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.

Deciduousness:The Mechanism, Ander Monson


Ninth Letter, 2010

Urbana-Champaign, Illinois

www.ninthletter.com

review by Thalia Field

Here is a short review of a fiction and also of a press which blurs the line between book/journal and object and foregrounds the question of publication’s aims, its mediums, and the variety of audience which exist beyond the well-manicured and gated lawns of the commercial establishment(s). Both this fiction and this press defy the solidity of this establishment and its conventions, which are about numerical dominance, bookshelf oligarchy, and the un-bliss of the dull-mindedly repeatable. Ander Monson’s story, “Desiduousness: The Mechanism”, and its publisher, Ninth Letter, seek to escape, if not subvert, this state of affairs, and the result is a collaboration offering tremendous pleasure.


I selected this ‘book’ to review because I’ve admired Ander Monson from afar and wanted to more intimately enter a conversation with his work. Starting from that point, I was immediately taken with the sensation that “Deciduousness:A Mechanism” is decidedly fiction, happily and deeply and differently so. The book, bound by a velum, immediately falls into six four-panel folios, folded into comfortable sizes which allow the reader to hold them, gather them, and constantly experience them as the notes which are being collected in the hand, and the mind, of the story’s subject.

The design impact of this publication is everywhere on the story, and yet no more intrusive that the body is on our minds, giving us the sensations, the mise-en-scene, of living. Monson’s story sketches an indeterminate technological ‘Mechanism’, discernable only through the tattered notes written for the infirm, disabled mad-genius who may some day wake to its ominous presence. The narrative is tightly wound, or tightly unwinds, and proceeds with emotional precision. The notes which structure the confession of their author begin in handwriting, and are backed with screen-prints and digital imagery, numbered by hand and sliced with the arches of connections, meanings whose meanings have been lost and aren’t avoidable.

That the story and the book-form co-elaborate the story feels right and powerful as the reading advances – and reminded me in their constant interplay of the general poverty of the publishing convention which binds all stories into the same habitual gestures. Here it is possible to open and refold, to stack and sort, to gather and shuffle. The lacunae in the story reflect in the gaps between the folios, as they speak both to the loss of the present as it could be brought back by the past/memory – and also to how we must await the unknowable future. This future is only made of past actions in this story, as elsewhere, and this was the aspect of the story I found most compelling: the subversion of nostalgia into a form of hostility that pushes things we are not comfortable with out of our way in the present and into the future, which is also the past.

The quasi science fiction (and psychologically insightful) scenario of Monson’s story never resolves, though we sense in the protagonist the isolation of a Moreau, a similar foreign locale, and an almost unholy or at least profane, project. Monson’s language is lyrical, elliptical, emotional, and just descriptive enough of the elements of the environment (and of the Mechanism) so that we keep hold of it – the butterflies and optical cables, ducts and screens, which sustain the body of the story itself. Confusion over whose story “Deciduousness:A Mechanism” will ultimately be remains of interest, as the reader is put in the place of the hibernated consciousness, unsure what we will wake up for or to, and by the time the end comes, I had the eerie sense that what I know of my world has more been laid from the past (and possibly with an agenda) then seeming to drop in from the future, so that the present, ever impossible, contains nothing but the kind of light the Mechanism itself devours. I do not intend to offer narrative interpretations, for this is an open text in the best sense: both specific in its dramatic details, and inconclusive where the wrong answers would lead us off the right questions.

This is a love story, and it is a story of anger, bruised where passion was. The Mechanism of both turns out the same, and yet it is the technology which allows the character bound to it to live and see, to experience life and death. There’s something enormous wrapped in this short story, it stays like an afterimage in the imagination.

from the last folio: “What is on the other side I do not know. It could be the outside world, cold and blood all over it. It could lead to a thousand animals consuming each other. It might be the past. Or nothing. It could be hell. A dream of hell or just a dream. In my dream it is a thousand butterflies organizing themselves into comprehensible patterns, like city light, moving off the edge of the screen as we begin forgetting. It could be a beating heart. A psychedelic corridor.”

I wish more publications of fiction, poetry, and essay would embrace the values of this Ninth Letter collaboration with Ander Monson – that we would be able to satisfy ourselves with more hand-made objects and book forms which sacrifice the false promises of mass-consumption with the beauty of organic innovation in design. Even when the fiction might be imperfect or the design critiqued, this is so much the better conversation to be having – how writing and reading are multiform and of infinite variety.

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Ander Monson draws from his life in Michigan, Illinois, Iowa, the Deep South, and Saudi Arabia. He has an MFA from the University of Alabama. He edits the magazine DIAGRAM and the New Michigan Press, and publishes widely. His novel in stories, Other Electricities, has been newly released by Sarabande Books.

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Thalia Field's book BIRD LOVERS, BACKYARD is just out from New Directions (2010) as well as is a collaboration, A PRANK OF GEORGES (with Abigail Lang) (Essay Press, 2010). She is also the author of two other New Directions titles (INCARNATE:STORY MATERIAL, and POINT AND LINE) as well as ULULU (CLOWN SHRAPNEL) a novel from Coffee House Press. Thalia is on the faculty at Brown University's program in Literary Arts where she teaches courses for writers which often ask questions about storytelling on and off the page and across many too-hardened disciplines of method.

Texture Notes, Sawako Nakayasu


Letter Machine Editions, 2010

Chicago, Illinois

http://www.lettermachine.org/

ISBN: 0981522726

by Karen An-hwei Lee

The latest collection by translator and poet Sawako Nakayasu, Texture Notes, features 48 original journal entries dated from 2003 to 2004, arranged in a variety of textures and rhythms. With echoes of Zukofsky poetics and Steinian word-play, Nakayasu explores the poetic challenge of describing physical textures in the external world: bicycles, fresh laundry, love in the air. To this end, the kaleidoscopic prose fragments resist simplistic interpretations, playing with formal categories of definition in a choreography of word-objects reminiscent of the early Modern objectivist poets:

7.9.2003

Ant-sized objects, in the order received:

Ant, microchip, staple, pine needle, dimple, pebble, the ant’s twin, a one-to-one scale model of the ant, another ant of the same size, dust, crumb, fingernail, crumb, staple, mustard seed, the letter ‘I’ typed in 12-pt. font…. (19)

Focusing on “thingness” in the abstract and concrete senses, Texture Notes investigates the texture of bicycles in its first succinct prose poem, contemplates the textures of absence in an elegant one-line poem, 10.4.2003: “layers of loss” (7), and directs the reader’s attention to self-referential components in 11.8.2003: “Line trying to crumple its way into texture…” (17).

Nakayasu’s book-length collage is a recombinatory syncopation of astute observations: “Combined sum of the texture of one word at each moment everywhere, thicker than it is true” (11). With varying poetic densities at once macrocosmic and minutely liminal, the contradictions of urban life are depicted in miniature:

9.20.2003

Thirty thousand unanswered minutes, eight arms filled to capacity three times over, a four-year-old tree attaining twice its current height thanks to the tears of a widow, one small Chinese girl and a couple of kegs, five million rotations of this old fan, whichever comes last.

Or the rock that develops a dent, small stone in my hand.

Waiting for.

The rock to grow, spread, answer, spin, cold and smooth, after all the rain in my hand, or before it stops, or before it returns, quickly now -- (67)

At times, the poems take on the surreal allegorical qualities of a Russell Edson fable, as in 4.6.2004, whose first line begins: “Texture of a field of fried umbrellas” (9).

…Enough fresh oil was used in the frying of these umbrellas that theoretically the should repel any sort of fluid which takes a shot at the field, and in fact this is true, but the unfortunate inherent shape of umbrellas encourages the rain to slip inside the crevices between one fried umbrella and another, getting the toes of the children wet, whether they are there or not. (9)

Tinkering mischievously with a reader’s expectations, Nakayasu swiftly mingles the textures of word-objects as nouns by using language usually applied to other categories of definition. An emotion, for instance, is portrayed using meteorological language: “Love as described by the heaviness of air, measured by a repeated rise in humidity” (13).

According to the Etymology Dictionary, “texture” derives from the Latin textura for “web, texture, structure,” and from the stem of texere “to weave.” The word “text,” similarly, originates from the “wording of anything written” with its root in the Latin textus: “Scriptures, text, treatise,” also sharing a genesis from the stem of texere.

In perfect resonance with its etymological origins, Texture Notes weaves epistemological questions about categories of knowledge, or how we know what we know about the world, culminating in the phenomenon we call beauty.


 8.22.2003 ….People, pilgrims, innocent bystanders, drivers-by, tourists, and locals alike come and gather, independently and in their own time, in their very own time, to admire it. And enjoy it. To provide a physical, chemical, psychoanalytical, or textural analysis of it. To assign it values of beauty.

---

Sawako Nakayasu was born in Japan and has lived mostly in the US since the age of six. Her most recent books are Texture Notes (Letter Machine, 2010), Hurry Home Honey (Burning Deck, 2009), and a translation of Kawata Ayane’s poetry, Time of Sky//Castles in the Air (Litmus Press, 2010). Her translation of Takashi Hiraide’s For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions, 2008) received the 2009 Best Translated Book Award from Three Percnt.

- - -

Karen An-hwei Lee is the author of Ardor (Tupelo Press, 2008), In Medias Res (Sarabande Books, 2004), and a chapbook, God’s One Hundred Promises (Swan Scythe Press, 2002). Her books have been honored by the Norma Farber First Book Award from the Poetry Society of America (chosen by Cole Swensen) and the Kathryn A. Morton Prize for Poetry (selected by Heather McHugh). The recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts Grant, she chairs the English department at a faith-based college in southern California, where she is also a novice harpist.

Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone by Matthew Shenoda


BOA Editions, 2009
Rochester, NY
www.boaeditions.org
ISBN: 978-1934414279

Reviewed by Mike Walker

Matthew Shenoda’s new book of poems dwells on the historical and contemporary cultural and physical landscape of Egypt, covering a vast expanse of topics and images associated with the nation. Shenoda teaches poetry and writing and is Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity for the School of Critical Studies at the California Institute of the Arts and while nothing in his biography is quite clear on his associations with Egypt, via his poetry it is obvious that he has a deep background and empathy for the country and its people. The teacher in Shenoda is also obvious in this work, as he even includes at the back of the book a glossary of many terms germane to Egypt he uses in his poems. Shenoda seems, beyond all else, excited to share an intimate portrait of a complex modern nation (with a long, varied, history which is just as complex) with his reader. That said, at times his writing seems nearly trite and his images appear close to something we’d expect from an Indiana Jones movie or Disney ride. Mummies, tombs, palm trees, poor native kids in the streets, all make their entry into these poems and at times I felt while reading that I would have a more accurate and clear sense of Egypt as a real nation—an actual place—via a Lonely Planet guidebook.

A deeper reading of Shenoda’s work though provides a more acute, powerful, view of Egypt. Although his writing is on the surface easy enough to explore, Shenoda proves to be a poet we need to take on with due care and a lot of time. His poetry holds riches if we are willing to spend the careful moments in finding these; he gives us a very real Egypt, and helps us understand how the most common images of this nation remain the most lasting in the cultural dialog most of us have with Egypt. Those rewards are powerful and worthy reasons for reading Shenoda, however, at times his emphasis seems a bit too pedagogical and less concerned with the art of writing. I do not doubt the images and experiences I gained via these poems are very personal to the poet but some seem too easily designed to convey a certain impression or feeling, and taken outside of the context of ”poems about Egypt”, many of these poems do not hold their own as interesting works of poetry. To give Shenoda the benefit of the doubt, his book is about Egypt, about a given topic and set to explore that topic in depth. It is probably unfair to expect additional merits from poems that are foremost employed to the goal of serving a certain topic and working as a cohesive unit. Still, a poet such as Jorie Graham can write about a spruce tree and also address a handful of other issues in one quick page while Shenoda takes at times a couple pages to sit us down in the desert and paint one single image.

I dreamt of this exodus
This wrapping back into
What had been unwrapped
And again beginning to see Home

thus Shenoda begins his poem ”Ecology”, which like many of his poems in this collection dwells on the process of being away vesus returning home, whether it is a collective home, a metaphorical one, or a personal one.

It is time for us
to dig
unearth the earth from itself

Shenoda tells us at the close of another poem, perhaps imploring us to undertake (in very literal terms, undertake) the greatest journey, the hardest exodus, of them all. Shenoda doesn’t lack for images, his ”buzzing telephone wires” in yet another poem I especially find powerful knowing of Cairo’s chronic issues with telephone service and the apt metaphor of telephone chatter for the many lives causing such speech in this sprawling city. However, sometimes I felt in reading Shenoda that the metaphors, the images, piled atop each other and didn’t quite have a clear direction in which to travel. Sometimes, his poems feel like a very astute and useful dictionary has been upended like a box, spilled forth its collection of words. I think the problem I experience with Shenoda’s writing is that I obtain from it striking, powerful, images but they quickly overlap and become too much like the image previous on the page I just turned over. I am sitting there, reading, and thinking ”in a place so varied and dynamic as Egypt, isn’t there more to speak of than old tombs, brotherhood, palms, and religion?”. Yet these are, if not the core themes exactly, the repeating motifs of Shenoda’s poetry. It feels something is missing, something both of modern Egypt and something of ancient Egypt beyond those things we all already know of this great culture. Yes, mummies, yes, tombs . . . but what else?

Perhaps though Shenoda’s project points at the problem faced in most any effort to revisit ancient texts and to write poetry about historical cultures. I have encountered the same issue when writing about Russia in the 1800s or about the Celts myself: how do you bring esoteric details to life to readers without dwelling on what they already know? How do you find focus germane to the nuances that intrigue you while firmly grounding your work in the period and place you’re interested in and making that geography evident? It is difficult to write of a place anew. For Shenoda, his work is really cut out for him as he is not only writing about Egypt the Ancient but also Egypt the Current: that’s a lot of space and time to consider in a slim book.

a child cups her hands in river water
knows too much about her history to drink

Here, and in other poems the image of cupped hands is used to represent, I think, not only the true, actual, cupping of hands to bring water to mouth but the broader need and action of moving water and other goods into one’s own control. Egypt’s history, in many ways, is a primary national resource, something that can be marketed for the sake of both tourism and associated economic benefits and also for the sake of national pride. Shenoda does a fine job in walking between the silent stones of history, the everyday lives of normal Egyptians, and the broad, grand, view of the nation that is on the forefront of its international relations. While in places I find his poems nearly trite in their stock images and his voice lacking in enough detail, I also find that his effort to be encompassing, as Shenoda is taking on a huge duty and taking such very seriously.

We run our fingers in sandstone,
Speak stories in rivets and impressions.

In fact, this seems to be how Shenoda himself speaks, how he writes. Using various touchstones of the experience of Egypt, he twists together a comprehensive story. The fact is that this story is lacking in places on details, lacking in plot if you will (for this is a narrative, though one composed of poems; for Shenoda’s stated purpose to be carried out, the overall function must be a narrative one). However, altogether, perhaps this isn’t such a bad thing: I can think of many books of journalistic and travel photography that are high on emotion, high on variety, but very low on real detail and leaving you wishing for more. Shenoda’s poetry provides a dashing view of Egypt and makes me want to dig deeper into the history and contemporary culture that has inspired his writing. It is a bit like looking at a city via Google Earth: you find yourself at times wishing to be down at street level. In fact, I plan to dust off André Raymond’s amazing, magisterial, history of Cairo due in part to reading Shenoda’s poems.

In conclusion, I am not awestruck with Shenoda’s poetry the way I was awestruck when I first read Jorie Graham’s work or Victoria Chang’s book of poems, Salvinia Molesta. His work simply doesn’t impress me in a way that I connect with hard and fast, but there are ample merits to his poems and in the depth and scope of his project. I would recommend that his book should be in the hands of anyone with a keen interest in contemporary creative writing on Egypt, North Africa, or the Near East, or anyone who has enjoyed Shenoda’s previous efforts. To the reader new to Shenoda, I am unsure whether or not this book is the best of introductions because its theme demands a lot of the reader and doesn’t offer up as much, at least in my own case, as I was expecting. Perhaps after re-reading Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone I will take from it what Shenoda intended, for now it is an interesting collection of poems that has some strong points, but simply not quite the caliber I was expecting given the grand scale of its ambitions. That said, I am warmed to know there are poets like Shenoda who are not afraid to tackle such ambitions.

• • •

Matthew Shenoda's poems and writings have appeared in a variety of newspapers, journals, radio programs and anthologies. He has been twice nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been supported by the California Arts Council and the Lannan Foundation. Shenoda's debut collection of poems, Somewhere Else (Introduction by Sonia Sanchez) was named one of 2005's debut books of the year by Poets & Writers Magazine and is the winner of the inaugural Hala Maksoud Award for Emerging Voice, granted by RAWI , as well as a 2006 American Book Award. His latest collection, Seasons of Lotus, Seasons of Bone, was published in Fall 2009 from BOA Editions. He has taught extensively in the fields of Ethnic Studies and Creative Writing and is currently Assistant Provost for Equity & Diversity and on the faculty in the School of Critical Studies at California Institute of the Arts. He lives with his family in Los Angeles.

• • •

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, 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.

Oracle Bones


Review of C. Mikal Oness’ Oracle Bones

Paperback

Lewis-Clark Press, 2007

by Karin Schalm

One of the most difficult tasks of a poet is to capture life and death while invoking the musicality of language. By capture I mean more than portray or show; I mean enact. A good poet translates emotion into words, inviting the reader to share an echo of what was originally felt. A great poet transforms emotion into song, creating a reverberation that engages the reader’s own psyche. At his best, C. Mikal Oness is a great poet. In his first book, Oracle Bones (Lewis-Clark Books, 2007), Oness demonstrates a mastery of language that engages the reader on a strong emotional level.

Oracle Bones is divided into three sections: Divinations, Scapulimancy and Charms, with an introductory poem, “The Handworm’s Hipbone,” setting the stage as an exploration of “the dark”:

He pe sceal legge leaf et heafde

Under the overturned wheelbarrow,

in the dark of that insulated space

warmed by the decay of last year’s leaves,

is the dark of the dark and building soil,

is the dark of the ever-dampening.

And when I overturned the overturned

wheelbarrow, the dark flew out like a covey,

like sparrows, and having been for so long

so used to all of its damp and warm

containment, and having fled so quickly,

it left behind the decayed, or half-decayed

body of an ordinary bird, a black bird,

the remnants of its red brassards browning

beside it. The remnants of last year’s leaves

also lain by its head for so long as to be

blackening beside it, silent and benign,

as if sent there by charm to diminish

some inconsequential thing shamefully

placed in a dark space in a dark time

to become naught in the heart of the harrower.

Oness’ goal in Oracle Bones is to decompose the darkness, to diminish shame. He does this partly by letting it fly free like “a covey” and partly by placing it next to something more “benign, as if sent there by charm.” The first technique involves the telling of the story—liberating it from its dark, hidden space of silence—and the story Oness tells involves dark confession as well as transformation.

In the first section, Divinations, we learn from “August 1990” that the poetic narrator accidentally killed his friend and mentor, Don, in a tragic car crash five years earlier. The source of the narrator’s great shame is that he was driving drunk. This is the main event of the book, the event that less significant events—like leaves—blow up against. The poem begins with small details of the narrator’s brunch with Don before the accident:


And it seems now as if brunch were a dream—

a fourteen dollar plate of shrimp and ham,

champagne from ten to twelve, and staggering

to my car. What did we talk about? Our jobs?

It continues with the startling clarity and painful consequences of the crash:


I only remember this: a sharp right turn;

in retrospect, a dreadful look of horror

on a woman’s face; then time goes past; I wake

to a loud slide, a crash of glass; my dash

board spins; I fall against the roof, the road

through the open window; I pull myself

out of my car, I think; I walk myself

past Donny, past a full crowd looking on.

I was, I say. I drove. It was me driving.

Yes, yes, yes, yes. I understand. I’m fine.

And powerless—that’s what it is you know—

on the curb pulling my ripped shirt over

my head, refusing help from the paramedics—

I am refusing help for the last time.

Because years later walking down the street,

or sitting on my bed at night, it comes

to me that I have done this, and someone

is dead, and that a mother must still weep

just north of here; I can begin to hear

her now. I can begin just now.

Oness builds both meaning and musicality through repetition. When the narrator is “refusing help from the paramedics,” the reader sees how unaware he is. Later, he is “refusing help for the last time” because he realizes how much he needs it, and not just for his physical wounds. The mother who “must still weep/just north of here” is finally something he can “hear.” All of the talkiness of the poem slows down, inviting the reader to be in this quiet space with the mother’s sorrow. Just as the narrator “can begin to hear/ her now,” he can also “begin just now.” He is beginning the process of healing through accepting, truly accepting, his part in the tragedy. This is a powerful place to begin.

The second technique Oness uses for decomposing the dark seems inherently flawed. The narrator refers to placing something benign as a charm next to the dark. “The Handworm’s Hipbone” opens with a mysterious Old English quote described in the appendix as a “charm against wens.” Not familiar with the term, I learned that wen means “a benign skin tumor, especially of the scalp.” This definition deflates the power of the mysterious Old English as well as the enigmatic definition Oness supplies, and not (I might add) in a good way. The terrible beauty of the “dark of the dark” is trivialized when seen in comparison to a skin disease. Perhaps this is Oness’ goal as well, to render the darkness as “naught in the heart of the harrower,” to make it disappear, or to decompose into something indistinguishable, and therefore less significant.


Unfortunately, the book loses some steam after the opening act. The reader catches glimpses of Don, the master ship crafter and mentor, in lively imagistic poems like “Sorbies” and “Chisel.” For the most part, the narrator’s earlier moment of recognition—awoken by intense tragedy—dissipates, shrouded in references to fishing, boats, Beowulf and runes (thus the title Oracle Bones). By section three, Charms, Don has almost completely disappeared. In “Mentor,” the narrator claims, “Forgive me: I have simply forgotten who you are.”


Oness seems to drop the main event of his book out of convenience, though, rather than a true act of decomposition. When asked about the different syntax and approach in poems like “August 1990” and his Beowulfian “Sea Voyage” in an interview with Sheri Allen, Oness said that he simply assembled the poems he had written over a period of time.

The poems were written at different times as I was engaging in different formal projects, and then, like so many others who put together books, I emptied a large room and played several games of poetry solitaire with the poems, experimenting with arrangement (Oness, The Southeast Review online).

When the narrator tells the story of the birth of his own child, it’s a bit jarring—like pushing in a puzzle piece that doesn’t quite fit. There seems to be yet another dead child to account for, a child of the narrator’s. At the beginning of “In Memoriam” he says “All our relatives have turned to roses/in my mother’s yard, as has my child.” This losing and gaining of his own children is a compelling story, and definitely one I want to hear, but not in this collection. If these poems had appeared in a second book, they would have seemed cathartic. In this context, they seem simple-minded and self-serving. They make the whole enterprise turn sour for me, like a compost pile someone forgot to turn and pawned off as soil. For example, the poem “Struck” shows maple leaves alive and shimmering in light:

Under the silver-leafed maple, my house

gleams: inside, my one-year-old.

In any breeze the tree shimmers

wagging underleaf to overleaf.

A white light burns in a pure wind.


I want to believe that the purity of this wind is real, that there’s a sweet light emanating from the narrator’s house, his home, but I’m not yet ready for this. The wound from the car accident is still so fresh in my mind that I need more time to heal. All the charms and runes and fancy terms like “scapulimancy” (which refers to the heating of bones to produce cracks which are interpreted as oracular signs) feel like a distraction to me, a denial of the work at hand. Unlike the passages where Oness is great, where we are asked to embrace the oracular wisdom of his words.

*

C. Mikal Oness is a homesteader, poet and printer, living in rural Minnesota. He is the founding editor and director of Sutton Hoo Press, a literary fine press producing hand-made limited editions of poetry and prose. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and the University of Missouri, Oness has received the Toi Shan Fellowship from the Taoist Center in Washington, D.C. His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, Shenandoah, The Colorado Review, Third Coast, The Bloomsbury Review, Fence, Puerto del Sol, and other magazines. His work has been awarded the Mahan Poetry Prize, an Academy of American Poets Prize, the Mary Roberts Rinehart Award from George Mason University, and a Wisconsin Arts Board Grant. His book of poems, Water Becomes Bone, was published by New Issues Press in 2000 and was awarded the Posner Prize in Poetry by the Council of Wisconsin Writers. He has a limited edition chapbook, Runian, from Bergamot Press, and another limited edition, Privilege, from Cut Away Books. His manuscript, Oracle Bones, was selected for the Lewis & Clark Expedition Prize and was published in 2007.

*

Karin Schalm lives with her family in Missoula. She works as an administrative assistant at The University of Montana, rising early most mornings to walk her dog in the dark. She is a Master Gardener, a labyrinth lover, and a big fan of mountain wildflowers.

Water the Moon


Poems by Fiona Sze-Lorrain Marick Press
Paperback - November 2009
88 Pages
ISBN: 978-1-9348511-2-8

Reviewed by Z. Cody Lee

Every book of good poems contains moments that I have taken to baptizing “Catch-alls.” First, because they are the passages that get copied into our notebooks and journals, which, indeed, I once heard a poet call “catch-all books.” However, I tend to identify with the term more in its metaphysical sense, in the sense that these catch-all moments are actually catching/capturing all that poetry is supposed to do and, quite simply, that is why we extract them: the language is doing just what we had hoped language could do; it is doing precisely what we needed it to do—whether or not we can put our finger on exactly what or why that is.

I have been waiting a long time to read a book that fields questions of heritage, identity, and exile with such tact and polish. If I could stack a few of my favorite catch-alls from Fiona Sze-Lorrain’s new collection, Water the Moon, it would look something like this:

***

Those who perished

before arriving

build their tombs in those

who escaped.

(“Tibet”)

***


I imagine the void

of your solitude, crystallized instants

through which I observe

you are now at peace, ready when time ends.


(“Reading Grandmother”)

***


So what if the shroud of Turin never

soared, and sunlight confessed

nails piercing feet as rust?


(“Mysticism for a False Beginner”)


***


Yet the light is no mystery — the mystery

is how something moves to filter light through.


(“Steichen’s Photographs”)

***

What I see this book doing as a whole is very much different from what I see it doing page-by-page. What is accomplished in its totality reminds me of a poet who is taking a picture of her reflection in every windowpane she passes as her taxi speeds through town. And that taxi is bringing her to a place where she knows only one or two people, a place where she might or might not blend. Each photograph, in this description, later becomes a poem where memory and actual presence are held in the transparency of the glass as the poet tries to capture what is fleeting, what will soon be no more; for in each window so much is happening on both sides of the pane despite the poet; and what is happening on each side is both a part of and apart from the action on opposite side.

The manuscript is broken into three sections—Biography of Hunger, Dear Paris, and The Key Always Opens—which I will address here as closed units leading into and out of one another.

The themes, if you will, of the first section, Biography of Hunger, seem to travel in teams. The first six poems call upon well-known and easily accessible Chinese cultural figures: Mao, Confucius, Tibet, The Great Wall, Buddhists, as well as plenty of east and red evocations. And while the imagery seems to have at least one foot in Asia, the tone of these opening poems situates itself in a much broader spectrum, often charged and political—ranging from a tattered, all but empty letter between father and daughter to a letter addressed directly to the Chairman himself. Because the confessional, autobiographical allusions cannot be missed, these first half-dozen poems let us know who will be guiding us through the book and, importantly, where it is that they are coming from. We read in “Par avion”:


His letter translated nothing but instructions,

Confucian wisdom (One must not sit

on a mat that is not straight), from

father to daughter, two cultures apart.

The latter half of this first section begins to move away from China and into, most notably, Europe—the second “team” of images. With almost the same frequency that we encountered terms like “Year of the Monkey” in the opening poems, we see the language here peppered with French idioms and places—rendez-vous, mise-en-scène, nouvelles, vérité, Luxembourg Gardens—as well as other notable Europeans—Bach, Schubert, Plato, Beethoven. The energy and mood are also notably different in this half of Biography of Hunger. There is an urgency to explain (or at least to comprehend) large concepts like truth, mortality, loyalty, and loss; while simultaneously there is an anxiety present, a sense that the hard-earned knowledge gathered from one culture will not translate to another. We hear the speaker asking, “Can these things in my life mesh? Can they join?” In “A Course in Subtlety” we read, “I introduce my mother to my French husband. / Silence lost gravity and hit / the floor.” And then later, in “New Growth,” presumably the voice of the mother speaks, “Married daughters are strangers.”

The poems of the second half are just as marked by loss and powerlessness as the first half, only here that defeat is personal, whereas before it was political. All the same, as this first section moves toward Europe, we find ourselves appropriately positioned for the second section of the book, Dear Paris, which opens with a Cavafy quote: You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore. / This city will always pursue you. Here we are aware that this quote serves as both introduction and conclusion. In one way it acts as the speaker’s formal resignation that she might never actually blend the two cultures together from the first section—Europe and Asia. While, at the same time, a subtitle like “Dear Paris” calls to mind the infamous, infectious city of Paris, wherein the quote might be taken more literally at surface value.

The poems in this second section take place, for the most part, in Paris proper. They include an actual poem-letter to Paris, a brief history of France and the French mentality, and an ode, of sorts, to chocolate. The language and tenor of there seventeen poems avoid redundant and pompous insertions of the French language, which we might expect from a poet not as considerate and adroit as Sze-Lorrain. While all the while we are always aware of where we are, we are in Paris all this time, situated directly in the hubbub of French life. For the most part these poems stretch long and narrow down the page, with very few lines longer than ten syllables.

While being a section of poems set in Paris, there are interesting moments where the speaker finds symbols, moments, artifacts, and reminders of her former life. Be it in a Chinese restaurant on Rue Sainte-Anne where:


...the chef spreads a gauze

of soy-sauce around the heap, the circle

like a brush stroke of Zen calligraphy.

Porridge now smoking under my nose,

I confess an old habit — with a spoon, I dig

a hole, cavernous, right in the middle,

where ribbons of dried pork flurry out

and untangle themselves, like moist

brown roots expanding skyward.

Today, I still have no idea

how to eat porridge with chopsticks,

without stirring it into chalky ripples.


Or, again in a restaurant, we read in the poem “China”:


What — after revolutions — remains exquisite?

Paris has houses but here is not your home, says

the Maître d’hôtel frostily. Pas du tout, the beggar says.

No weighty words, he casts a legless shadow over the table.


And it is interesting that the element from the speaker’s old life in China—be it physically, genetically, or in memory—that reappears most often is food. This is most striking in a book of poems that opens, in the first section, with a poem that is, on the surface, about her grandmother cooking moon shaped snacks. It seems the speaker uses food, or perhaps more precisely, the energy locked inside food as a way of moving through time, space, and geography. Seven of the seventeen poems in this section are centered around food and/or hunger—“Eating Grilled Langoustines,” “Breakfast, Rue Sainte-Anne,” “L’Assiette dea Trois Amis,” and “Snapshots from a Siamese Banquet,” to name a few.


Where the fist section of poems deals with two cultures coming together, the second section deals with cultures coming apart, or being picked apart, boiled down like basic, “traditional” servings of food. The third section, The Key Always Opens, while not belittling the complexity and deftness of the preceding sections, explicitly takes on some pretty large themes: art, god, science, music, and literature. There is not a single poem in that does not openly call forth Einstein, Celan, Edith Piaf, Bach, Van Gogh, Chopin, the Guggenheim, Gertrude Stein, Diane Arbus, or Virginia Woolf, to name some.


Though often times the poetry is simply evoking a sense that one is surrounded by these figures but not necessarily interacting or communicating with them, they are there nonetheless, their presence is felt. Sometimes the speaker merely passes by a statue, or hears a line from this or that poet, or overhears and recognizes some classical notes. For example, in “Instructions: No Meeting No World,” we read, “Hang a bicycle tire on the door and Duchamp’s / portrait on toilet walls.” Lines like this, and others indicate a stance that perhaps we are surrounded by “high culture” to the point of gluttons. There are moments when we might hear the speaker saying, “ENOUGH!”


Formally, the poems here, in this last section, are more expressive of the poet’s abilities to use both fixed and experimental units of verse. The villanelle, “Along Ludlow Street,” for example, is an example of this. Or, “A Lot had Happened: A Five Act Play,” modeled after Gertrude Stein, shows the poet stepping away from standard poem-on-the-page poetics and exploring language through a slightly modified lens.


These closing poems are rich and beautiful and noticeably different from the poems of the first two sections. It feels a bit like the poet let her hair down and, in many ways, the poetry responds rather willingly to this relaxation. “A town sleeps next to a rising dark force. / This night whispers eternal,” from “Van Gogh Is Smiling;” or, from “Rauch of Celan,” the lines, “At dusk the dead soar on iron wings, / the living grope around a mutilated day”; lines like these seem to exemplify Sze-Lorrain’s ability to reach into metaphor and shake sounds from it like apples from a tree.


One could hardly do better than this amazing collection of poems. Whether they are read one by one over the course of a week or all in one sitting, they have the audacity to look back at us and narrow their eyes. Often I sensed from the lines what the poet states herself in “Steichen’s Photographs” that “Souls inside them are probably speaking.”


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Fiona Sze-Lorrain (www.fionasze.com) is an editor at Cerise Press (www.cerisepress.com). She lives in Paris, France and New York City.


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Z Cody Lee is a poet and letterpress printer. He lives in Missoula, MT where he is currently finishing a translation of the complete poems of Blaise Cendrars. See his fine press work online at www.gendun.com.