She will pin ponderous medals to her housedress, dripping the repeated roses, while she claws through boxes filled with him and then him.

The speaker observes Tabitha Bonilla, a young woman who loses her husband and her father to the Iraq War within the space of a single year. Smith's initial tone, apparently disaffected (with small underpinnings of lament and anger), eventually swells, embittered, yet ironic: “And she will ask a bemused God / for guidance as she steps back into line, / her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.” Smith focuses upon Tabitha, noting that life's basic pleasures have lost their taste in the wake of sudden death. The speaker feels the void, the disillusionment that Tabitha feels, and forlornly looks toward a future of perpetuating death.

Smith exercises restraint in “Giving Birth”; the poem could easily be an outpouring of grief, but here the cries just penetrate the poem's toned down surface, evoking a sense of smoldering, undirected anger. However, this is not to say that Teahouse is without wit or outbursts. Smith's poem, “Drink, You Motherfuckers,” observes an open-mic event at a seedy bar, run by an “insane Mexican barkeep” named Sergio. The speaker declares the event “an odd parade of eggshells / and desperadoes,” occupied by poets who are “duly convinced / that [their] lines had leapt / / from the cocktail napkin, / sliced through the din, / and changed Chicago.” Smith's observations, made with a snicker, are incisive, to say the least. However, Smith identifies with these poets, especially in the final lines in which Sergio blasts his customers, these pretentious poets, into humility:

He waved a sudden gun, a clunky thing that sparked snickers until he blasted

a hole in the ceiling and revised our endings, smalling our big drunken lives.

Smith's tight lines constrict (and thereby accentuate) the preposterous, booze-filled evening. Teahouse of the Almighty evokes anger, hilarity, disillusionment, and humility in equal doses. Smith's language, wit, form, and concentrated presence, testify to poetry's ability to empower the speaker and her subject. With grit and intimacy, she interrogates circumstance and misfortune, and locates a thread of hope within each poem.

REVIEW: Helsinki, Peter Richards

Action Books, 2011. Reviewed by Brett DeFries Most reviewers can and rightly will note Peter Richards' close affinity with central and eastern Europe, particularly contemporary Slovenian superstars Tomaz Salamun and Ales Steger.  But one could also include Vallejo on that list, or Bolivian poet Jaime Saenz, the way horror floats into scriptural heights; or O'hara and his spontaneity, his exuberant grief; or second generation New York School poet Joseph Ceravolo's trust in major spills; or fringe surrealists like Char or Cesaire; or others.  None of these would be quite wrong, but none of them would be quite right either.  Like his previous two collections, OUBLIETTE and NUDE SIREN, HELSINKI's verbal range and span of influence are seemingly endless, but HELSINKI absorbs influence so completely into its fat and muscle and bones, that no one ancestor is separate from the others, and all of them are confused.  One might even imagine Whitman1, on his way to swallowing everything, getting Dickinson2 caught in his throat:

Tonight Julia awakens painting the way our kiss can sound there's a reticent lilt to her hand as each hastened stroke gets confused with our own she's painting let the hallway worry about the hallway she's not painting sounds in a ship she's painting they began by walking the lawns together they began without emissaries they began to get specific so far they are just two smears so it's hard to tell if the hair was left to reference the painter or in fact just fell where the painting had seemed seems how we know how seems together with all forms hues and shades of leaf we fell there fallen and seeming last night went searching for three city blocks there is no city not even Helsinki has something to do with itself yet that banner deploring the length of our fingers as it would not burn bury nor tear at the fray begun by our teeth I spread it out and bloodied myself bled until the study can say the banner means nothing the banner means nothing but the banner remains

In these poems, all of them untitled, unnumbered, unpunctuated, a speaker earnestly and humanly explores the limit, not just of language, but of things themselves.  I'd say that these poems have no ideas but in things, but with such a weakened distinction between the corporeal and the broadly phenomenal, Williams' famous dictum turns too vague to grow a pulse.  Part of this confusion is the synaesthesia, which may be a blessing or a blessed syndrome, but is chronic either way within HELSINKI.  If you can paint the sound of a kiss, then you can also call into question the meaning of a kiss and the limits of sight.  But there is more to it.  This doubting of banners and cities is not just a drug induced poetic positivism.  No.  In HELSINKI, the poem is the thing independent of science, and everything else is a thing in the mind of the poem.  In a poem, the rules of experience change.  Anywhere else, HELSINKI is no such place, and the banner means nothing.

One way I can think of to be simultaneously ecstatic and hidden inside oneself is to seriously CONTAIN the multitude like a covered birdcage whose bird is the multitude.  Or to be a self scattered haplessly about:

I do remember as a small boy being brushed by a black man in the courtyard feeling the small of my back lightly brushed so that it sank deep into my imagination and partly the initial deathblow Helsinki prepared for my boyhood drawing an invisible orange line at the base of my skull leading to this villa my parents shared between them each room holding a portrait of one of my parts and one room wrongly represents the cyst in my knee another captures my chin before it was mended a third stretches to the evil side of the room where this tear sits hard and white and so I think it must be cold so cold the cold outnumbers ice from when the ice was young no tear has taken its place so it must live beyond the great doors of winter and sing as many flesh and blood songs as a frozen tear can sing.

The line down his skull leads to his parent's house, the rooms of which contain inaccurate sketches of his parts.  Finally, in the evil side of a room, a frozen tear lives "beyond the great doors of winter," and the tear sings.  What he finds inside himself is both his self in parts and that which lives outside.

For all its lyrical wanderings, though, HELSINKI remains a strongly narrative series with recurring characters, locations, and a quest perduring across the void of death.  Too, there are important narrative turns, mostly around Julia's shifting axis.  Julia, the colonized one, the monolith, the green bee-like horse with a swinging herrick.  Julia, whose chariot the speaker would never dare take, because "it might change Julia / into an island capable of holding / as many ships as she can / until she herself is the island's / freed ringlet of ships."  Much of Julia's shapeshifting, I think, owes to HELSINKI's superb attention to detail.  As the eye moves, the image changes, and if a decent view of a villa is as much worth our attention as disappearing soldiers, then there is a great deal of change.  Amidst that change, every seen object is an object seen in fervor.

Consider this passage from Motherwell's 1970 statement before the United States Congress:

As an artist, I am used to being regarded as a somewhat eccentric maker of refined, but rather unintelligible, objects of perception. Actually, those objects contain a murderous rage, in black and white forms, of what passes for the business of everyday life, a life so dehumanized, so atrophied in its responsibility that it cannot even recognize a statement as subtle and complicated as the human spirit it is meant to represent. I am as well, at other times, an expresser of adoration for the miracle of a world that has colors, meaningful shapes, as spaces that may exhibit the real expansion of the human spirit, as it moves and has its being.

Romanticism aside, what interests me here is the notion of painter as finder of monads.  That is, someone with attentions so acute that objects divide until qualities become their own indivisible units of perception.  And divorced of unity, these new units grow rather unintelligible.  If HELSINKI is in fact a place, it is a place like drains "where the hemispheres / do war and the hemispheres unite."  The units split and collide so quickly that the speaker is left to explore, with each event, every scenario of possible feeling.  In the same poem as the hemispheres, a handsome older man pulls the speaker's face off by the braid, tells him to "shut the fuck up," and seems to want the speaker to "serenely drink from [his] back."  But in a sudden turn, the poem ends: "with that we both had / a good laugh and you should have been with us / that day when we all went sledding together / down a great monster of sunlight and hair."

Even more than Motherwell, and as much as any poetic influence, I see Francis Bacon in these poems.  In Bacon's painting, Triptych August 1972, each panel, side by side, contains a figure resembling, in various degrees of rudeness, a human form.  Behind each figure is a black rectangle like a wide threshold or vertical grave, and beneath each figure is a puddle, spilling from some unraveling place on the figure.  In the center panel, the puddle is pure lilac, and the figure is more lump than human.  Also, the central figure is in repose.  In the two side panels, the puddle is a mix of lilac and the color of skin.  The side figures sit in a chair, though sections of torso are absent.  Instead, where the torso should be, there is the void of the threshold behind them.

In Helsinki, an oarsmen rolls a cigarette and stands, but his waist is enchanted.

In a 1971 interview, Bacon says, "death is the shadow of life, and the more one is obsessed with life, the more one is obsessed with death."  Further exploring this twinness, art critic Lorenza Trucchi remarks, "when death appears as a stark and hermetic inevitability, no further barrier can remain between these two parallel obsessions that finally meet in the infinity of 'nothingness.'"  In HELSINKI, FINALLY is NOW, and in keeping with Trucchi, "there is no city / not even Helsinki has something to do with itself."  But like Bacon's Triptych, a vision remains—terrible, playful, dead, and alive:

I have these competing transparent patches ingesting my body help me I'm growing quilted all I can see is the yard with its animals and a tunnel filling my chest

******

1Throwing myself on the sand, confronting the waves, I, chanter of pains and joys, uniter of here and hereafter, Taking all hints to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them, A reminiscence sing. (Whitman)

2And then a Plank in Reason, broke, And I dropped down, and down— And hit a World, at every plunge, And Finished knowing—then— (Dickinson)

******

PETER RICHARDS was born in 1967 in Urbana, Illinois. He is a recipient of a Massachusetts Cultural Council Grant in Poetry, an Iowa Arts Fellowship, an Academy of American Poets Prize, and the John Logan Award. His poems have appeared in Agni, Colorado Review, DENVER QUARTERLY, FENCE, The Yale Review, and other journals. He is the author of OUBLIETTE (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2001), which won the Massachusetts Center for the Book Honors Award; NUDE SIREN (Verse Press/Wave Books, 2003); and HELSINKI (Action Books, 2011). The University of Montana-Missoula's visiting Hugo Poet Spring Semester 2011, Richards has taught at Harvard University, Tufts University, and Museum School of Fine Arts, Boston.

BRETT DEFRIES received an MFA from the University of Montana, where he received an Academy of American Poets Prize.  His work has appeared in or is forthcoming from Colorado Review, Eleven Eleven, Laurel Review, Devils Lake, New Orleans Review, Phoebe, and elsewhere.

REVIEW: Money Shot, Rae Armantrout

Wesleyan University Press, 2011. Reviewed by Christopher Kondrich

In his Winter Conversations with Mark Halliday, Allen Grossman explains, “the word ‘person’ does not specify a static or isolated state of affairs, but a profound interaction, a drama always going on, of acknowledgement and presence.” This sense of personhood, which is transient, fluid, contingent on the ongoing shifts that define our experience of the world, is the subject of Money Shot, Rae Armantrout’s follow-up to the Pulitzer prize-winning collection Versed.

Money Shot collects 62 new poems written with her signature juxtaposition of various tones and modes of speech, and her incorporation of colloquial phrases and interruptions that bubble to the surface like the words that fall from a television program suddenly turned on in a public space. Many poems are split into sections and have the attributes of collage or pastiche, pieced together into something resembling Williams’ American Idiom if only to ponder the influence this collective Idiom has on the individual utterance.

When colloquial phrases or cultural references appear in quotation marks, we ponder their significance in the context of the poem. In “Spin,” Armantrout writes,

The pundit says the candidate’s speech hit “all the right points,” hit “fed-up” but “not bitter” hit “not harkening back.”

In “Sustained,” we revisit the language of the twenty-four hour news cycle, but without quotation marks:

Just now breaking

into awareness, falling forward,

hurtling inland in all influence

“Spin” and “Sustained” are linked in that they employ similar cultural signposts, and this type of linkage occurs throughout Money Shot. Phrases and references appear in and out of quotations, and, by filtering them through the shifting voice of the poem, suggest a collective language, a language that is shared on a fundamental level. The origin of these utterances matters insofar as origin is the subject up for debate, but on some level who or where or when these utterances are voiced matters little since they give shape and sound to the muck in which we are all mired. They are dropped by one and picked up by another – found objects for Armantrout because they were never lost.

As Stephen Burt once wrote about the various sources of voice in Armantrout’s work, “those other speakers themselves receive these phrases, and the attitudes they connote, from a system larger than they are, one that can do us harm.” This unsettling conclusion is one that Armantrout allows for by employing found language and its unreliable punctuation. It invites readers to challenge their own perceptions – in this case about the tension between singular and multiple utterances – because that is what Armantrout’s work is doing to itself.

But Money Shot doesn’t stop there. These poems wield a doubt that is hyper-aware, always turning back, reconsidering, re-visioning. In “Recording,” she writes,

Here everything is singular and strangeness may be hard to recognize as such. Or not. I don’t know and there is no way to ask the inhabitants about it.

At the point in the book that “Recording” appears, many poems have already demonstrated a willingness to engage culture and the language of culture in order to trouble it, to trouble us; resultantly, this doubt complicates the tone of the book. It’s an attack of a different kind, not on the language of culture, but on her original attack, challenging the (perhaps naïve) impulse to distance ourselves from culture, from our roles as cogs in its giant machine. What makes Money Shot such a trip is that it recognizes that simply acknowledging our role as cogs doesn’t automatically transform us back into people.

The I-don’t-know-ness of it all creates a very unnerving reading experience. It rattles us in our cozy reading chairs because we assume the artistic authority inherent in the poem after its creation, upon seeing it on the page. But in these poems, particularly in the stunning “Recording” when we read “I play along, though, / privately, / I still have my doubts,” the onus is on us, the readers, to think our way through the cultural allusions, juxtapositions and tensions between voices, sections, poems. The poetic capacity of Money Shot is not merely a result of its assumed artistic authority; the poetry, as it were, is also in the transference between authority and admittance, between the circuit that is constructed on the page and the light that is thrown across our minds.

In “Measure,” we read, “I am not alone in this / sentence,” while “Second Person” explains, “I know / you think / I wonder / if you think / of me.” These poems are ripe for theoretical discourse. Notions of the “drama always going on,” as Grossman writes, immediately come to fore, and for good reason.

Yet these lines are also striking for their profound mystery, and they implicate us in their mystery by speaking right to us. And so Money Shot is a participatory volume. It invites readers to field its dissonances and to ponder its tensions, which all employ language that is of-the-moment, very now in an attempt to figure out what now might mean.

Although this epiphany is ostensibly unattainable, Money Shot valiantly tries to create a version of the present to this end. And insofar as its moment of presence is contingent upon our willingness to admit its dislocated voices, Money Shot demands to be read.

******

CHRISTOPHER KONDRICH is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver where he is Assistant Editor of Denver Quarterly. Recently, his poems have appeared in Boston Review, Cimarron Review, Free Verse, Meridian, Notre Dame Review, Painted Bride Quarterly, Sonora Review, The Journal and Zone 3.

REVIEW: Leaving the Atocha Station, Ben Lerner

Coffee House Press, 2011. Reviewed by Colin Post and Patrick Allen

1. [detail] reception

Out came the handkerchief and the man walked calmly into 56, stood before The Garden of Earthly Delights, considered it calmly, then totally lost his shit.

There is a difference between consumption and reception. In the process of reception, a nervous, bursting sense of attention is paid by the receiver to the thing received; the receiver commits herself to not follow but to find with the received subject their suddenly-conjoined path; and without the frenetic action of both agents, there would be no course at all. Now, look [it] up. The restraint of the screen complicates reception by necessarily modifying the information received. Painter, herald, patron, analyst, hash-dealer, viewer, guard, writhing in a dense, multivalent pile of weeping bodies being slightly tuned under the lens.

2. [detail] excess

When I found a relatively dry, sheltered place, I smoked and watched the faint rain fall into the artificial lake. I had  never smoked hash before coming to Spain and, unlike the weed I smoked in Providence, which instantly made me an idiot, the hash usually allowed me to maintain, or at least to believe I was maintaining, the semblance of lucidity, especially after months of habituation.

Character development is designed to be casually ingested. Break [out] the plastic in the event of desperation, puking. After all, money changes hands. When it serves a narrative function, excess becomes a pose: drink floods the mind and various smokes allow one to be properly misplaced in relation to his fellow characters. Flee the room you paid too much for onto a street you couldn’t find.

3. [detail] translation

Something in the arrangement of the lines, not the words themselves or what they denoted, indicated a ghostly presence behind the Spanish, and that presence was my own, or maybe it was my absence; it was like walking into a room where I was sure I’d never been, but seeing in the furniture or roaches in the ashtray or the coffee cup on the window ledge beside the shower signs that I had only recently left.

Translation, a form among many, is not a final, binding transformation but is one stage in a series of developments that an utterance might take. Occasionally, the offended fist arrives before the translation. Bloody pompé, persona, daemonization, miasma, passus, yarn, wanderjahr, sprezzatura, weltschmerz, passus, bildungsroman, proentelepsis, roman á clef, passus, passus, kenosis, apophrades,  passus. The failure to translate between the hard rock and water might end in a breathless riverside body. Information demands its conveyance, even if it must resort to those methods most dim and most violent.

4. [detail] vantage

I saw, I might have seen, a dazed teenager with blood all over his face and a paramedic who took his arm and sat him down and gave him something that looked like an ice pack, instructing him to sit and hold it to his head.

Is any vantage ever complete? Screen-in-screen: we are playing a consistently-visible bit-part in the world as we watch it perform itself. Imagine the ever-refreshing webcam that would project you turning toward another lens. You could see them holding their heads. Update: gather the additional (mirrored/cinematic) data of yourself.

5. [detail] spectacle

Or I would take the Metro and experience a sudden jerk in the carriage as the first detonation. I would imagine my friends from the U.S., their amazement and maybe envy at the death I made for myself, how I’d been contacted by History.

We’d like to refrain from attempting to eat what is larger than our collective mouth. It (the active lens of spectacle) resists any possible deviation of interpretation. The eye collects, the crowd collects, the situation develops. Ben, you did it. People remain flammable.

******

BEN LERNER is the author of three books of poetry The Lichtenberg Figures, Angle of Yaw, and Mean Free Path. Lerner has been a finalist for the National Book Award and the Northern California Book Award, a Fulbright Scholar in Spain, and the recipient of a 2010-2011 Howard Foundation Fellowship. In 2011 he became the first American to win the Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He teaches in the writing program at Brooklyn College. Leaving the Atocha Station is his first novel.

Sarah - Of Fragments and Lines, Julie Carr

Coffee House Press, 2010 Review by Noel Thistle Tague

Wallowing in the perpetually cloudy Missoula, Montana, this spring, I found my solace in books. This in itself is not new, but living in a valley that sucks in gray weather and holds it close for weeks is, so the solace was especially meaningful. Two of those books were Julie Carr’s Sarah—of Fragments and Lines and Marina Tsevtaeva’s essays on poetry, collected and translated by Angela Livingstone in Art in the Light of Conscience; this review is about only one of those books, but mine has also been a spring of Russian obsession (again—the weather), so I can’t help but write of one by writing about the other.

In fact, Marina Tsvetaeva did teach me something about what a review should be—and what poetry, in its fullest, most wondrous capacity can be. Her 1922 review of Boris Pasternak’s My Sister Life, “Downpour of Light,” is not only an ecstatic introduction to an extraordinary Revolution-born(e) collection, but a lesson on how to let a book of poems pry open and transform one’s life, how to live with such a book, how to live. Consider: “[Pasternak] is lightning to all experience-burdened skies. (A storm is the sky’s only exhalation, as the sky is the storm’s only chance of being, its sole arena!)” Or this command: “Read it trustingly, without resistance and with utter meekness: it will either sweep you away or it will save you! A simple miracle of trust: go as a tree, a dog, a child, into the rain!” And this prophecy of the book’s power (of poetry’s power!): “And no one will want to shoot himself, and no one will want to shoot at others…”

This last might seem a logical segue to Carr’s previous book 100 Notes on Violence, but right now, we are in the presence of Sarah. Sarah, who—at once named and nameless—haunts the fragments, lines, abstracts and addresses of this most recent collection. In navigating the spaces of conception and dementia, life’s shadowy bookends, Carr puts her faith in form and language—and to great effect. The slippery, the inexpressible, the duplicitous—all of these seem captured, or at least confronted, in these poems. Take “Daylight Abstracts”:

“Now flight, now gift, now speaking of plastics, of rapture of rise. Woke corridored by calendar, woke exhausted in face, spoken of and speaking into thing cold and needing. Needling too.”

In the negation of the ending of one life and memory as another begins, language does not fail; language is, perhaps, the only thing that cannot fail, as etymologies, sound components, syllables, are transformed and multiplied throughout these poems.

Language dazzles—

An election year. O. Dust mites spin on guilt-ridden heat. Dire guilt.

What’s an eye spot? An eye-sore a

sunspot, piss pot

—(and in this, there are echoes of the interests Tsvetaeva took in language in her prose, rendered so well by Livingstone), but it does not overfill the poems. Which is to say that Carr is aware that certain things are inexpressible, respects this, and gives space to this by giving precedence to the components of the poem, rather than the whole. Given the richness, the purposeful craft of Carr’s lines and fragments, made stark by the ineffable white space between and around them, one feels as if at the center of this book there is a void and all of these poems peer into it. Eileen Myles, who selected the book for the National Poetry Series, said, “As a reader I feel included a lot in Julie Carr’s hard and beautiful book.” I feel included, too, because in this book I see an honest, earnest reflection of the way life is experienced—and not limited to carrying a child while watching one’s mother progress through the stages of Alzheimer’s. At the core of our most difficult and our most beautiful experiences, there is the unutterable, threatening to overwhelm, dangerous. And poetry is that thing that allows us to safely look into it.

So there is one thing Sarah—of Fragments and Lines has taught me about the intersection of poetry and life. Carr is, of course, no Tsvetaeva, the phenomenon and circumstance of whom is unrepeatable, but she is a poet to learn from—from pondering the result of giving all to the line to working with the transformative power in language—and her book is one to dwell in on the most overcast days.

--- Julie Carr's previous books are 100 Notes on Violence, published by Ahsahta Press in 2009, Equivocal, published by Alice James Books in 2007, andMead: An Epithalamion, which won the University of Georgia Press's Contemporary Poetry Prize in 2004. Her poems have appeared widely in journals such as Volt, Verse, New American Writing, Parthenon West, Boston Review, Bombay Gin, Denver Quarterly, Colorado Review, American Letters and Commentary, and Public Space. She also has poems in the anthologies Not for Mothers Only (Fence Books), and The Best American Poetry 2007. She teaches poetry and literature at the University of Colorado, Boulder, and is the co-publisher, with Tim Roberts, of Counterpath Press. --- Noel Thistle Tague was born in Ontario and was raised in the Thousand Islands region of northern New York. Currently, she is pursuing an MFA at the University of Montana where she also teaches composition.

Ventrakl, Christian Hawkey

Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010. Reviewed by Ezekiel Black.

On the title page, the byline reads “Christian Hawkey | Georg Trakl,” and the subsequent page reads “[a collaboration].” Although this is a fair description of Hawkey's project, it does not capture its full nature or extent; indeed, Georg Trakl, an Austrian Expressionist poet, died of a deliberate cocaine overdose in 1914, so a standard collaboration is impossible. In an interview, Hawkey explained his choice of Trakl as collaborator: “It occurred to me that maybe the sense of foreboding that can be found in his work prefigures--tracks--the build-up to WWI, and that if you folded the past 100 years in half, roughly speaking, Trakl's time and our time would overlap.” To compare, Ventrakl, like Juliana Spahr's this connection of everyone with lungs, arose from the worldwide antiwar protests before the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and Trakl wrote his best poetry in the last two years of his life--from the political tension before The Great War to the aftermath of its first battles. Furthermore, Hawkey and Trakl respond to the absurdity and despair that their respective periods entail, which, especially in the case of World War I poets, such as Trakl, lead to experimental, avant-garde verse, a movement evident in Dadaism, Surrealism, Modernism, and other -isms. Although one collaborator worked at the beginning of the twentieth century and the other works at the beginning of the twenty-first century, they both draw water from the same well: they both answer a new millennium with a new poetry. With its variety of forms, with its homophonic translations, direct translations, centos, essays, interviews, definitions, photographs, ekphrases, apostrophes, dialogues, lists, biographies, and chronologies, Hawkey's book is difficult to categorize, but if one remembers the products of High Modernism, namely William Carlos Williams' Paterson and Jean Toomer's Cane, those books famous for their pastiche or collage, then Ventrakl is no longer foreign, but a homage to Trakl and other modern writers.

In Ventrakl, there are several recurrent words and ideas, but the one that governs the book is the hole. Early in the book, Hawkey includes a definition of hole, pronunciation, etymology, and all. Here is the first definition: “1 a : an opening through something: perforation b: an area where something is missing: gap as (1) : a serious discrepancy : FLAW, WEAKNESS.” If hole is taken as an example of a void, then the book can be read as a creation myth because many religions, alive and dead, begin with creation ex nihilo. For example, the Earth was “without form” and “void” in the Bible, but from that vacuum, God divided light from dark, water from air, and earth from water. Likewise, Ventrakl begins with a photograph of Trakl beside the ocean, so like Aphrodite, who was born of spume, Trakl steps full grown from the ocean's void. This is Hawkey's commentary on the photograph: “You claim that until the age of 20 you noticed nothing in your environment save for water. Perhaps, then, you were falling through it or through the word for it, bottomless--” Baruch Spinoza said that “nature abhors a vacuum,” argued that something is superior to nothing, so the primary concern of Ventrakl is to address its holes, and Hawkey understands that this concern demands a creation myth: “I too know these are stories, handed down by others, half-truths, myths, and I know you courted and encouraged these myths. That I am--here, now--just as complicit in the construction of your self as your friends were, you were. That I am repeating, reinscribing the myths.” There is a gulf between Hawkey and Trakl, and to connect with his long-dead collaborator, Hawkey must bridge the expanse with myth, a picture of Trakl. “A photograph,” be it literal or figurative, Hawkey claims, “gathers every past tense into its present.”

Similar to his holes, Hawkey's use of photographs is ingenious. While he often responds to these photographs or details of these photographs, he, late in the book, employs one for dramatic effect. First, Hawkey offers a chronology of Trakl's dear sister Greta, who was as troubled as Trakl:

1914 March. Trakl visits her in Berlin after she barely recovers from an abortion. Continued drug addition. Unhappy marriage.

1914 November 3rd. Georg Trakl's death. A week before, in a letter to von Ficker, Trakl donates all of his belongings to her, including Wittgenstein's gift of 20,000 crowns.

1914-16 Husband leaves her. Unable to continue her career in music.

1917 September 23. Berlin. At a large party she steps into a side room and shoots herself.

After this matter-of-fact description of her death, the next two pages are blank, perhaps a visual representation of the shock over her suicide, perhaps a moment of silence, another void. Next comes a series of single lines, each found in the middle of its own page, a quiet reemergence of poetry, a dawning:

A side room.

A private act in a public space.

A gesture--a grand gesture, tragic.

There is the question of music, her music.

A figure in a poem, a shadow.

Several pages later, Greta's visage suddenly shatters the white space. This full-page photograph is ominous, given her austere lips and askance gaze, and artifacts on the film and the grainy enlargement only amplify the haunting effect. In Hawkey's preface, he mentions the necromantic power of literature: “And to read the deceased is to reanimate their words; the between-voice is a ghost, a host. Books--of the living or the dead--are the truest ghosts among us, the immaterial made material. And this book is a ghost containing a ghost.” In Ventrakl, Greta is able to live once again through literature; moreover, when Greta commits suicide in the book, she is able to live once again, as a phantom, through photography. There are strata of existence in Ventrakl, and this allows Hawkey to collaborate with Trakl, the book's variety of forms housing a different ghost of the Austrian.

---

Christian Hawkey, a poet and translator of German poetry, was born in Hackensack, New Jersey in 1969. He has two full-length collections and two chapbooks of poems. His first collection, The Book of Funnels, received the 2006 Kate Tufts Discovery Award. He has also been given awards from the Academy of American Poets and the Poetry Fund, and in 2006 was honored with a Creative Capital Innovative Literature Award. In 2008 he was a DAAD Artist-in-Berlin Fellow. His translations from the German have appeared in jubilat, Dichten #10, the Anthology of New European Poetry, and the Chicago Review. he lives in Berlin and Brooklyn and is currently an Associate Professor at Pratt Institute.

---

Ezekiel Black is a lecturer of English at Gainesville State College. Before this appointment, he attended the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he received an MFA in Creative Writing. His poetry and reviews have appeared in Verse, Sonora Review, GlitterPony, Skein, Invisible Ear, Tomfoolery Review, Tarpaulin Sky, InDigest, Drunken Boat, and elsewhere. He lives in Oakwood, Georgia, where he edits the audio poetry journal Pismire (www.pismirepoetry.org).

Bird Lovers, Backyard, Thalia Field

New Directions, 2011 Reviewed by G.R.O.A.N.

Some generous instinct to1 receive, to read; incipient2 form as support3 of flight, of further4 investigation; or,5 a lush trajectory6 that must be met7.

1Question what we’re doing: the deliberate act of approach is the surest way to frighten off most anything so peevish as a book (or a bird that, somehow, strays near) that catches, in some glimpse, our attention. And it seems like a generous act, to stray near. And so how does one approach so generous a book (in the sense that it’s generative) without infringing on its act of infringing, its approach, the act that first caused our attention to be caught? But without snare. Something other-than. And so we as a group decided to do as little as possible with Thalia Field’s Bird Lovers, Backyard, to sit with it, alongside, to observe the unfolding of a mosaic-like language asserting itself, against space, and together. But that isn’t enough, so it was up to us to sketch a quick lattice of investigatory jabs, or to conjure tenuous glue so that we might pin down, however briefly, what instinctually resists approach. But what also instinctually strays into our line(s) of sight, the spaces we consider most personal. 2 A book of beginnings (one entry ((“Crossroads”)) stutters entirely under the banner of “Chapter One”) that insists on opening rather than closing; the sections themselves are whittled from excerpts of past sense- making, almost always beginning from a thing made porous: a question, a remark, a nearly-innocuous observation. The forms contained within this book aren’t hyperconscious genre-blobs that hunger to be different for difference’s sake, but delicate coils of language designed simply to undertake an assertion of itself and its surroundings, this vast interaction, resulting in what 19th-century zoologists might have considered an "incipient species” — a combinatory thickening of received information, a body deftly capturing, retrieving, and rearticulating in its very species (the impressions put upon it), its very build, the clatter of reactive stances, statements, vantages and the attendant questions of aftermath. What we receive and what we make of it. To allow the reception and the consideration and so, so on. Piles of importance elapsing into a dance/collage of colliding points (or in Field’s case, generally writing, lines) of entry, building blocks that come without any instruction other than themselves. She’s carved a rare thing: a cave that wants to resonate. Or a backyard, out of what materials were around, where minor seclusions, the brief ownership of sight, or little approaches between species could take place, out in the semi-open. Bounded field. 3 Systems of brief collapse, an unsettling of sediment and response; and what manages to cling, together, provides a step—; but a step is also a ledge and so as one reads, one falls, and Field’s cunningly jagged structures allow one to pour down the length of the page, only to suddenly, unexpectedly, arrive at a height of resonance. These parts resemble without strict imitation, like living blocks of erosion, like the curve of important stones, and like, as strong. 4 Query, a language unsnared; birds, like this book, capture us by other means: the distant grip of intrigue, the way their gestures of soar draw our eyes across what surrounds us, injecting it with movement, reminding us of pattern and arc. 5 An act of watching the watchers, or, more importantly, their conclusions, the ways in which they relate their watching to the world afterward. The back flap refers to the work as “an interrogation of the act of storytelling”, but it is an interrogation in the way a bird interrogates the sky; darting in and out of it, carving a path with and through this vortex of concern, testing the wind, its shape, vaulting from vantage to vantage. 6 Of growth, a growth of shape. And as shape is what we determine the world from, those elementary blocks of possible information, they become desirable to the seeker. But we inhabit our confusions as much as our advances, which scatter the diagram, refusing to yield either the originary form or its logical conclusion. And Field’s is an interactive book in that it wrests with source, with these blurred origins in the manner of a cold-case optometrist, putting earlier investigation, earlier sight, under the lens, seeking the path of the shaped, quietly tracing deep veins of resemblance. In this book, even our confusions are too precious to allow their extinction. They must remain charted, and we. 7 How does one introduce oneself to such a work? How near can we get to a book this swift? We don’t know how. But because it can feel our presence, it has the unique ability to get near us, approaching, self- determined, reacting against capture.

--- THALIA FIELD's books with New Directions also include Point and Line (2000) and Incarnate:Story Material (2004). She is the author of the novel, ULULU (Clown Shrapnel), published by Coffee House Press (2007), and with Abigail Lang, A Prank of Georges (Essay Press, 2010). Thalia teaches in the Literary Arts department of Brown University. --- G.R.O.A.N. is a collaborative-action imprint currently based in the Netherlands. They can be contacted at: groanpoetics@gmail.com.

Walking the Dog's Shadow, Deborah Brown

BOA Editions Ltd, 1 April 2011, 92 pages

ISBN-10: 1934414476

ISBN-13: 978-1934414477

reviewed by Mike Walker

Last year’s winner of BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize, Keetje Kuipers, seriously impressed me with the book of poetry which came out of that swell victory, Beautiful in the Mouth. In fact, it was slightly uncanny that the very same day CutBank published my review of Kuiper’s book, a package came in the mail for me from BOA Editions containing the book by this year’s Poulin Prize-winner, Deborah Brown. My first thought was ”how much alike or how different will this be from Kuiper’s work?”. Perhaps it’s not fair to compare, but the evolution of winners of any literary prize over the years can be an interesting thing to watch—just as interesting as the winners of the Super Bowl or who makes the NBA All-Stars or what team has the best enforcer this year in the NHL.

For some reason, one of the things I cannot help myself from when I first look over a new book of poetry is to check out the author’s biography—if it’s someone whom you’ve not heard of before or know little of, you have to wonder ”who is she? what else did she write? what else does she do?”. In asking these questions I learned that Deborah Brown is an accomplished poet, translator, and also a Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire at Manchester. So she’s not new to this. The promotional tearsheet that came from BOA described Brown’s poetry as ”sage”, seemingly stealing a word right from my pen, as once I started reading Walking the Dog’s Shadow ”sage” was the best word I could muster to describe in an all-encompassing way what Brown had provided on these pages. Brown writes with an expectedly mature and knowing voice yet one which betrays no traces of effort in capturing the feeling of awe she often finds in her observations of life. Thus, her poems feel not only very natural and even flowingly light in places, but also—and without irony or contrast—come forth as powerful bulwarks all the same. They stand up—they have a feeling of age and gravity to them, of footing secure and robust. Much like Jorie Graham, Brown brings together images from science, history, and the arts in a way that never seems overwrought yet provides deep metaphor via her considerations on life. Not content to simply observe, Brown however also strikes the iron while still hot when it comes to personal experience and often her ability to bring herself into the larger fray of things—world events even—makes the vastness she seeks small enough to have that most powerful of meanings it warrants. Small enough, in fact, to hold in your hands.

To say Brown’s poetry can place a human face to issues too grand to grasp in their humanity, their real intimacy, may sound trite but it’s also very true. In her poem ”For the Cousins” we see this readily, as we start off feeling Brown may be about to tell us about what a nice time she had visiting some cousins until we realize, with due horror, the cousins concerned here are in fact distant ones suffering from war crimes in Albania. As I’ve studied the Balkans in depth myself, I felt the gravity of what Brown was speaking of, but I also felt even more her deep empathy—nearly guilt, really—of a woman who can read a book of poetry in comfort because her grandfather escaped the land where these cousins now encounter a daily hell.

I’m writing to you from inside,

in the thick of it, knowing you’re well

out of it.

With that Brown enters her poem ”Thick and Thin” but these words really could serve as a good introduction to many of Brown’s poems and, even in cases such as in ”For the Cousins” where Brown must admit she’s really also ”well out of it”, she still seems to hold a lift-ticket to the top of that mountain or the doctor’s otoscope to look into the ear of that beast. She has a key, but she turns it with great care. Do you remember that one high school English teacher who tried to impart the utility of poetry to your class in some mish-mash of a lecture (often just before reading some Frost) detailing how poetry isn’t just fancy words or for hopeless romantics but can open up doors into places of the world we cannot otherwise venture with any ease? Deborah Brown makes good on that promise. She really does open those doors, the doors to the life of a middle-aged woman who connects with family near and far through her words, the doors of physical places in her memory, the doors of depth into the world the news and Internet share out only as postage-stamp or paint-chip sized postcards of its actual self.

Back in 2008 I read a book of poetry entitled Salvinia Molesta by Victoria Chang which in great part Brown’s Walking the Dog’s Shadow remind me of in places, as both books often approach horrible, depressing, topics but do so in a way that is true and adroit in their feeling and scope. It’s a tough trick to pull off, to seem neither journalistic nor overly emotional when writing about things like genocide or a woman who may suffer from mental problems, verbal abuse, or both. It is difficult to speak of these things in clear truth when we’re surrounded by them in the newspaper or via television’s consant soap opera-scripting of life. Brown, unlike Chang, is more diverse in her topics and the leitmotif of gloom and doom in Chang’s book is absent (perhaps thankfully so) here. However, it is often when Brown addresses the most difficult where she’s at her very best, such as in her poem ”Clue”:

I am almost ready to say to the men who remove their belts

to strap a child, ”I understand

you must have been hurt yourself”

In short, I become a fool.

What Brown is saying, of course, is that empathy is a tender and frail—though highly powerful—emotion, one that can be useful yet should not always (or too quickly) be trusted. She has empathy, but should she allow it out of its Pandora’s box? She knows better than to become a fool from it—at least here she does.

The first poem in Brown’s book, ”Proof” is a manifesto, though one with a hidden, if not uncertain, trajectory. It’s in places such as ”Proof” where Brown reminds me for all the world of Jorie Graham. It is also here, at the first glance at Brown’s poetry, that I realized how ardent, adroit, and expansive a voice I was going to hear in the pages yet to come. Death, leaves, the sky, dirt—all the meanings of ”earth”, in fact, as whole planet and dust composing the same—these are the items most recurrent in Brown’s poems. Through it all, in many ways, I felt Brown’s thesis was to best stated in some lines from ”Proof”:

When did the innocent part of the country become one with the rest of the violent world?

That’s it right there: whether Brown means this in literal terms—and in many ways I suspect she does at least in part—or it takes on more nuances in her mind, it’s still grandly powerful. Her ”innocent part of the country” includes such marvels as willow tres, crumpled brown leaves, white flowers: it is everything we expect of an autumnal, enchanting, New England or western European rural experience. She’s sly enough to not color it in too many direct details, allowing few proper place names and providing uncertain time frames but it feels like New England just past the second world war to me. Yet Brown leaves time and place up to her reader in many cases, inviting them to make it all their own. She certainly knows the power of that. Even Brown’s summers have fall already in their air and her tone is always not exactly wistful but something we do not even quite have the language in English to fully express; there is the term mono no aware in Japanese, somewhat akin to the neoclassical literary concept of the sublime except that instead of a thing of grandness or subtle beauty being viewed as awe-inspiring, it is viewed in sadness—even pity—as how delicate the nature of beauty is in the world and how quickly such true beauty often vanishes. Brown doesn’t pretend to store such beauty away in a museum but instead to simply recall where she found it in the first place. She gladly recalls for us, and shares with us, but this beauty is one of memory and of landscape—neither her own nor ours, either.

Another part of what makes Brown’s writing so highly adept is that she never strives towards grandness in the least; there is something very natural yet romantic about her poetry, yes, but she never brokers on romanticism. More importantly, she never bets that winsome images will carry her trajectory without a strong gravitas at the center of her wings. That core of gravity is always found in Brown’s work, and it is most often a very humble thing, a shy essence which might rather hide had Brown not called it to the front of the classroom to speak for itself as the last presentation of the day after each of her lovely images and softly beautiful metaphors have already had their turn.

Do you believe the way the grass

trusts its roots to loam? What do you trust this way?

With this, Brown opens her poem ”Mamaloschen”. She takes us back to the origins of her family, to her mother’s own age as a young adult, to how things have changed, to what it is to be ”an underling” and how, oh, there are all sorts of those. How deep do our roots go? How far will we trust? These are questions Brown revisits time and again in her poems, but she’s astute at keeping her visits fresh and finding novel means each time to speak again and again of truth without making such trite. Truth is not only stranger than fiction, but history whether global, local, or personal has the uncanny power of being something that once actually happened and we are able to revisit again. What an awesome power this is in hands as expert as Deborah Brown’s. Of course, when one knows one’s history—when one speaks of history as Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote of it, or as Clyde Edgerton incorporates it into his novels—we are all the more expected to wonder, again and again, ”when did the innocent part of the country become one with the rest of the violent world?”

---

Deborah Brown is a poet, author, translator and Professor of English at the University of New Hampshire—Manchester. She is the winner of BOA Editions’ A. Poulin, Jr. Prize for the year of 2010.

---

Mike Walker is a writer, journalist, and poet. His original research and other academic work has been published in: AirMed, Goldenseal, EcoFlorida, BrightLights Quarterly, the ATA Chronicle, Translation Journal, Multilingual Computing and Technology and other journals. His journalism in: The Florida Times-Union, The North Florida News Daily, Satellite Magazine, Twisted Ear, and other publications. His poetry in: Meanie, the Church Wellesley Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

from the BOOK OF BOOKS by Nicholas Gulig

(chapter one : exegesis)

                    The forty-seventh word in the Book of Books is red, referring to a light slant, the room in which through dust the day is falling. In turn, because the speaker isn’t right, we, the audience, imagine being fucked with. I for one am empty of the ability to shine. Then, the walls collapse. A door of glass slides back, revealing girls. The light engages them in places inappropriate for children under seven. It was like the movies, like a stranger with his hands inside his pockets repeating beneath his breath the names of horses, like acid at a gun show. I swear to you, their jaws went slack in awe, and so did mine. Audience, surrender. Is it important, the men in the background balding, having stitched, at some point prior to the first word, the letter “I” in silver thread across their foreheads. It would be wise, I think, to consider before continuing, the history of salt, Mesopotamia, the tallest man on earth, circa 1956. Eventually the girls all turn to pillars. Eventually the sky. What strikes me when I read aloud at night is night. The way the stars look underwater if I extend the book, at arm’s length, and squint my eyes exactly thin, the words go dark around me, turning and turning over, widening the sea.

Nicholas Gulig, a recent graduate of the Iowa Writer's Workshop, is a poet living and writing in Missoula, MT.  "from the BOOK OF BOOKS" was the winner of CutBank's fall 2010 Big Fish Prose Poem and Flash Fiction Contest, and it appears in CutBank 74.

Beautiful in the Mouth, Keetje Kuipers

Rochester, NY: BOA Editions

April, 2010

reviewed by Mike Walker

Keetje Kuipers, the winner of the A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize in 2009, has published here the work that brought her to the attention of BOA Editions and garnered the prize named after that publisher’s founder. Kuipers, a native of the American Northwest and now a fellow at Stanford University in California, has always used her geographic identity as a powerful internal compass for her life and writing. In fact, this book was completed while she was the Margery Davis Boyden Wilderness Writing Resident, another nod towards Kuipers’ ties to the land. While not all of Kuipers poems presented here are directly concerning the wilderness, she is never far from the landscape at all nor is she only interested in the metaphoric value of such: Kuipers is very much a poet of the American West. Her best poems in this collection to me are those where she directly connects with the land of the brutal Northwest and human interaction with the same, as in ”After the Ruins of an Oregon Homestead”:

we are, none of us, native to the earth, not born in the dirt of her cupped palm, though yes, we go back to it

Words such as these could be dismal, to say nothing of trite, in less-skilled hands, but for Kuipers they are adeptly applied to their task as she describes in a sense the very meaning of ruins. In our modern times we do forget, it seems, the gravitas of life for pioneers, the fact that before the housewife could even boil the beans, the cornmeal for making muffins might be eaten up by the mice. Kuipers however, remembers. Her poem ”Memory, Eight Years Old” is a perfect example of this:

the neighborhood boys are smiling,

when they say they’re going to get knives

and come after me

How can you turn away from such a start? How can you not want to turn away, though? By the time you encounter this poem in the book, unless struck with the notion to skip around its pages an awful lot, you’ve read enough of her apt words describing the natural landscape and a sometimes harrowing sense of travel that you feel the real power this situation intones. Whether the boys were all that serious in their threat (by the end of the poem, we still don’t know), we are allowed a glimpse at the mind of a very intelligent eight year-old in the wake of such terror. Even at this tender age, life was assumed to be hard and anything, it seems, was assumed possible. That, in stiff words bookended by hard facts, could sum up the whole of the American pioneers’ spirit, really. In the course of this poem, Kuipers asks her mother for ”her sharpest knife” to combat the evil boys and is only given a plastic spoon. The pluck and pragmatism of the child versus the very different place where the mother’s mind resides is also telling here, and yet Kuipers does all this in a short poem, with no pushy emotion or showmanship of words. I think it was this poem that convinced me beyond any possible doubt of the wisdom of BOA in awarding her the Poulin Prize.

Even in a poem with as tame a title as ”Oregon Spring” Kuipers opens up her intentions with these dour words:

in the gully where last winter

the tourist died

and how do you respond to that in a poem? It’s just as lurid as the boys’ knives. The near-gothic deadpan here would be comic in other surroundings or would be found too quick in setting up pity, but Kuipers makes it work, coming full circle when she mentions the renewal in spring, the rise of the pines and other botanicals around this location, then stating ”I’m glad at least one man didn’t die in an uglier place”. Many, of course, do: those in hospitals, those on battlefields. At least one man, had his time come, died in this place of beauty which, Kuipers predicts, his daughters one day may visit.

In ”The Lake Oswego Girls’ Soccer Team at the Hilton Pool” we see Kuipers move away from the dark corners she’s gone over to in many of the poems of ”Beautiful in the Mouth”, but not by much. She delights in the youthful, fluid, robust, playful, nature of these girls in the water, yet still she compares them to herself, their innocence to her experience (and I don’t know her age, but must say that I don’t believe Kuipers to be all that old, either: the emotions she betrays are from in fact experience, not simply the passing of decades). Kuipers here and elsewhere reminds me a lot of my friend Allen, whom, in nearly every conversation we’ve had will somehow carry a coffin through the feast, no matter how happy he is overall, some shadow will still be cast. Allen, like Kuiper I suspect, is not trying to depress the lot of us, but simply to open up a vastness of not always pleasing experience.

Another poem, ”To the Bear Who Ate a Ten-Pound Bag of Sunflower Seeds in My Front Yard This Morning” makes Kuiper’s trajectory even more clear: from the title, a funny take on an unfortunate event might be expected (unfortunate, at least, to whomever purchased the sunflower seed), however Kuipers draws a working allusion between the bear’s actions and her own hand-to-mouth life while living in New York City. Taking a chance, certainly, in such a far-fetched premise, Kuipers tells the Bear that once, she lived in New York, and that while he cannot know what that means, it was the New York, the city, not some remote part of the rest of the state. She and her boyfriend there were not wealthy, in fact, they hardly had a dime. She understood a hardscramble life, she’d seen a shoplifter dodge out of a grocer’s doorway and drop some cans of tuna and soup from his coat into the snow, losing even his ill-gotten prize. Humans, too, have the ability and desire to meet unmet needs, by hook or crook.

A poem that preceeds the poem about the soccer girls by a mere page, ”The Undeniable Desire for Physical Contact Among Boys of a Certain Age” allows the nearest swell of pure happiness unmitigated by experience and hard-earned cynicism that Kuipers provides in the span of the entire book. Unlike the soccer girls, these boys, probably somewhat the girls’ juniors, are allowed their youth in full, without pity, without caution. Reading this poem I couldn’t help but think of young pop star Justin Beiber’s recent music video for his song ”One Time” and the opening scene of him sitting next to his friend Brian playing video games; the awkwardness of the tween and early teen years seems more apparent for boys than girls, yet in other ways it actually appears a more gentle process. Beiber’s video, for a work of the pop mainstream is outstanding (in the most literal sense that it stands out) for its honesty in showing the awkwardness of that age whereas Kuipers’ poem in short lines captures the same emotional state yet also further defines it in a way only good poetry can. In fact, much of what I found most impressive of Kuipers’ entire book was her ability to place poetry to task in ways that poetry serves better than most any other art.

In Kuiper’s poem ”Fourth of July” she uses her simple yet very real, very nuanced, language that she elsewhere applies to such great effect in service of the natural world, but focuses it on relationships and thus draws us into how the mundane is also the truly romantic:

If I have any romantic notions left,

please let me abandon them here

on the dashboard of your Subaru

beside this container of gas station

potato salad and bottle of sunscreen.

Otherwise, my heart is a sugar packet

waiting to be shaken open by some

other man’s hand.

Of course she has ”romantic notions left”—her book is an entire collection of these, even if they are cynical ones in places. She’s just adroitly concerned, a bit like she was at age eight with those boys, of what happens when you let your guard down, but she’s also able to realize and delight in how romance works. Her heart could be frail, but it’s protected. Experience, once again, rears its ugly yet sage head.

So what do we learn of the poet herself via this collection, aside of her early encounters with boys carrying knives and her empathy for a bear that ate all her birdseed? She travels a lot, for one: if you’re a rural person in the American South, see, you’re kind of expected to stay put, at least for literary purposes. But if you’re of the pioneering spirit of the dank and dark of the Northwest, travel must in so many ways be in your bones. Kuipers says as much in her poem ”I Arrive in Paris on the First Day of Montana’s Fishing Season”. No jours de l'an for the likes of her. She compares, in a manner more haunting than one would imagine, her explorations around the arrondissements municipaux to a friend’s foray into spring fishing back home in Montana. She has lived, and aside from her work at Stanford it seems lives still, in Montana . . . yet another locus on the vast map of the West Kuipers has claimed. So she has landed in Paris, such a grand destination for poets, you know, and here she is, a lady who we could even say has a touch of Rimbaud in her, and yet she is missing Montana’s chilly streams already. She’s a country girl, alright, she’s lived in New York City, visited Paris and a host of other locales, but she knows where her home is, and despite her fine ability to write about probably any location with the verve of Lorca or Rimbaud, she’s certain about the primary places she wishes us to visit with her first.

I have no reservations at all with Beautiful in the Mouth or the poet behind it: if my praise seems even too encouraging for an unbiased review, just know that this is possibly the best book of original poetry that I’ve encountered since I first began reviewing books in 1998. Perhaps it is because Kuipers as a poet is much like myself in her foci of intimate affairs and broad natural landscapes, or perhaps it is because she is so skillful in crafting poems that tell stories or minister to our emotions honestly and she can do so with an impressive economy of words. She simply has impressed me, she has reached what I desire in poetry. How she did this exactly, I cannot quite place into words. In any case, she’s certainly one to watch.

--- Keetje Kuipers was born in Pullman, WA to a fishing guide and a sociologist. Since then, she's lived in Idaho, Montana, Minnesota, California, Pennsylvania, New York, and Oregon. Though she's pursued all manner of careers--from midnight baker to Google desk jockey, publisher's assistant to Off-Off-Broadway actress--poetry has been her passion for many years. Writing directly to the themes of loneliness, longing, and loss, Kuipers' first collection, Beautiful in the Mouth, contains, as The Rumpus put it, "pitch-perfect poems about topics that are expected in a poetry collection, but that are crafted so well that they transcend cliché to flower into these plainly beautiful chunks of text." Still obsessed with restlessness and isolation, Kuipers is currently at work on a manuscript entitled "The Keys to the Jail" which contains poems that examine the crimes we commit against ourselves--our acts of faithlessness, and the redemption of returning home to the self we left behind. As Kuipers herself has said, "[Poems] are beautiful, necessary attempts, the same way that standing on top of a mountain and shouting your name into the uninhabited air is an attempt—we must declare ourselves over and over again, and still never really find a way to understand how we exist."

--- Mike Walker is a writer, journalist, and poet. His original research and other academic work has been published in: AirMed, Goldenseal, EcoFlorida, BrightLights Quarterly, the ATA Chronicle, Translation Journal, Multilingual Computing and Technology and other journals. His journalism in: The Florida Times-Union, The North Florida News Daily, Satellite Magazine, Twisted Ear, and other publications. His poetry in: Meanie, the Church Wellesley Review, Tipton Poetry Journal, and other publications. He lives in Gainesville, Florida.

The Sore Throat and Other Poems by Aaron Kunin

Fence Books, 2010

Review by G.R.O.A.N.

A pleasure of1

Insufficient funds2

Of voices demanding simple3

Formal rei[g]ns, ragged4

This manifold failure5

Of shame to be other than6

Writing about writing about talking about us7

---

1

The Sore Throat wheezes most consistently with the pleasure of textual desperation, a gymnastics of the imprisoned
tongue, presenting a confined space tinged with the hot breath of a damaged throat (the core of which is an unrelenting
mundanity; not diseased, not flayed, but erupting from a common, vaguely unpleasant infection, a minor malady, a
sickness unto dearth). This book is a delight in the way that watching a drunken, curbside woman weeping into her
handbag is a delight. It is a recess suddenly revealed, a raw complex of simple inabilities. It should not be a delight,
but it is—the pathos is almost insulting in that it cuts both ear and tongue, speaker and receiver. The result is deep
intimation between the slightly wounded.

2

What we have is a lack attended by a lot of questions. Buy this book, but buy it with something other than money.
Currency, like articulated desire, is empty gesture: it supposedly holds weight in other realms of experience, but in
Kunin’s shame-based economy, the money, in any amount, is never enough to offer the individual the security it
desires. God is no less a gesture, nor is love. Thought is perhaps the most interrogated realm, the most able to be
communicated and therefore the most able to fail under these heightened expectations. Distinction between mind,
thought, or body is an unnecessary contortion. Not even nothing is unauthorized.

3

Kunin situates the first section of the text as a (revised) translation of Ezra Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley”. This
textual situation, of initiating translation within a language (implying that the gulf between poets, especially poets of
distinct generations, is as wide as the gulf between different languages), is considerable. The concentration of potential
renditions into a “severely limited vocabulary” is one way to approach a severely widespread epidemic of shame in a
culture dedicated to openness, one that hides shame behind the façade of rights regarding various forms of protected
speech. Speech, when it fails, essentially needs protection, but this protection is what keeps it from escaping mediation.
Speaking commonly, each individual’s vocabulary is generally limited in much the same way as Kunin’s formal
process, an insight that drains language of the stable bridges that it conjures in its most rudimentary bindings. The
notion of the revised translation (many of the poems of The Sore Throat’s first section appeared as early as 2004 in an
online-only release entitled “The Mauberley Series” through UbuWeb) also implies that translation is conceived of as
realistically more a process than a product, more a paroxysm than a pantomime.

4

This is a very different book from Kunin’s earlier work, Folding Ruler Star, in
which poems were syllabilistically
incised, throttled and restrained from venturing beyond a codified length of expression. The Sore Throat, instead,
crawls exhaustedly into an ever-opening horizon of unsettingly simple diction, into forms that ensnare contradiction, let
it flail and later release it to the soft lap of whitespace; the most bland of landscapes is the most frightening.

5

6

Pervasive entanglements, finally resulting in a parody of the self. The preface to this work ("Note on Method")
inspires a blurred narrative presence: Kunin, in this work and in other interviews, openly writes/speaks about the
experience of notating the external world’s language-din through the physical tic of his “binary hand-alphabet”.
However, this is not a simple notation, the hand acting as a dictaphone, but a creative gray-space in which the operative
device of the writer receives, generates and assembles experience. In other words, the alphabet turns in upon itself,
recording the individual twitch of the hand that records the outer world. Snatches of conversation become snatches of
the self; din becomes him, multiplied. The experience of the world and the experience of the hand experiencing the
world is a process invoking translation, a space where language meets gap and bridge and yet, must fall.

7

Or, this should read “Writing unsuccessfully about successful writing about the failure of talk between ourselves.”
Kunin’s work discriminates the voice above all other noise; poems are wrenched, simply, from a throat garotted by
its own instability. But the book is finally more than this, its parts. It is a stable nation of formal divergence, machines
making brittle music to glitch to, a hand confidently failing to denote the entire quiver of the throat-string, a voice
falling upon other voices to insinuate a pile of imploded harmonics, and tables of whitespace indicating an ordering of
absences. If a thing is worth reading, The Sore Throat and other poems is worth reading.

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Aaron Kunin grew up in Minneapolis, was educated at Brown, Johns Hopkins, and Duke. His work has appeared in Boston Review, Fence, The Germ, No: A Journal of The Arts, The Poetry Project Newsletter, The Poker, and elsewhere.

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G.R.O.A.N. is a collaborative-action imprint currently based in the
Netherlands. They can be contacted at: groanpoetics@gmail.com.

If Not Metamorphic by Brenda Iijima

Ahsahta Press, 2010

Reviewed by Christopher Kondrich

In the collection of essays she recently edited )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), Brenda Iijima writes, “Poetry can actively engage blind spots – where conditioning, denaturalization, and denial for instance, have buttressed the status quo, politically, socially, spiritually, and environmentally, leading to a degrading ecosystem that places terrestrial wellbeing, everyone’s wellbeing, all living organisms, oceans, forests, etc., in jeopardy.” In her new collection of poetry If Not Metamorphic, Iijima addresses our ecological predicament by using language “as a means to create and articulate alternative strategies for living.” Both )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) and If Not Metamorphic were published this year, and seem to be companion pieces. If Not Metamorphic represents the actualization of the philosophical and linguistic imperatives put forth in her essay in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), and largely succeeds in articulating an alternative strategy for living that is jarring, terrifying and somewhat sublime.

The state of ecopoetics as presented in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)) is one that is complicated by a troubled relationship with the ‘I’. In her essay “Eco-Noise and the Flux of Lux” contained in )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), Evelyn Reilly captures the concerns of the ecologically aware as being “a matter of finding formal strategies that effect a larger paradigm shift and that actually participate in the task of abolishing the aesthetic use of nature as mirror for human narcissism.” I believe Iijima would agree. In “Tertium Organum,” the third of four poems in If Not Metamorphic, Iijima writes, “I has been extricated from / gesture, endures as a symptom,” but of what? Of language? Of the human projection of self onto nature through language? In Nature, Emerson asks, “have mountains, and waves, and skies, no significance but what we consciously give them when we employ them as emblems of our thoughts?” This is an issue Iijima addresses in “Tertium Organum” with a “message of self-erasure / read theoretically.” If Not Metamorphic is an attempt to erase the self through the violence inherent in language, through the violence language inflicts upon that which it describes.

Language assigns, conditions and codifies. The brain can only narrow its “winnowing screed,” as Iijima writes in “Tertium Organum.” Throughout If Not Metamorphic are signposts of contemporary life; each page contains several words that refer, redirect and re-contextualize the images, ideas, feelings that contain them. The phrase “composted lexicon” appears near the close of the magnificent poem “Time Unions” and one cannot help but apply the purpose and performance of a compost pile to the language of If Not Metamorphic itself. Language that has been left to decompose and develop bacteria is now being used in different ways, for different purposes. Words and phrases that have no cultural reference have been broken down with those signposts of contemporary life to create the “skeletal nomenclature,” as she writes in “Tertium Organum,” of a whole new entity. Cultural signposts such as “industry,” “tear gas,” and “sanctions” are complicated by context, and tempered by tone. Iijima removes a historical legend from the compost pile as “don’t tread on (me) / do not” and doubles-down on her self-erasure. At the end of the poem, she writes a litany of pictures, of differing images:

pictures of rivers
pictures of rivers
pictures of spinal columns
picturing the body, picturing dog
optical illusions have pictures
the autonomy of one owl is a picture
upside down picture
whereas mirror animation picture
when in fact picture picture
pictures picture
picturing pictures solidified
it’d felt as if I answered

Just as mountains are emblems of thought for Emerson, for Iijima pictures are what we make images and objects into with a kind of violation. She tries to break the system down by resisting language, letting language resist itself. When she writes, “it’d felt as if I answered” it is a lost-for-words moment in an attempt to lose one’s words, one’s language and self. Losing one’s words is what we may need to embrace what we violate by describing, equating and aligning with the cultural detritus we use those same words to discuss. Losing one’s words is what may be needed to let mountains be mountains.

And yet Iijima allows her poems to have moments of awe and discovery. Often the discovery is what language has turned itself into, but there is a passage in “Tertium Organum” that nears the sublime:

Numerous numerous worms play with
pulp rose thorns mulch
then I shovel deeper
uncover rocks
The circulatory systems of trees lay here
Bamboo pleasure
showing groin
as sexy as elbow

Even though the “I” appears, this is a moment that is not marred or denigrated by the “I” and its actions, by the referentiality or intentionality of language. Shoveling deeper into the earth is an act of connection that renders the “I” irrelevant. If Not Metamorphic is full of these moments – perhaps not as explicit, perhaps only theoretically – moments that do not so much solve the problems of “I” in an “I”-consumed world, as reroute the mind around the “I.” If Not Metamorphic attempts to tread new pathways between sign and signified, between “I” and nature, in such a way that composts those descriptors, those categories of a violent mind into something new, something useful.

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Brenda Iijima is from North Adams, Massachusetts and studied at Skidmore College. In addition to writing, Iijima also paints, runs Portable Press, and teaches poetry at Cooper Union. Other recent works include a collection of essays edited by Iijima, )((eco(lang)(uage(reader)), and a collection of poetry, Revv. You'll--ution.

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Christopher Kondrich is a PhD candidate at the University of Denver. Selections from his book-length poem Canto Fermo have or will appear in Boston Review, Free Verse, Meridian, Notre Dame Review and The Journal.

Slaves to do These Things, Amy King


BlazeVOX, 2009
http://www.blazevox.org/

Review by Marthe Reed

Moving deftly between registers of the fabulous and the mundane, Amy King’s Slaves To Do These Things articulates a language of resistance and becoming, this transformation figured through the re-configured body: “I thrum between / postures I heal from / and postures you pose in.” Opening with Baudelaire’s description of beauty as “a dream of stone…mute and noble as matter itself” juxtaposed against the dilemma of the embodied soul, being in the world – “I came out twice / sobered and married, / then aimless and pregnant,” King sets her new collection amid the daily rites of Brooklyn —cool weather, poets walking its sidewalks, friends gathering over wine and a meal — even as she warns us, “I am the final / seminary soul to / check your shape / in the dress of that embalming line.” Against the “neglect of a virginal / mother,” a church whose “fear of eternal flames…render[s] the spirit deaf”, she offers an alternative schema of sacred/spirit/body: “this space is blank, though / not intentionally so. It is so / because you are not yet in it.” King describes a dream about-to-manifest amid the catastrophe of political and economic collapse: “we play life / until delivered…everywhere terrorists, suicide failures, half-rolled against the fence of a homeless drifter.” Taking us on a “vision quest” at the Hudson’s edge, she speaks at “a door which opens…to no knock.” Chronicle of the coming of age – or vision – of a poet, the five “acts” of this collection meditate on gender, identity, and nation, “slaves / we made but no / longer cohabit with.”

A simultaneous awakening into poetry and politics, the speaker of these poems wrestles, in angry love poems, with an America of “snake oil’s morning” which she “want[s] to rescue from this toy chest /…[but] won’t use [her] only gusto.” The poet’s dream-formed Brooklyn becomes the scene of encounter with the lost self/Other, in which the divine functions as the site of threat rather than redemption – Claude Cahun’s epigram to “Act III” a confirmation, “Selling one’s soul to God : is to betray the Other.” Rejecting “the tear-soaked armpit / we call God’s love” as “a sideways path / that keeps us safe and criminal,” King’s speaker sends forth from Brooklyn, “me, / lost weed, skulled tulip, with scalloped eye. / A view to escape within.” Of the longing for redemption, only the fear of it “beautiful,” King reminds us that “To believe / a scarecrow’s resurrection, // you must, at first, behold the thing / alive.” Hope, redemption, divine intervention figure as “disease”, perils leaving us begging from “Doctor Starch” and his endless catalog of absurd prescriptions:

& you should, pounds told, eat more,
kill pill, stretch on, walk dogs,
little tongue, stone’s throw, vomit up,
grow heart, asks legs, quiver gut,
shake down, no meat, sex less,
prove life, launch death, sell self,
machine me, x ray, honey mound,
pubic eyes, smoke pipe, victim beef,
star lips, blanket I, apple chunk,
tea bag, growl pouch, pound out,

Turning elseward, King’s speaker “let[s] [her] body grow down / among weeds of singing children”, her mind “portable….[traveling] / the verse and valleys of whole people”, baking them into “shapes and a spoon- / shaped cake to taste the world with.” She leads us with her, outward into other worlds, the ones we’ve overlooked or “never stepped into” because in America “We hold on to the value / of a vote, a soliloquy, a sword.” Even so, we’re no closer to the sought-after redemption, “the lights after the curtain”— we’re still “hoping for a kinder, gentler world.” Riding along with King, we’re the “audience not quite tied / to the running board / of a hazmat jalopy,” “this sprayed-on dream…of supply & demand.” The “God” we’ve been waiting for? She’s re-gendered, “her mocha acetate / A-line” belying “her swollen version/ of [our] abdomen”, pregnant and promising what? Re-embodied she’s growing a “second fetal skin”, “an intimate book” we’re reading, our “forever / project of waking up.”

A bardic vision of the poet, seized from the midst of quotidian Brooklyn, like Whitman before her, reborn tracking the "American" catastrophe, envisioning another birth/re-birth -- a new 'earth'/body/dream born of the "etched-over dream": "we swell and precede / lit to the age of the coming America." A collection in five "acts", both re-creation and performance in which we are the actors, "looking down the hill," tumbling on "the pen's own angle." These poems, "prodigious...as the green pearl in silt," flash in and out of vision's surreal space, into and against love, out of masks, and into the open of the American dream, the American city: "Brooklyn...busy in / its torments, its gashes, its faint array / of willing and rebellious tenants." In "our love", "this art", “the child”, the possibilities of redemption are translated as body, a stage upon which the self performs and re-performs its own becoming: “This crawl space narrows / as the child emerges, // Ever more fractal, / ever more motion.” Slaves, stuck in “the soup of stupidity [passed] off as love’s castigations,” we stand, vertiginous, at the cusp of liberation—“a literal exchange / we reach across.”

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Amy King is the author of I’m the Man Who Loves You and Antidotes for an Alibi, both from Blazevox Books, The People Instruments (Pavement Saw Press), Kiss Me With the Mouth of Your Country (Dusie Press), and most recently, Slaves to Do These Things (Blazevox). Forthcoming is I Want to Make You Safe (Litmus Press).

Amy organizes “The Count” and interviews for VIDA: Woman in Literary Arts, edits the Poetics List, sponsored by The Electronic Poetry Center (SUNY-Buffalo/University of Pennsylvania), moderates the Women’s Poetry Listserv (WOMPO) and the Goodreads Poetry! Group, and teaches English and Creative Writing at SUNY Nassau Community College. Her poems have been nominated for several Pushcart Prizes, and she has been the recipient of a MacArthur Scholarship for Poetry. Amy King was also the 2007 Poet Laureate of the Blogosphere.

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Marthe Reed has reviews in New Pages and at Dialogue's End; another is forthcoming from Ekleksographia. She has published two books, Gaze (Black Radish Books) and Tender Box, A Wunderkammer with drawings by Rikki Ducornet (Lavender Ink), as well as two chapbooks, (em)bodied bliss and zaum alliterations, both part of the Dusie Kollektiv Series. Her poetry has appeared in New American Writing, Golden Handcuffs Review, New Orleans Review, HOW2, MiPoesias, Big Bridge, Moria, Fairy Tale Review, and Exquisite Corpse, among others, and is forthcoming from Ekleksographia, Eoagh, and The Offending Adam.

The Morning News Is Exciting, Don Mee Choi


Action Books, 2010
Notre Dame, IN
www.actionbooks.org

Review by Caitie Moore

“Say no lame!” the book opens. What might stand as an imperative for those of us living in the West, The Morning News Is Exciting exhorts us to face our international roles as imperialists. Here is a case for “political” poetry, (if it is our fear that we’ve lost our imaginations to a grey, harping, secular concrete when we create, publish or read poetry that knows its way around systemic oppression) made by retaining the starkly salvific and the significantly weird. Don Mee Choi’s poems give treatment to current events, but disallow familiarity of those events, and through this defamiliarization, we come to a greater understanding.

In thirteen sections, all containing discreet poems that range in form from epistolary to homophonic translation, Choi remains preoccupied with distance, loneliness, and the circumstances that create them. This is from the fourth poem of the section Diary of a Translator:

The moon wept behind the cloud. The child said to the stars: Detachment is painful, so is madness. Home is a system of longing, and suicide is a system of exile.

And earlier, in “10 Aug 2002” the fourth poem of the section Diary of Return, she writes

When I return when I return I say my twin of a twoness paces the bridge over the river of oneness and translates exile of an exileness and empire of an empireness while I trace the alleys of my childhood and find no one.

This yearning is ‘traced’ against a world that we already wish were different. In “10 Sept 1999”, the poem preceding the one above, came this figuration:

Another mysterious death of a GI’s woman (....) That is not to say GIs will now rape any woman due to homesickness and R & R. What needs to be said is that from elsewhere I translate the report of the death of a woman I met two months prior in Tongduch’on and that colonial distance can be saturated with separation due to homesickness of a different nature.

The language and conclusions drawn in this section buoy us through what might have been our wariness of the prosaic, and demonstrate that Choi’s keen perceptions were not just happy accident in the opening sequence Manegg. The bizarre grammar there stems from the passage’s being a product of a homophonic translation of Manteg by Monchoachi, the Martinican poet. Choi has said “When translation fails, that is when we take orders from the darkness, displaced identities easily become worthless beings.” To stave off pain for these potentially displaced beings, she takes on the responsibility of conveying the experience of those who might not otherwise speak (“Females are silent” she writes, in the first poem of the section Instructions From The Inner Room). Her homophonic translations do not fail, and like many sequences in this collection, Manegg turns to animals for elucidation. We’re given yokes and eggs representing traditions of hetero-normative expectations layered with compulsive reproduction in animal husbandry. “Let me say in-law, in-law/ I won’t lay an eggy egg” (from “1 Say No Lame!”) and “Save and grin, wee and we, Hen revolts and bets on awe” (from “3 None Say None”). With syntax like “I solely laid beyond nit for jerk” we’re prompted to understand across hybridization, while confronting the constant trouble of doubting because the language is ‘foreign’, which is to say not familiar, which is to say difficult, which is to say worth it. But if we are left with any question of what, exactly, is being refused and why, we may have a response in one of the last sections, Diary of a Translator:

Long time ago, the moon laid an egg, which became an occupied egg, war egg, then a neo-occupied egg. The moon’s egg was a doubled egg. Egg and egg, a divided egg. History and memory fed egg. Not a hollow egg. Not a nation’s egg. Egg did talk egg talk! Egg did. Egg off! Empire must go!

The poems track many objects across and through sections—eggs, forests, bridges, the OED—until it begins to feel like these objects are being picked up and handled and carried to another room where we find them later. There is no space, however, in these rooms of rape and colonization for a vatic tone. The demotic tongue is as lofty as the speech will get. Even in the section From Noon—to All Surviving Butterflies, which draws on a book of Dickinson’s fragments and employs her use of the dash, we encounter earned irony and exasperation:

Master’s language is forever thoughtful about what happened before something. Happy language! Shame is attached to syntax. Seal it or numb it. Most terrible pain you can imagine. Ask OED! In my house, the shoed are put to sleep and the shoeless forever depart. Going to dooms of napalm! Going to Guantánamo.

It is this tone that specifically resists helplessness, and to consort with animals and etymology suggests power outside of a reign of terror. The speaker has been “In the forest since 1981” articulating a space that must be lived in, especially if comfortable inhabitation is impossible, especially if inhabitation provokes the sentiment “My forest, my ass.” The power of this collection, after the myriad problems are traced (Empire, Empire, Empire) resides in its multiplicity. The various forms throughout the different sections are woven with many disparate sources, including books regarding South Korea/ U.S. relations, and quotes from Spivak, Deleuze and Guattari, Fanon, Dickinson and Freud. The author herself slides skillfully out of one guise and into another. This variation presents an oblique solution to the problem of Empire as the one. Its welcome antithesis is here in shape-shifting multiples.

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Don Mee Choi was born in South Korea and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong. Her first book of poems, The Morning News Is Exciting, will be published by Action Books this April. She lives in Seattle and translates contemporary Korean women’s poetry; her translation titles include When the Plug Gets Unplugged (Tinfish, 2005), Anxiety of Words: Contemporary Poetry by Korean Women (Zephyr, 2006), and _Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers (Action Books, 2008). _
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Caitie Moore has served as the poetry editor of CutBank and as the managing editor of Slope. Her poems can be found online at Strange Machine and Inknode and in print in Muthafucka and forthcoming in Handsome. She lives and works in New York City

Nox, Anne Carson


New Directions, 2010
192 pp, $29.95
New York, NY
http://www.ndpublishing.com/

A three inch deep box that opens like a bivalve or casket houses Carson’s book, Nox; the book inside is not bound to a backing but folded, concertina-style, and piled on itself. The one hundred and ninety-two unpaginated pages reproduce a note-and-scrap book containing lexigraphic entries, family photographs, collage, paintings and sketches, excerpts, quotations, and numbered autobiographical notes. Both the cover of the box and top page display on gray background a section of a photographic image of Carson’s brother as a boy, in flippers and goggles. The enigma of his character and death comprise the impetus and premises of Carson’s project, a project she describes as an epitaph.

Within the first few pages the reader is met with a blurred photocopy of a Catullus’ elegy for his brother in its original Latin. What follows, on almost every left-facing page, but a dictionary entry for each successive word in the poem, listing the relevant English meanings and a few carefully composed examples. Below is the entry for nequiquam:

nequiquam adverb

[NE + quiquam] to no purpose or effect, vainly, without avail; et sero et niquiquam pudet late and pointlessly she blushes; (in litototes) without cause, groundlessly; (dubious) by no means; (as an exclamation) nequiquam! For naught! (why?)

On the other pages, all variety of personal trivia and notation narrate piecemeal the life and death of her brother, Michael.

The reader learns where (Copenhagen) and when (2000) he died, that his death was unexpected, and that news of it took two weeks to reach Carson. The reader also finds out where the funeral was held and how his widow spoke and behaved there and disposed of his ashes, how his dog reacted. The reader obtains knowledge of his involvement with drugs, his running-away and name change, his several wives and lifestyle abroad; they learn of the frequency and contents of his correspondence and nature of relations with his sister and mother, as well as how he spoke and behaved as a child, and that his eyes were blue. There are facts concerning the subject, such as the cause of death, that a reader does not receive, but it is unclear whether Carson is withholding them or knows no more herself.

Often described as a ‘highly acclaimed classicist and poet’, or ‘scholar and artist’, Carson has been lauded, dismissed, and cited for her generic positioning, her confessional content, her archival yet abstract, clinical yet intimate methodologies. A reader of her other books expects a sensitivity in presentation to the material and historic nature of words, as well as auto-biographical statements made in a voice which combines ironic, pedgagic, and lyric tones. Nox displays tactics and values present in much of Carson’s other writing: it doesn’t merely play at, but insists both on being experienced as history, and as an intensely personal artifact.

In a review for the New York Times, Sam Anderson describes Nox as a ‘deeply moving…brilliantly-curated scrap heap’, an ‘elegy and meta-elegy’; he finds in it the simultaneous portrait of a specific brother and a kind of Everybrother, noting the suspense that builds around the disclosure of this person’s details. Megan O’Rourke, writing for The New Yorker, also found Nox “personal and deeply moving”, stating that “despite its inclusion of personal details, [Nox is] as much an attempt to make sense of the human impulse to mourn.” Ben Ratliff calls it “precious in the best sense of the word” (NYT Sunday Book Review), and Michael Dirda finds it ‘moving yet strikingly unconventional’ (Washington Post). Only Dirda cautions readers against the fallacy of ascribing biographical truth to the book’s contents. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, John Timpane addresses directly this issue circumscribed by other reviews, claiming that Nox is not precious because of its ’‘painful, authentic uneasiness with itself…it’s self-consciousness and irony.”

“Why do we blush before death?” Carson’s invocation of this visceral and cosmetic change of color---one of performance as well as true feeling---gives the reader a sense of this self-consciousness. “If you are writing an elegy begin with the blush.” A few other aspects of Nox gesture towards the dual nature of elegy. The book, as object, is unwieldy; the shoring together of different forms and sources puts the syllogistic momentum out of joint; it frequently points to its own limitations and failures (“no use expecting a flood of light”).

More often, though, the work encourages illusions of transparency and genuineness. It is, after all, a photocopy of a notebook. In addition to imparting the material for a story of her brother, his death, and her grief, Carson directly addresses the reader (“I want to explain about the Catullus poem (101)”); she tells them what her brother called her as a girl (‘pinhead’, ‘professor’); she may even slip an elegy for herself into the definition of cinerum (“this ash was a scholarly girl”). At moments, she implies the validity of her endeavor by universalizing: “All the years and time that had passed over him came streaming into me, all that history. What is a voice?” It is not by accident that one finds the most striking language and thought in the sources mined---in dry definitions and ceremonial, restrained phrases of poets and historians who never prick the surface tension of their grief with disclosure, who point beyond themselves, always, to something else.

This Night situates itself as coffer and gift—but to who is unclear, as it is known that books cannot be enjoyed by the dead. Perhaps its universalisms and tropes of authenticity redeem the book from a certain kind of preciousness. If not, its quiet self-consciousness, generic quirks, and ironies challenge a simple categorization. But these too could be identified as related and not unproblematic methods: secret telling and its loopholes of explanation and wit, generalization, complicity, and voyeurism---does one not have boxes enough, secrets enough, of one’s own? If not, why conflate them with another’s? The shuttle of embarrassment, the loom of gossip and guesswork, the fabric of coy exposure: these discomforts combine with the pleasures of reading Nox to make up a mixed, complex encounter.

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Anne Carson is a Canadian poet and professor of history at McGill University. She has written several books, all of which blend the forms of poetry, essay, prose, and non-fiction.

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Andrea Applebee recently completed her MFA at the University of Pittsburgh. She presently lives in Philadelphia, where she teaches composition.