CUTBANK REVIEWS: People Are Places Are Places Are People by Jeff Alessandrelli

People Are Places Are Places Are Peopleby Jeff Alessandrelli Imaginary Friend Press, 2013

review by Alice Bolin

Jeff Alessandrelli’s chapbook People Are Places Are Places Are People begins with a poem titled “Understanding Marcel Duchamp,” in which the speaker describes how he “beat the shit out of” his neighbor’s bike: “just pummeled and crumpled and wracked and irrevocably dismantled it until what it was couldn’t even be called ‘bike’ anymore; it was something else entirely.” Each part of the bike was “shaped into new and heretofore incalculable realities.”

The poem is stalking something of Duchamp’s aesthetic—the notion of doing violence to and thus transforming every day objects; some of the artist’s audacious crudeness. People Are Places Are Places Are People is populated like a mind is populated: Ezra Pound and Evel Knievel and Elsie Stevens and Alois Alzheimer prowl through the poems like ghosts; in his “Understanding…” poems, Alessandrelli ventriloquizes Duchamp and Mina Loy and Eileen Myles and Anne Carson. Oh, it’s all very well intentioned—one way to understand someone is to impersonate them. A mind appropriates automatically, anyway. * In “Bad Pop Songs Make my Throat Hurt,” Alessandrelli describes comedian Lenny Bruce as “forever/the smartest dumb guy in the room.” A surprising number of writers have spoken out in favor of stupidity. Michael Earl Craig writes in his poem “Bluebirds,” “THE READER/CAN ALMOST BE DUMB REALLY/AND STILL GET MY POEMS.” “Writers are not smart,” Myles writes in her essay collection The Importance of Being Iceland. “They are something else and each writer can fill in a word here, but smart is not what that word is.” Alessandrelli explains that Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie barely passed the sixth grade: “Unlike her failure of a husband—/his mind betraying himself /to itself—//Elsie suffered/no wanton perversity/of the imagination.//She loved flowers./She tolerated funerals./She laughed and laughed/and laughed//at even funnier jokes.” * Elsie Stevens did not think too hard. Jeff Alessandrelli is not so lucky. “And if I like trains it’s no doubt/because they go faster than funerals,” he writes in “The Undignified Act of Thinking Too Hard in Public,” “faster than the meaning of our mostly round/heads in a mostly round world//and the flat flat ground I today find/myself swiftly running across.” The poet tries to outrun thought, his fate.

It’s only that things are so mixed up; there are different ways of thinking about everything. “I know that the sun is a byproduct/of an infinitude of marigolds/and pure supple honey,/but I don’t believe it,” Alessandrelli writes in “It’s the Things You Know that Are Hardest to Believe.” It’s as if a poetic truth can be believed into being, but once it exists, it no longer relies on the believer. Our lives multiply with events and actualities and memories and fantasies and possibilities and contingencies—it gets so crowded. “Past is past,” New York School poet James Schuyler writes in his first-ever published poem, “Salute.” “And if one/remembers what one meant/to do and never did, is/not to have thought to do/enough?” “Past is past,” Alessandrelli concludes “It’s the Things You Know that Are Hardest to Believe,” “is past/is past…///Is past.”

“These poems are not interested in received history. They make their own epistemology,” poet Elisa Gabbert writes in her introduction to People Are Places Are Places Are People. In epistemology, the branch of philosophy that explores the nature and origins of knowledge, what is known is based on what is believed. One can work backwards in a series of deductions until hitting bedrock—fact, something given, assumed, self-evident, maybe, in any case too obvious to be proved. Well, this can open up the arena of play that is “reality” considerably. “Past is past,” Schuyler concludes “Salute.” “I salute that various field.” * At least that’s how someone explained epistemology to me once. What do I know really. “There is no Other of the Other and anyone who claims to take up this place is an imposter,” Alessandrelli quotes from Jacques Lacan in “Semi-biography.” If I pretended to have anything more than an intuitive understanding of what that quote means, I would be an even bigger fraud than I am now. * People Are Places Are Places Are People multiplies with Others of the Other, imposters, personae, alter egos, past versions. Alessandrelli plays imposter openly in his “Understanding…” poems; he writes with Myles’ hybrid of vulnerability and swagger and adopts the strange, ambivalent God from Carson’s series “The Truth About God.”

A number of poems in the collection explore a mysterious character named Jeffrey Roberts who “has two jobs, maybe three, sometimes three;” who “claims/to have found/the Fountain of Youth/using Google Maps;” who is at once an animal, a child, and a man. Alessandrelli describes Jeffrey Roberts as “my most imaginary friend,” and his only notable quality is his absolute indeterminacy. It might be a coincidence that Jeffrey Roberts and his author share a first name, but I don’t think so. * Self encounters self. As “the wind hears nothing//but its own rustle,” in Alessandrelli’s “My Ezra Pound.” Self evades self. “Believing Evel Knievel” includes conversations between Alois Alzheimer and Auguste Deter, the woman who suffered from the first published case of Alzheimer’s Disease. In these conversations, Deter’s self seems to be expanding rapidly. Alzheimer asks where she is, and Deter responds, “Here and everywhere, here and now, you must not think badly of me.” She reports that her first name, her last name, and her husband’s name are all “Auguste”; when asked to write the number eight, she writes “Auguste.” But as she is writing she says, “It’s like I have lost myself.”

One of the important modes of People Are Places Are Places Are People is an ambivalent romanticism: there is both grief and exaltation as the self expands and is sublimated into the abundant everything. Many of these poems are baldly nostalgic, their sadness related to all the surrendered identities one leaves on the road away from childhood. “I’m a different person now you say//to yourself,” Alessandrelli writes. As William Wordsworth said in his famous nostalgic poem written above Tintern Abbey, “I cannot paint/What then I was.” * At times Alessandrelli’s poems take on the romantic, the pastoral, and the rhapsodic self-consciously, making frequent use of exclamation points and the old-timey modifier “verily” to construct a goofy-ecstatic persona. “You can see the stars tonight!” the speaker of “With an Old Soul Song Stuck in your Head” cries out. “Shining and Bright!”

“Sometimes I read/the approaching landscape/wrong, the way I/once did as a child,” Alessandrelli writes in “Bad Pop Songs Make my Throat Hurt.” Childhood seems key to Alessandrelli’s wonky romanticism, how most of the overtly pastoral moments in these poems ring a little off-key. The speakers in these poems still encounter the natural world with the freedom and confusion they did when they were very young. “Open the refrigerator door to stare/into the sunset,” Alessandrelli writes in “The Days of Wine & Roses.” “Sometimes I wake up/in the morning/and install the flowers wrong,” says the speaker of “Bad Pop Songs Make my Throat Hurt,” “and later they’re still shining/and resonating/in the sun anyway.”

In “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth describes his boyhood devotion to nature: “the tall rock,/The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,/Their colours and their forms, were then to me/An appetite: a feeling and a love.” My copy of Wordsworth’s collected poems is bound upside down and backwards, which seems like it could be relevant here. * The romantic ethic is about an ideal of wholeness, a paradise lost, a pleasure viewed from a distance. This is complicated in People Are Places Are Places Are People because the past and the self are both such “various fields”—in a version of romanticism that eschews the linear, the singular, wholeness might be achieved, a perfect circle. What if the childhood self is not lost, only running on a parallel track, available to be reclaimed and re-inhabited? “The world is perfect//and that’s the problem,” Alessandrelli writes in “This Last Time Will Be the First” of his frustrated romantic project, his inability to look back simply at an idealized past. “You can’t discover//the lost treasure//if the ship didn’t sink.//This last time//will be the first.”

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Jeff Alessandrelli lives in Portland, OR and is the author of the little book Erik Satie Watusies His Way Into Sound (Ravenna Press) and three chapbooks, including Don’t Let Me Forget To Feed the Sharks (Poor Claudia). Work by him has appeared in, among others, Pleiades, Salt Hill, Gulf Coast, Boston Review, and CutBank. This Last Time Will Be The First, his first full length collection of poetry, is forthcoming from Burnside Review Press in 2014.

Alice Bolin's poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Ninth Letter, FIELD, Guernica, Blackbird, Hayden's Ferry Review, and Washington Square, among other journals. Her nonfiction is featured regularly on the arts and culture website This Recording, The Paris Review Daily, and elsewhere around the internet. She lives in Missoula, Montana.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: The Louisiana Purchase, by Jim Goar

The Louisiana PurchaseJim Goar Rose Metal Press, 2011.

Reviewed by Nate Friedman

At once a nervous breakdown of word association and a love letter to the mythic American frontier, Jim Goar’s second full-length collection, The Louisiana Purchase, is both sweet and surreal; at its best, it’s a moving examination of the effect that country has on one’s interior life and personal identity, and Goar’s ability to forge emotional connections between disparate characters and concepts is exceptional.

Rose Metal Press, who published the attractive 6” by 6” collection, are self-described publishers of “hybrid genres,” and although The Louisiana Purchase is undoubtedly a collection of poetry, there is something of the fabulist in the way the series unfolds. There is a serpentine narrative in the hypnotic repetition of the series, but it’s one of associative leaps and bounds, where players like the red-faced bird, Iowa 1806, and the weeping elephant act upon an American dreamscape in fluid metamorphosis. Although the collection begins with Thomas Jefferson’s request that Meriwether Lewis “explore the Missouri River and its communications with the waters of the Pacific,” the collection’s historical impetus rapidly gives way to unhinged conceptual riffs. In the series’ second poem, we meet the recurring character of the moon while Thomas Jefferson unselfconsciouly pitches a game against the Cardinals:

President Jefferson walks off the mound. The Cardinals take the field. Ozzie Smith falls over dead. The crowd falls silent. Phil Niekro throws a ball at the sky. The ball does not return. We call it the moon. It becomes a crescent. When Jefferson holds up two fingers, the moon breaks into the dirt. (7)

There’s something so authentic in the Dadaist historical jumble of anachronisms here and throughout the collection that the reader is willing to forgive Goar’s haphazard and frankly distracting lineation (“The/ Cardinals,” “a ball at/ the sky,” “call it the/ moon”) for his imagery being so succulent, and his freewheeling narrative so uniquely pleasurable. The appearance of major league hall of famers alongside the third President seems oddly right; it’s as if, divorced from our historical narrative’s indignities, this is in fact the authentic story of America.

And in that regard, Goar has done more with this collection than paint a surrealist portrait of an imagined landscape; he has produced an authentic myth of the America that should have been, or perhaps the myth that we deserve. Our collective history and present, all of the insecurities hoisted upon us by our cultural situation are melded in the imagination of the poet, and out of his words a unique and authentic revisionist historical narrative is spun:

A tree sprouted from my penis. The red-faced bird came to Nest. When I found auburn leaves on my sheets I encouraged the bird to go. It claimed squatters’ rights. I called the police. They summoned a lumberjack. This was not the outcome either of us desired. Now the red-faced bird visits on Tuesdays and Thursdays. (30)

Here, the dreamlike imagery surprises and delights, but because the reader cannot fully gauge the degree to which the speaker is being serious within the context of his world, the events of the poem are discomfiting. That the speaker has no control over the “red-faced bird” invading his person is as unsettling as it is startlingly humorous. As the red-faced bird claims “squatters’ rights,” the speaker’s body becomes the American frontier itself. The inevitable march of civilization, a constant and measured undercurrent in the series, will spell the undoing of Goar’s nation of dreams.

It is through this palpable vulnerability on the part of the speaker, finally, that we are able to accept his American myth as our own. The overwhelming feeling after reading The Louisiana Purchase is one of intimate connection not only with the poet, but with America itself—not America as the political and historical narrative insist that it is or that it should be, or even as it was beyond the limits of our gridded and metered comprehension of the past, but the ethereal America that exists where landscape, dream, and language become a nation independent of precedent, one of infinite possibility.

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Jim Goar was born in San Francisco, California. Since then he’s lived in Tucson, Arizona; Changsha, China; Boulder, Colorado; Bangkok, Thailand; Seoul, South Korea; Norwich, England; and whenever possible, Brevard, North Carolina. He received his MFA in prose from Naropa’s Jack Kerouac School and is completing his PhD in Critical and Creative Writing at The University of East Anglia. He edits the online Journal, past simple.

Nate Friedman is an MFA candidate at McNeese State University. He is a founder of the Ostrich Review, and his poetry and criticism have appeared in Crab Orchard Review, Rattle, and storySouth.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Shore Ordered Ocean by Dora Malech

cover imageShore Ordered Oceanby Dora Malech Waywiser Press, 2009

Review by Charlotte Seley

As a writer who loves and appreciates titles, who thinks they are super important, should be both creative and somewhat telling of the journey I’m about to embark on, I pondered for quite a while about what Shore Ordered Ocean might mean in terms of Dora Malech’s collection of poems or her poetry as a whole. At first, I felt impelled to think it was a nod to the power of her poetic voice—how it is both strong but also made of liquid. How the impact of the ocean against the shore packs a mean punch. Then I thought maybe it spoke to the way in which her poems are strung together, how there is a certain magic in them that is inexplicable much like the force that orders the ocean inland. I think all theories I could come up with certainly contribute to Malech’s collection as it is massive like the ocean in all of its commendable qualities.

What I love and envy about Malech is how she takes a risk in exposing all her threads. The work she puts into each poem is easily traceable and doesn’t feel showy, pretentious, or obnoxious. Her associative leaps create their own logic that is absolutely operative in her poems by way of linguistic twisting. If the image isn’t driving the poem to its cohesion, the sonic delights are. A poem like “City Beach” plays with the reader by saying, “I could clap flippers skip the asterisk / and hop a plane” instead of opting for the more frank and obvious. Malech invigorates language, creates a playful rhythm without sounding like The Cat in the Hat or meter for meter’s sake by combining more traditional metrical techniques with colloquialisms or appropriations of common sayings and witticisms that she ultimately turns on their sides. However, her poems, and such is the case in “City Beach,” save themselves from operating solely on its sonic pleasures by also presenting familiar images in order to revitalize them: “A mouth in a bottle is no kiss sealed / to sender. In it remainders and no answer / and a thin relic at that.” Here, she works off of the common ‘message in a bottle,’ sealed with a kiss as a way to end a letter, and even manages to squeeze in remnants of those impossibly small antique ships in bottles with the “thin relic.” Sound and image work together, create a tightly stitched movement and unwavering harmony. A movement without movement. Shore Ordered Ocean isn’t an ocean but the wave itself, the impetus making the ocean move.

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Dora Malech earned a BA in Fine Arts from Yale College in 2003 and an MFA in Poetry from the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 2005. She has been the recipient of a Frederick M. Clapp Poetry Writing Fellowship from Yale, a Truman Capote Fellowship and a Teaching-Writing Fellowship from the Writers’ Workshop, a Glenn Schaeffer Poetry Award, a Writer’s Fellowship at the Civitella Ranieri Center in Italy, and a 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship. The Waywiser Press published her first full-length collection of poems, Shore Ordered Ocean, in 2009 and the Cleveland State University Poetry Center published her second collection, Say So, in 2011.

Charlotte Seley is a native New Yorker, an MFA candidate at Emerson College, and editor-in-chief of Redivider. Her poems can be found in places such as InDigest Magazine and inter|rupture. She is not afraid of the future.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: O Bon by Brandon Shimoda

O Bonby Brandon Shimoda Litmus Press, 2011

Review by Sara Renee Marshall

Here, fox gowns alight and haunt the hillside. A spinneret lets a waterfall of web. The night singer dances spirits awake through Bon Odori. The distance between a mother’s recollection of her son and wagtails rising on a wisp is nothing, is air, is the mind wafting or itself downwind of “incontinent grief” in “memory the startled forest.” Myth becomes the sleepless life of the living. Within this book, history laces together with dreams of history, life with projected lives, death with what happens after, sensory perception with extra-sense. When I think of this book, more questions unfold than answers. What is correspondence and where does it happen? Who and what is living? When do we dream and how is the dream not real? The dream is real, or should I say I believe in everything in this book.

I first spoke with Brandon Shimoda on a patio in the heat of summer, where, with two other friends, we swapped anecdotes and stories of our grandparents for hours. My great-grandfather, Robert Roblek, came from Slovenia to southern Colorado in his youth, around the turn of the 20th century. Brandon’s grandfather, Midori Shimoda, was born in Hiroshima and came to the U.S. at age 9 in 1919. I already knew from Brandon’s first two books, and confirmed in real life, that Brandon’s engagement with his grandfather’s history was not a mere curiosity but a lifestyle—an ongoing excavation, a way to visit and be visited.

It’s no secret that O Bon considers Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and their wakes, even as they apply to the memory of Brandon’s family. If I treated this book’s language apart from its interests, my thinking would be divorced from its pulse. I cannot write about this book without addressing who wrote it, where he might be in it, wondering what he wants, and how he uses his vision to communicate that. Put simply, he indicates his placement inside the book, and I won’t pretend to sidestep him. So, for better or worse, I can’t review this book. I can read it over and over, and I can write about it from within my limited sight.

While I lived in Japan part of 2006 and 2007, it never occurred to me until reading this book how Obon (the eponymous annual Japanese festival that invites and celebrates ancestors) must have been infused with unthinkable trauma, sobriety and sadness after the bombs. What is it to invite the haunting of spirits whose lives were lost in one of the most unfathomable, unprecedented assertions of violence in modern history? And then what is it for Brandon to plumb the intersection of personal and international record, but also of gruesome inhumanity and celebration? I can’t answer that, but I can say this book sticks to one’s skin and should not be read at night. I can say that on a couch in Tucson, Arizona I put my bookmark in it to save my place while I cried or took pause from “the canopy of ligament sound.”

When I press myself to describe Brandon’s third collection, O Bon, I feel the temptation to call its poems something like “meditations” or “reverie” on “grief” or “loss,” words I’m sure have been used to describe the work before. But those feel like ways to plug in romance where it has only a small part. Nor is this book just a tribute, in spite of its concentration on his grandfather’s life and his ancestors’ lives. So much earnestness and desire and steadfastness buoy up in this book that it feels more like part of a pursuit, or as Brandon writes, “courting” or “rites,” and then an ode borne out, even in its resolve to concentrate on the most sublime horror. In many places in this book, he writes to approach and approximate what was, in essence, unspeakable: “without war inherent in the vein / fluttering the eyelid after death / vision closes on non semantic light.” I think immediately of Inger Christensen’s alphabet, wherein she writes, “there is no more to / say.” She suggests that the explicit goal of large-scale weaponry is to obliterate, to end, to cause an effect so devastating that it inspires the apex of awe and fear, confounding response. Then, like Christensen’s book, O Bon determines to speak something of what can be relayed, or really, what fear and love oblige one to rebuild directly out of the ruin.

We, the readers, guess Brandon is in Japan, Montana, in a river, in an aftermath, in books, in the company of ghosts, deftly traveling inside and pursuing the dream, nightmare, and mind; he’s in the “misshapen where”: a no-place that is the curdling present or recollection of ruins. Even when his attention focuses on the grotesque, Brandon stuns so thoroughly with his diction, rhythms and music that, with distance, my memory glosses the book’s intensity. An example: “Streamers screwing eyes / the color and slender of thought moving slow / Pink meat of a lily dripping its clarion.” As such, the book asks you to slow down, to come closer, and then closer still.

Like some sort of private adage, a voice says “no / recitation / no remnant,” and so casts his duty outward—to the world of ghosts among whom he moves, to the honoring of those speaking within him and without. There is gravity to this writing; much has been dragged through the past into the present continuous, pressured, like the sublimated lives it describes, with the threat of vaporizing:

the people diminish the people are diminishing

In Brandon’s notes at the end of O Bon, he says, “…it feels more truly that ancestral spirits do not come from an ecstatic station beyond this world, but from one pulsating within it.” And in order to commune with those wavelengths, Brandon puts himself in every site—celebratory, traumatic, literary or memorial—where he can get to know that vibration. This work translates the transmissions of a dutiful receiver. But as he also writes, it intones with such keen attention to surfaces, but also to untangling the understory. Its voice bears evidence of the listener’s permeable ear and eye. He allows us entry to the conjoined space of mourning and celebration, life and its view through screens into other modes of life, both inside and outside language.

At the beginning of “August Gate,” Midori speaks: “Wake me from sleep / not a ghost but a man of ash without speech / I am ordered.” And with this invitation from his beloved ancestor, a call is spelled out to a living scribe: to access a sense of the dead. Brandon’s speaker is a supersensory trafficker of that other world. His communication begins when “The sky lowers its tenants / to the syllabarium,” or when the ancestors descend into language as translated experientially, lyrically into the poem. In this moment of invocation, Brandon asks after perhaps the intersection of himself and his grandfather at once: “Where are you in the characters.” He suggests the viscosity of voices and memories through which he wades, and moreover, the inherent confusion of language as an identity-maker, particularly while getting one’s bearings in a culture obfuscated by a foreign sign system.

With startling tenderness and music, he writes, “Come back in / I get so lonely in the den / I keep my hands to my own.” This voice doesn’t just desire to listen to ghosts, but to touch them, to wear them, to see from behind their eyes. Betraying an appropriate humility, he hopes for contact, real contact. And then he wants a sign: “Illumine the eyes / if you want me to die / more expediently.” Would he be welcome should he pass through whatever diaphanous veil divides him from these others? He begs to know “am I doing right,” his life itself a form for devotion to other lives.

The dead require more than an ear to listen. He seeks and finds new modes of communication, “Touching ruins / an attentive hand.” The whole body is a net registering reverberations, an enlistee “to follow not language.” But touching the ruin, traveling into the haunting knowingly hunts truth, which is awful in the truest sense of that word. In the imagined time before a great loss, a poem, “Irradiant,” augurs, “In one week from now / you will be seen anew / though the light will catch / you incorrectly.” Presumably Brandon imagines the after-image of bodies captured in radiation’s bulb and transposed onto the earth in the moment preceding sublimation. In the next poem, he writes, “I slip into atomy,” the speaker breaking his own atomic bonds to travel alongside the family that emerges:

my family walked into the river uneven curtain stretched from the wood—

feet swelling with dead weight splintered lamps

I can’t help but think of the glowing lanterns placed in rivers during Obon to light the path of the dead. Here, the enjambed “the river uneven / curtain” multiplies meaning and impact. He offers the possibility that both the family and the river are imbalanced. The river as an “uneven / curtain” gives the eye in the poem a tilted phenomenological vantage point, but also suggests the water is a portal through the veil of life and death. In this case, the dead return not redeemed, not as apparitional gusts of cold but as bodies wearing the facts of their alarming passing: “lips varicose,” “ash in the folds of their knuckles,” “lashes coil / round eyeless veins.” And then their visitor’s equally unsettled response:

where are their heads what may I rest my head my hands upon of them

His form and syntax embody the unfixed mind reckoning with bodies warped into something unrecognizable, something that confounds the satisfaction of a human connection with them. Further, his wobbling syntax seems to wonder—now that he slipped into their mode—is he too disassembled, disassembling? This uneasiness communicates the speaker’s degree of empathy. If there is a self, it’s found by being unbridled inside the multiplicity of its relation to family. Their lives, their deaths inscribe themselves into his present.

I wonder if Brandon gives a body to that empathy in one of this book’s most memorable devices: syntactic slipping. Frequently one word or phrase acts as a linchpin, drawing together and fueling two separate clauses. An example:

waists we cut

an ogreish smirk into a field of pallid lanterns

As if the language wasn’t curious and alive enough to marvel at, this move creates dynamism, both forward and backward. It facilitates a ghostly transition between two actions. The melding calls the subject into question. Is it the same “we” cutting waists and fields? Who is the “we,”—we the family, the corpses migrating? The Japanese? The Americans? Stored inside this difference is the confusion of creating an ethics. Consider another example in which the slip suggests a fusion of identities and trajectories, or really, a baseline for a social ethics:

every surface is a mirror I see my family in

though I never learned any of their names for fear they would have changed my course

my shadow wake the disembodied

In this case, the change of “my shadow / my course” is contingent upon “they,” and waking the disembodied is contingent upon “my course / my shadow.” Causality moves in two directions, again, with osmotic pressure that asks the reader to look in both directions at once. In this way, Brandon’s book recalls H.D.’s Trilogy: “but gods always face two-ways.” Two ways can mean backward and forward in time, delving into the subconscious and simultaneously absorbing the external, or toward the self and the other/family at once.

In the final section the question “why is mourning countermanded” is posed without offering what countermands mourning. Is it the opposing and inauthentic demand of celebrating? Is it fear? Sublime awe? Does the present cut in to remind the mourner of futility? I don’t know. I don’t know if Brandon’s book is a companion in sorrow or a salve. Either way, over and over, I’m rent by the same zealous tone of its last lines:

Before I am taken by the light I climb on the nightstand, singing

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Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books, most recently O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011) and Portuguese (Tin House & Octopus Books, 2013), as well as numerous limited editions of collaborations, drawings, writings, and songs. He is working on a documentary book (re: wartime internment, glaciology, hell, picture brides, pictorial photography, dementia, the desert, etc.), and is co-editing, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writings by Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (forthcoming from Nightboat Books). Born in California, he has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, Arizona, and here.

Sara Renee Marshall grew up in the Southwest. She is an editor for The Volta and Noemi Press. Recent poems can be found in places like OmniVerse, Poor Claudia's Crush, CutBank, SpringGun, Octopus and Colorado Review. Her chapbook, AFFECTIONATELY WE CALL THIS THE HOUSE, is forthcoming from Brave Men Press. Sara lives and writes in Denver, Colorado.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Cloud of Ink by L.S. Klatt

Cloud of InkBy L.S. Klatt University of Iowa Press, 2011

Review by Les Hunter

It’s possible that the best way to describe L.S. Klatt’s illusory Cloud of Ink is by talking around it. Stephen Burt’s admonition in Close Calls with Nonsense to “look for a persona and a world, not for an argument or a plot” may be sound advice when reading this dense book. Like Burt’s description of “elliptical” poetry, these poems are difficult and tell “almost stories,” whose linguistic turns and repetition of words invites a reading of a certain kind of plot, albeit one made up more of word association than of a traditional pattern of events.

Take “Liquefaction” for instance: “I found an octopus in the snow” confused, the narrator “gutted it as if a hunter” only to have its ink cover his hands “like opera gloves in the moonlight” which, in an instant, leads the narrator to an orchestra pit where, “As the house lights came down, the audience lost their places. / They were swimming in a maelstrom of inklings.” The narrative of this poem, as in others in Cloud of Ink, attaches itself to words and their ability to be used to set different scenes. The sense is constructed through the words’ various meanings and figurative usage. In “Liquefication,” the narrator’s “opera gloves” made of ink, reposition him from a field to an opera house, where, in turn, the lights go out, leaving the audience in the poem both physically and mentally in the dark. In these murky clouds of ink, words, not people, are the protagonists. Their adaptability in performing various parts on diverse stages offers only an inkling of a traditional narrative. These poems are plays, specifically plays on words.

The result of these quick changing juxtapositions border at times on the surreal; nonetheless, the tone of many of these short poems manages to maintain a quiet, almost folksy Midwestern stoicism. We see both these seemingly incongruous strains in, “Andrew Wyeth, Painter, Dies at 91” where:

A weathered barn on a hilltop; a nude woman sprawled on the slope below.

A giant squid rises out of a hayfield, & the barn is compassed in tentacles then a cloud of ink.

Unlike a more traditional strain of surrealism, as seen in say, Buñuel’s films, where the unnatural is heightened through its association with the quotidian, Klatt’s surreal tendencies comes out of a choice of topics to pursue. Here, instead of focusing on the monstrosity engulfing the scene, the poem concentrates on a detail: “A man with fountain pen in his hand / & a pitchfork / in his back / walks the cow-path around the barn.” Despite the fact that the man has a pitchfork in his back, his nonplussed amble is less notable than the rise of a giant squid on the horizon. Whether it’s the man walking down the path, or a cockroach caught in an empty teacup while a woman commits suicide in an adjacent room, these poems glorify the background; they focus on the subplot.

This kind of off-center perspective is no surprise to those familiar with Klatt. Things have changed and they have not since his last book, Interloper, in which the poet shows a penchant for pictographic quirkiness, literary and historical allusions, and a breezy joy for the sound of words, as in his poem, “Provincetown”: “Yokefellow how steep our swoop / what coastline what distance?” While the more mature poems in Cloud of Ink still foray into word play, they no longer contain the pictographic hangmen, price tags, and magic eight balls of his first collection. They also still show some of the same word-shifting narrative composition, as well as a persistent interest in Emerson, ampersands, and flight.

In Cloud of Ink, add to this somewhat random list another interest: liquid. These are poems alive with ever-changing images that bleed into each other. The result can be confusing, though it also serves as a productive font of creativity, as the author himself admits in his final poem, “For Lack of a Better Word,” by saying, “If you could speak plainly / out in the open / you would never paint your tongue.” This poem serves as a kind of perverse ars poetica, in which the poet divulges his aversion to speaking plainly, instead opting for a painted tongue: a resistance to easy reading created through stories that are not-quite stories with dense language and shifting imagery. These hemorrhaging images indeed keep the reader on his toes. In one poem, the sun becomes a baseball that illuminates the joy and misery of the inconsequentialities of daily rituals, while in another, an aimless canoe adrift in the cosmos of a pond is reimagined in its original state: a straight birch, narrow and “made swift.” Both of these images demonstrate how Klatt pictures the physical world as a stand-in for the self, world-weary and resigned, but not without curiosity and an active imagination.

The collection of images in Could of Ink seamlessly merge, combine and disintegrate not only within the poems, but between the poems as well, with small-winged insects from one poem managing to flit their way into the next, giving the overall shape of the book a well curated feel. Their persistence is curious; it is as if these winged creatures, ever-conspiring, want to tell the reader something, and while it is not always clear what it is that they say, that doesn’t stop the reader from wanting to listen.

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L. S. Klatt teaches American literature and creative writing at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Michigan. His poems have appeared in such journals as the Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, Denver Quarterly, Notre Dame Review, Chicago Review, FIELD, Cincinnati Review, jubilat, Colorado Review, the Iowa Review, Eleven Eleven, and Verse. His first book, Interloper, won the Juniper Prize for Poetry.

Les Hunter has an MFA from Boston University and is currently completing his PhD dissertation in 20th century American literature at Stony Brook University. He has recent work published in American Theatre Magazine and Comparative Drama as well as a play, Cyrano de Bergen County, New Jersey, published by Playscripts. His plays have received over twenty-five productions, mostly in New York City, where he lives with Spike, Jr., a barrel cactus.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Thunderbird by Dorothea Lasky

Thunderbirdby Dorothea Lasky Wave Books, 2012

review by Caitie Moore

I had a psychic dream recently. It's possible the dream was given to me by the poet-psychic Dorothea Lasky via Thunderbird, a book rife with the supernatural, a book that connects us intimately with demon guides, spiritual snakes and ghosts. In the poem "Cortex" the vengeful Balinese witch-goddess Rangda is compared to the mind and the self: "Rangda is not the cortex of the brain/ But without her there is no revenge/ There is no enemy/ Without her there is no light." Like Rangda, Thunderbird troubles the divide between destruction and preservation, between the natural and the created.

In the strange and awesome poem "Is it Murder," Lasky writes "Long ago I made this poem/ And then you read it/ And then I ate it." As readers we're intricately written into the art that in this poem is "hell to live in." Within this poet/reader collaboration I feel completely trusting, while not totally safe. The danger stems from the unpredictability, the sudden newness she makes of that worn lyric trope direct address. "Is it Murder" begins "What is murder/ This is a very interesting poem to write," a question followed two stanzas later by another: "What is evil?/ I loved/ And I loved truly." The title of the book shows up differently in subsequent poems, but manifests here as the Thunderbird Motel, a real place come into current consciousness via the people to whom the poem is dedicated: Jasmine Fiore and Ryan Jenkins––a murder victim and her boyfriend/murderer who eventually hung himself in this Canadian motel. Lured into wiki-ing this extra-textual information, my collaboration with the poet becomes part of the horror, and I'm implicated as a perpetrator of violence. Lasky reassures us "It is the Doctrine of/ The Similar/ / Which states that because/ I am the same as you/ I am both just as good and/ Just as evil."

In his essay "Lyric Poetry and Society," Theodore Adorno argues "precisely that which is not social in a poem should become its social aspect," but Lasky's poems regarding daily life as well as her more mystical work provide incisive glances into the human condition. They are often kind in a way that's shocking, in a way that works against the shock given us by violence. In "I had a Man," her response to street harrassment is: "Still I'm glad he said that to me/ Still I'm glad he was so cruel to me/ What bitter eye knew I had a voice/ To say what men have done to me."

However, Adorno's point explains my identification with the poem "Why it is a Black Life" which is predicated on hermetic gestures like "Because I sigh and sigh/ And it sounds like a dog baying/ And no one wants to help me/ Because I am ugly, obnoxious, and insane/ Because the only living things that like the sound of my voice/ Are the vermin underneath the earth." But her tracings of the intricacies of the ego are smart enough not to stop at wry humor. Following the themes of her earlier Black Life, Lasky writes about the death of her father in poems less immediate now, less about experiencing the death of someone than communing with the dead. Her focus has moved from the acute but finite power of bearing witness and grieving, to the blurry but infinite skill of speaking with and for ghosts. This ability strikes me as practical and necessary.

There is something particularly urgent about the poem "The Room," in which there are four ghosts, the speaker repeats escape attempts from terrifying but vague threats, and in which Lasky writes of a profound confusion: "I hide in yellow sheets/ I fall alseep for days/ When I wake/ The golden man is next to me/ Touching my face/ Eyes going every which way/ He tells me a story/ It makes no sense" and later adds "my father's ghost stops/.../ And my father and I go down the hole/ We slide down the hole for hours/ My father is calm." What is the current use of surreality and dreams in poems? Of a poet/speaker who repeatedly asserts that she is dead? Lasky's ability (and all of our potential ability) to mark dreams and the surreal as life-altering experiences, to identify evil as something deserving of attention no matter the context, necessitates this tranquil, salvific end of "The Room": "And put the fruit in the basket/ And in the background I hear children playing/ And on the edge of my farm is a school/ And the children are learning near my farm/ And I go about it/ And I go about it for a good long while." A poetry which calls its own dead, which protects and warns its readers with demons, which acknowledges the words and the snakes that will not 'leave us alone,' surely brings into perspective the quotidian, our difficult but miraculous cohabitation with billions. After all that "The seasons they happen gently" and after all "You will not go gently/ And why should you?"

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Dorothea Lasky is the author of two previous poetry collections, Black Life and AWE, as well as nine chapbooks, including Matter: A Picturebook and Poetry is Not a Project. She is a graduate of the MFA program for Poets and Writers at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and holds a doctorate in creativity and education from the University of Pennsylvania. Born in St. Louis in 1978, she currently lives in New York City and can be found online at www.birdsinsnow.com.

Caitie Moore is a poet and curator who teaches writing at a small college in Brooklyn. Her first chapbook is forthcoming from the ever-brilliant people at Argos Books.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Apparition Wren by Maureen Alsop

Apparition Wrenby Maureen Alsop Main Street Rag, 2007

Visual Review by Crystal Hartman

12"x12" ink, watercolor and gold powder colored acrylic with intaglio etched birds on canvas

For reference, here are my transcribed notes...

How do I begin to represent the tender and honest, complete lives sewn together "Yes, it is you love-suspended within this simple moment." Round edges - the roots of a sycamore homecoming Fearless, Maureen Alsop reaches to the innards of darkness, stirs them round with dreams and associations pulling out something lace-like. Simple details in a greater experience.  Flooding imagery with tactile words let an artist linger on lines for days where centuries will not suffice.   Turn page to another. Round and curling layers, a clear imagination that offers up hope creating atmosphere - clouds and scents, a part. they leave me calm in contemplation. 

Process Images

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Crystal Hartman is a multi-media artist, a writer and a jeweler.  Her work has been shown at locations such as The National Palace of Culture, Sofia Bulgaria and the Center for Contemporary Culture Barcelona Spain.  She received her BFA for Printmaking from The University of Colorado at Boulder and studied Image in Enamel at Ox-Bow, School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  After completing a grant to study Femininity in Argentine Society, she filmed for Null Skateboards in Spain, and studied public art and cultural craft in Chaing Mai, Thailand. Inspired by storytelling, culture, and the natural world, she creates large and small opening conversations within and between disparate perspectives. Her current artwork, projects and adornment can be found online here.

Maureen Alsop, Ph.D., is the author of Apparition Wren (Main Street Rag), and several chapbooks, most recently Luminal Equation in the collection Narwhal (Cannibal Press, 2009), the dream and the dream you spoke (Spire Press), and 12 Greatest Hits (Pudding House, pending). Additional chapbooks include Nightingale Habit (Finishing Line Press) and Origin of Stone. She is the winner of Harpur Palate's Milton Kessler Memorial Prize for Poetry and The Bitter Oleander’s Frances Locke Memorial Poetry Award.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: The Arcadia Project, ed. Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep

The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoraled. Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep Ahsahta Press, 2012

review by Hannah Ensor

Well, it’s the 21st century. And, as Joshua Corey points out in his introduction to The Arcadia Project, even the weather—“the tentative ambient glue between persons otherwise unlike”—is politicalized; wrought; unsafe. So what do we do? What do we write?

The pastoral may not be your first thought. Even its simplest definitions include the genre’s very constructedness; the way it smacks of escapism, evasion, of the harder realities of our world; a pastoral is, according to my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, “a fictionalized imitation of rural life, usually the life of an imaginary Golden Age, … To insist on a realistic presentation of actual shepherd life would exclude the greater part of the works that are called pastoral. Only when poetry ceases to imitate actual rural life does it become distinctly pastoral.” And we’re so over escapism… right? At least as poets/reader-consumers1 of poetry? If the pastoral isn’t right, what about the unexpected portmanteau of “pastoral” and “postmodern”?

This anthology—and the more-than-five-hundred pages of what it terms “postmodern pastoral” poems—is definitely positioned differently than its Arcadian predecessors. Whereas the pastoral poem or painting of yore may be positioned gazing from a real world of difficulty toward an escapist fictional world of delight and safe pleasures (ah, to picnic nude in the countryside!), the pastoral of today comes from our seemingly delightful and safe world—the one of immediately- and overwhelmingly-gratifying spectacles; of the precious self-righteousness of green tote bags; of going for real picnics in a pristine-enough-to-satisfy-us countryside wearing our rugged performance outerwear2—toward an attentive experience of our lived realities.

Given that in 2013 “[w]e are [actually] living in Arcadia: that bubble riding atop the tidal forces of history” (this from Corey’s wonderful introduction), our pastoral poetry today must invert and contort: the escapist reality is, surprisingly, one in which we manage to attend to the world as we are actually inhabiting it. If the pastoral of yore was about escape instead of engagement, the postmodern pastoral is about escaping to a world of engagement.

This is radical and needed and terrifying and—whoa, who would’ve thought?—a hell of a lot of fun.3 By which I think I mean: stimulating, and startling, and diverse enough to take up almost 550 pages with spinning, vivid, yelling, moaning, laughing, observant poems.

Again, from Corey’s introduction: “The contemporary versions of pastoral presented in this anthology … [combat] cynicism, apathy, and despair with their fierce commitment to the intersections of the present tense with the boundaries of historical and ecological knowledge.” He continues: “this book is a call to imagination—not to the imagination of dire futures, but to the interruptions of poetry.”

Why the pastoral? Why poetry at all? Why an anthology? “If it is to be not altogether delusional and vain, an anthology such as this one must be a living and motile assemblage of our best hopes for what poems can be: vessels of attention to the world and to language, attention at its most intense. To be present, with/in the world, with/in words, in active relation to the living (and dying) environment—that is the ordinary utopianism practiced by these extraordinary poems.”

Sold yet?

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I’ve mentioned that this anthology is more than five hundred pages long, right? It’s incredible. There are one hundred four contributors, but what’s more remarkable is that the length of contributions ranges from one page to twenty-one. Many of the poems (including excerpts from longer projects) are short, spanning a couple of pages then moving to the next. But perhaps the most notable part of this anthology’s sheer length is that it allows room to print longer pieces: poems that require time to breathe, time for the reader to adjust to them, time to unfold and expand and contort back upon themselves and shift and warp. I was consistently swayed, even won over, by the longer poems printed in The Arcadia Project, even poems I began on the outside of. Indeed, looking back on my underlinings and embarrassingly-emphatic marginalia, many of them start on page three or four of these longer pieces: just around when I started, in retrospect, to acclimate to a voice, or to a set of ideas or logics that the poem spun out.

If you’re thinking: “Twenty-one pages? That’s a damn chapbook!” Well, yes, it could be. And thank goodness that the whole thing’s in there. Brian Teare’s twenty-one page “Transcendental Grammar Crown” uses as much white space as it needs; is a field, an exhalation. No “3-5 pages per poet” rule squeezed the poems/poets into crevices, pressurized what didn’t want to be pressurized. Instead: twenty-one pages, for instance, with Teare’s spaced-out, spread-out, voice that wants to immerse us, and can, and does. Doesn’t it sometimes take that long to get inside of someone’s language? To, once inside, stay inside? Be in it?

There are more than twenty contributions that span seven or more pages. We get a dystopian-corporo-feminist world built by Catherine Wagner; a careful and incisive and growing set of notes on our minds and birds and forests and how we write by Brent Cunningham; a warping, weaving, spinning, confusing, jumpy, entertaining pseudo-fairy tale from John Beer that leaps away and away; a sixteen-page post-Thoreauvian berrying poem from Stephen Collis that points astutely to the reality that—just as Thoreau’s own huckleberry-picking was never apolitical—even a 21st century experience of picking blackberries can be both pleasure/community and a “palimpsest” of cultural/social/environmental complexities.

And then there’s Rusty Morrison’s contribution, which adds up to nine pages. Nine is not, by a long shot, the most in the anthology. But what’s notable here is how close to a mini-collection we get from her. First, we read “Field Notes: 1-6” (already a collection of its own, philosophical and observant, clipped/reduced and full), then we shift gears into “Making Space,” a poem in sections itself, all of which together is, relatively speaking, dense, perhaps even vaguely narrative (if not narrative, populated), while following many of the same syntactical reductions of “Field Notes: 1-6” and adding new tricks to the arsenal (small caps assertions/slogans/philosophical statements juxtaposed against the more personal, gentler poem-surrounds). Then, seven pages after we first encountered “Field Notes,” we return: “Field Notes: 13-16.”

Morrison’s “Field Notes: 1-6” starts with an epigraph from Gilles Deleuze: “[A] sum but not a whole, Nature is not attributive, but rather conjunctive: it expresses itself through ‘and’ …”

What a gift that Ahsahta has given to Corey and Waldrep; what a gift they have passed on to their contributors and to us the readers: space and permission to let poems take a little bit of time. Anthologies are all-too-often “samplers,” zipping from voice to voice like a TV clip show. The Arcadia Project is a stack of chapbooks with pages dog-eared by some friend you really trust to show you something good and important and good some more.

My Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics sits open to its entry on “Pastoral.” Closed, the encyclopedia is just barely taller than The Arcadia Project. They sit alongside each other nicely, and I’m sure I’ll have both nearby for years to come.

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Though I started by talking about Corey’s introduction, I should note that this anthology is not a book of criticism, and is not interested in foregrounding its own editorial framing. As I’ve mentioned, the anthology spans about 550 pages, with very spare front-/middle-/back-matter. Besides the brief introduction Corey offers, the editorial input is quiet: Corey and Waldrep have made their presence known only in the cogent organization and (unannotated, unexplained) section-headers.

And while the book-geek part of me was at first disappointed to not have more bookish infrastructure, framing, prefatory notes and critical introductions to each section (defining for me what a “New Transcendentalism” might be, what to think when I hear “Necro/Pastoral”4), ultimately it’s the poems that tell this story, and tell all of it, the story that pushes against itself and hews its own poetic field and growls and burns.

When I think of the part of me that was disappointed to not have it all laid out for me, explained (away?) before reading a single poem therein, I think of Dorothea Lasky’s Poetry is not a Project. It’s a question that’s gotten, I hope, its due when it comes to single-authored poetry books, but is maybe a question we could stand to ask more in this context: what makes an anthology foreground its poems over its project? What of the risk that the title, the introduction, or the back cover, could stand in for the hopefully thriving, bustling, self-contradictory and complex content? The Arcadia Project does this. Juxtapositions between poems speak loudly; sections are, it seems, framed by “first” and “last” poems that interact to draw an arc; poems within share some of the same heavy lifting and work against each other. Corey and Waldrep don’t “come down on the side of” this or that; prioritizing poets or ideas. The poems compel or they don’t; they speak for the book or they don’t.

Of course, the critical contributions are also out there. The explanations. The discourse around the “postmodern poem,” and its interactions with the “pastoral.” In fact, you don’t even have to look too far away from The Arcadia Project: just go to the website for the anthology. The site includes essays by Corey that he didn’t include in the book. Outside references. Teachers’ guides and discussion questions. It goes on. It expands. Don’t we all know this already? That the book in the 21st century doesn’t stop at its covers?

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The Arcadia Project is an admirable experiment in/expression of where 100-plus decidedly 21st century poets stand on “nature poetry”: what it is, what it addresses, how it approaches and backs away and turns and approaches, how Nike and Twitter and Hammermill Papers share space with stalagmites and raincoats; share space with blood and birds and trees and hills and ravines. This anthology can—and should, in my estimation—take its place on environmental literature syllabi for the next twenty to a million years.

So yes, come to The Arcadia Project with an eye towards where poets stand on the nature poem. But come, too, to see how these poems are decidedly 21st century poems; to see what this anthology (its poets, its editors, the press) has to say about what a poem is.

Through this lens of what Corey and Waldrep did include, selected for, the lens of what moment we’re in now, I’m excited to see as much work with sound—with punning, eye-rhyme, rhyme-rhyme, assonance, consonance, alliteration—as there is. So many of these poets slip between words, make their connections with words-as-material and also between what these aural-oral consonances act like, reflect, do, more broadly. The slipping, maybe, of the 21st century: distraction, yes; piled-on denotations; suddenly finding yourself in a new place, seemingly unconnected by content-based logics but wholly connected by other tissue. Maybe it’s by what’s playing on the TV or by what the commercial environmental rhetoricians/ad-men are spewing at the moment, or, not-so-simply, by sonic logics as in Jane Sprague’s “Politics of the Unread” taking us through ideas overlapping syllable-by-syllable:

flipped gaze the mimic to stutter arctic—or just tic a long thigh a long thick finger of grease spill leak from something these monstrous yachts doth offend thee oh evermore than any Ulsan oil seep

gutter to stillness or smother the grunions left offspring eke out a living

Or we find play with the words cervix & server, watch as they become “servix” and “cerver,” watch as play with corporate behemoth Procter & Gamble transform them into figures, characters, representatives of their denotative categories (a proctor of a test; a gambler) in Catherine Wagner’s refiguration / theatrical proscenium / playful dystopian narrative (or as she calls it, “A Romance”).

Look at how this Michael Dumanis poem starts:

I thought there was a war on. I was wrong. To think the war was over me! The war was over. No: the war was over there, the other side of the barbed wire enclosure from our side, warless, …

and later in the same poem, sound takes over more fully, its own logic leading the way: “go, go, Giselle / through Gaza’s gossamer,” then, “Giselle, disguised, / find something in your glossary / of gazes to assuage / each gasp in Gaza / each gasp is a palette of grays.”

Maybe it’s naïve to call use of sound “brave,” but I feel that it is. Are we ready to be less embarrassed about our aural draws to language? to rhyme when we want to rhyme, to pun when a pun is what’s called for? to inhabit the sounds and slippery logics of aphorism? Are we ready to use all of the tools language affords us? All its tricks and draws? This anthology suggests: yes, let’s do it already.

Indeed, one section of The Arcadia Project is called “Textual Ecologies” (I’ll reveal my hand enough to say that this was, in my estimation, one of the most thriving sections as a whole). The online teacher’s guide describes the section aptly as “work that views language itself as “landscape,” or as a natural and naturalizing extension of landscape.” Yes! Using sound and beyond sound, these pages are each their own field. They occupy space and use it and we’re suddenly inside of a created place.

Look at this page. I took a picture of it with my iPhone. It’s by Erín Moure.

As is the case on this first page, the poem continues on in oscillations between sections that are readable as “poem,” sections that read as “not-poem.” One section joins words with the kind of typing-garbage (I say with awe) we saw on the first page:

Readability a context raises leaf a clear holographiea impediment holyoke, a crie donc amiable etruscan hole emmedial ,imtrespt , obligate , perflux creede lff;wejk fea tueauoriu`l a ‘lfk èaoeiur op;ajdvkrleu; `tjl`lsd l`àf` ;oertl l a;le er`f;dla`flk ae-wopr `pa`fò;e oad``;o;w`lkat;li`eo``àwp:i;eo`f e àsd f;l aeoi ; òo `;;soe to9ow l```lw-pooeri

At what point do we start failing to track these as “words”? Is it when the syntax breaks down? Is it at the first “unrecognizable” word (though even then we might question: is it I who doesn’t recognize this English-language word, or is it that it’s invented/misspelled/not a word at all)? Is it when the words “sound” as words but don’t quite “mean” as words? And what about the accented letters/characters? This isn’t the product of throwing the hands down on the keyboard (each à on my computer takes three keystrokes). Does that change anything? Make it a little more foreign, undecipherable, far away?

This is a poem that’s concerned with its own “poem-ness” (see its opening, the suddenness of its shifts between modes): moments of it are pure Romanticism, first-person-voiced to an unnamed beloved, honest and open (as if these categories… well, anyway). There are moments of text, just text, entirely text (most of them would be quite a stretch to vocalize). The poem explicitly brings up readability, context, clarity, invention, gestures. For a short enough poem (five pages with few words on each), this seems no accident to explicitly bring up these categories of inquiry.

Also in this poem, there is a gray block on the last of its three pages (just gray; a solid rectangle), and the poem ends

For gestures words are a birch path here à So suture an “alum gown” ààààà

What about these à-s? I couldn’t help hearing them. Hearing them, maybe, as bird notation? notation of bark beetles scraping away inside a tree? Or as notation for something else, something more conceptual, harder to access? Like the whole movie The Matrix was in my throat or gut? Maybe that’s just me.

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Flipping through the table of contents, I expect you’ll have a similar experience that I did: there were many names I recognized (and was excited to see what they did in this company, in the context of “the postmodern pastoral”) and some names, too, I didn’t recognize. The anthology can serve as something of a “Who’s Who” of smart, on and tuned-in, rad poets who are writing now. And what’s more, the curation and collection of this book is a little like one of those amazon.com algorithms that says “If you like [x], you’ll maybe be interested in [y].” One poem in The Arcadia Project will comment on a previous poem, build upon what was started. Disparate voices make the expected and delightful frictions, but maybe more compelling to me is that similar voices are allowed to be similar and proximate (in part because each individual poem is so good at standing on its own that there is no threat of redundancy inherent in the similarities). I was excited by what I found from the voices I was already familiar with and—I think even more importantly in terms of the effect of a book like this—blown away by the poets whose names I now have in a little list next to my bookshelf.

This is a masterfully curated anthology. I suspect that few people sit down with anthologies—particularly the ones wider than Paradise Lost—to read them from cover to cover. In this case, however, I highly recommend it. The careful curating of each section, and the conversation across sections, along with the sparseness of “extra” materials makes this an anthology that must, and can, and does speak mostly loudly through its poems and their sequence, their conversation.

We go to poems for different things. We go to “nature poems,” to “new” or “postmodern” poems, for different things. But these poets, poems, pages, in all their complexity, sincerity, use of the tools available to the 21st century poet (all of them!), offer plenty, in range and in quality, to their readers: the 500-plus pages of this anthology miraculously do not include a dud; a poem that fails to challenge and excite and spark something new.

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1 Uh oh, “consumers.” That just slipped out.

2 These are all pleasures I indulge in. I am not better than you. My web-browser is open to Patagonia fleeces on sale at REI.com.

3 Do you remember how beloved The West Wing was? The West Wing, the oddly and appealingly utopian show about politicians who spoke complexly, quickly, passionately, and at great length, about the issues that confronted our nation? Democratic politicians who, through lightning-fast discourse and group decision-making, unfailingly did the right thing? The West Wing premiered in September 1999, and was wildly popular for the first six years of George W. Bush’s presidency. Critics have both celebrated and derided The West Wing for being unrealistically optimistic and sentimental (indeed, “insufferably high-minded” was one critic’s assessment). Sure, this is escapism in the form of a 50-minute glossily-orchestrated spectacle (with such handsome faces)… but is it escaping to the easier place?

4 Please see the astounding Joyelle McSweeney’s contribution to this anthology, and also see her blog, for more on the necropastoral.

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Hannah Ensor lives in Tucson, Arizona. She is the author of no books, and is an MFA candidate at the University of Arizona. You can read more of her writing here, here, here, collaboratively here, and forthcoming here.

The Arcadia Project was edited by Joshua Corey and G. C. Waldrep.

Joshua Corey is the author most recently of Severance Songs (Tupelo Press, 2011), which won the Dorset Prize and was named a Notable Book of 2011 by the Academy of American Poets. His other books are Selah (Barrow Street Press, 2003) and Fourier Series (Spineless Books, 2005). He has recently completed his first novel and lives in Evanston, Illinois with his wife and daughter and teaches English at Lake Forest College.

G. C. Waldrep's most recent full-length collections are Archicembalo (Tupelo, 2009), winner of the Dorset Prize, and Your Father on the Train of Ghosts (BOA Editions, 2011), a collaboration with John Gallaher. His most recent chapbook is "St. Laszlo Hotel" (Projective Industries, 2011). He lives in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Bucknell University, edits the journal West Branch, and serves as editor-at-large for The Kenyon Review.

Read/learn more here.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Humanimal by Bhanu Kapil

Humanimalby Bhanu Kapil Kelsey Street Press, 2009

Review by Brandon Shimoda

You are beginning to look like other people. My heart sinks. It not only sounds like a death sentence, it is. What one was afraid to say, not what one did. It need and not be said. To look like other people is to have had one’s personhood erased, tamed into a normal pattern. What one looks like and how one looks. From the incitation of art to the vision of one who is earth makes it eternal. Assimilation, integration, acclimation, these, among the gestures of the never-ending age. And now I want to write. But not this. Something else. Maybe best to preserve the humanimal? Without whom there can be no art, no poetry.

I want to make a dark mirror out of writing. I have found myself stuck innumerable times in the story I am attempting, partly because the story itself is innumerable stories and I cannot make them cohere. I mean another story, again, not this one; this is a “review.” I am on the outer edge of something that is, Bhanu Kapil assures me in her writing, happening. On page 29 of Humanimal, Bhanu does something I think—it makes me think, or realize—is, though not the point, anyway, an important documentary moment: she lies on the ground beneath the music. She is in the company of French filmmakers; they are in Midnapure, West Bengal, India, making a documentary film on human-wolf relations, into which they have—or are—including Bhanu and her researching two young girls who, in the 1920s, Midnapure, were discovered living among a family of wolves. This is Humanimal. In this scene—inside and outside; page 29—the filmmakers have hired the local folkloric theater, a troupe funded by the state’s Marxist council, to re-enact the capture of a girl by a wolf. That’s fucking incredible. Anyway, though Bhanu is there, she is not in that moment needed, so she takes a rest behind the troupe’s drummers, beneath the music. When the “work” of the documentary takes a break, the documentary itself does not. And it is maybe the opposite of being critical to admit that a book—a work of art, in this case, as I take it, a documentary work of art—has the power, however modest or subliminal, to make one’s own work possible, but that is that: I read Bhanu Kapil’s writing and I am, to put it simply, re-minded of how to better approach my own. Her work opens up a space—a body (see below)—in which an order is tested and a rest is taken BEHIND THE MUSIC, so to speak, wherein any given inquiry—this one, necessarily—is a consequence of the heart and intuition. I’ll leave it to the mind to continue within what it is.

Am I wandering away from what I was meaning to write? I don’t know.

This is not a review of Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal.

The ostensible subject of Humanimal is the story of Kamala and Amala, two girls found living with wolves in Bengal, India, 1920. Kamala and Amala were known to the world by the efforts of Reverend Joseph Singh, a missionary who, having heard of the girls, found and killed their wolf-mother, and brought them to his orphanage in Midnapure, West Bengal, India. I’m abridging. Singh’s work was documentary. He kept a diary of their reintegration. His orphanage was called Home. The story of Kamala and Amala was eventually disproved—this has been documented elsewhere—though I believe this makes Humanimal an even more significant documentary work, for Kamala and Amala DID exist, were either autistic or suffered an unspecified congenital defect—or so the counter-story, which we ought to have license to further disprove, goes—and were subjected to an elaborate narrative in which being raised by wolves offered for their defect a plausible explanation. Either Kamala and Amala were (1) abandoned by their biological (human) mother, left to die in the wilderness, rescued by a family of wolves, with whom they lived for a number of years before being rescued AGAIN by Reverend Singh and rehabilitated at his orphanage, or they were (2) abandoned by their biological (human) mother, left to die (whereabouts unknown), rescued by Reverend Singh, who proceeded to make a name for himself and his subjects by spinning an elaborate tale, that of “girls raised by wolves,” touching upon a number of deeply held beliefs and fears related to our status as vulnerable, transitional beings, as prone to defect, disorder, and madness, as to a life congruent with the most sedate and stable forms of human being. Either way, Kamala and Amala’s fates were ordered by the Reverend and became the indications and ornaments of his narrative, which was his MISSION. He was in the wrong business, perhaps. If he had been a writer or a filmmaker, would there not, perhaps, again, have been some allowance for the enactment or re-enactment—revision—of facts towards a more ecstatic truth? (Werner Herzog’s phrase). Though what would then be that truth? The girls were beings; was Singh not barbaric?

It is as important to recognize the Reverend as a force serving to normalize the content of a fluid, transitional character—to make the individual, for example, stand upright and speak the governing tongue, within the confines of a repressive institution, in this case HOME, how rich, thereby leaving some part of itself, to begin, back there in the wilderness—as it is to ensure that it is not the Reverend’s narrative that ultimately endures. All writing would die. It happens fast. Generations do. They are not preserved. They emerge, for the first time, or re-emerge, as reflected—often thought or imagined—in the dark mirror held before or above bodies scrutinized, naked, in the dirt. Bhanu’s family emerges in the form of her father, memories of: his skin, the skin on his feet, a map back, but to where? The memoir of your body, into which all life imprints itself, often falsely, as upon the scroll we suck on, drink, get drunk on, then dark again. I have to say we would, I think, be truly TERRIFIED if we were to measure the amount of time it would take for a HUMAN such as you or I to become, if the conditions were such, an ANIMAL. Terrified, I mean, because we’d find it does not take much time at all. 50,000 years first entered my mind. Then I thought: it only takes one generation for a family to lose its (so-to-speak) mother tongue. But then I thought: No, even less than a generation. It takes only a few hours to cross an ocean, a few minutes to cross a border between countries, a second to make up one’s mind, half of that to lose it. And it’s incremental. You watch your siblings one-by-one suckle the wolf-mother’s teat and you, starving, and with no one around to offer assistance or dissent, make a decision: I too will wrap my lips around the wolf-tit and drink. Or I will die. The foreign nation becomes the new nation while the old becomes the foreign, it happens in the span of a split-second decision, even if the scaffolding to lift one into the place of that split-second is thousands of years in the making. We become animals once we no longer have any decisions left to make. Let me slightly rephrase that: WE BECOME ANIMALS ONCE WE ARE STRIPPED OF THE LAST OF OUR CHOICES. I should maybe add: Especially if we do not realize this to be true, to be happening. Or does that make us miserably human? See: every presidential election.

A tenderness that mirrors that of the wolf-mother towards the girls: My whole body felt rigid but then, abruptly, I submitted to her touch. When I woke up, I was covered with a shawl and someone, Mahalai, had covered me with tiny, pink-orange blossoms from the pomegranate bush at the gate. Was there a gate?

Being raised by wolves is a fantasy. To those who have not been raised by wolves, that is. It comes first within a reprimand, like you are the worst if you have been. Then it begins to enter the subconscious as the center of an escape narrative: I wish I HAD BEEN raised by wolves. Do you think it is too late? And wolves! An unknown quantity, the fully acclimated Other; their language is their own and impenetrable, as is their system of behavior, of living, dying also. That is no different for any one or thing. I’m not sure who holds the power in the dynamic: humans or animals? Does a human become an animal if she crosses over into—penetrates—the world of the wolf? Is a human an animal if she does not? I cannot help but think the selection of humans from animals, or vice versa, is arbitrary. In other words, we are humans because we can adapt to animal life. Animals are animals because they cannot adapt to human life. We are the Reverend, after all; the animal, the Muselmann, those doomed to selection. Those are Primo Levi’s words, from The Drowned and the Saved.

Alphonso Lingis is given the first word in Bhanu Kapil’s Humanimal. He say, They open up a body that is a lesion in the tissue of words and discourses and the network of powers. The body, at once and in an instant, a site, a wound, an unraveling atlas. Who are they? The body IS a lesion. Thousands re-entering a nation of which they are the evidence of barbaric and excessive defense, squandered and bewildered sex, obscure within a box, beneath a flag, no more known than when they were sent away or at the moment of expiration. Alphonso Lingis has the perfect surname, and Bhanu Kapil, who actually has the first word in Humanimal—dedicating the book to Thelonious Arjun Rider and Rohini Kapil—is the one who makes Lingis speak—or rather, re-speak what has already been spoken. I asked Bhanu once if she ever felt like the opposite gender or without gender completely, and she answered, In dreams, perhaps, when my lovers’ genders and races are transposed. In dreams, I sometimes have a female lover, or a lover who is not white, whereas in life, I consistently marry or employ white men. This is very telling! Immigrants, like cyborgs, need to be re-wired. I respond to Bhanu’s books in large part for the ways in which they reveal, in fact, the wiring of the immigrant, while in seamlessly parallel gestures, rewiring it.

What might she mean when she says that immigrants need to be rewired? And what is the relationship between an immigrant and a cyborg? Humanimal: A Project for Future Children, published in 2009 by Kelsey Street Press, who also published three books in particular important to me: Barbara Guest’s Forces of Imagination, Myung Mi Kim’s Under Flag, and another of Bhanu’s, The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

After Lingis, Ida Rolf, whom Bhanu counts among the documentary artists important to her: I was changing a unique but very poorly operating girl to a normal pattern of a woman who could no longer look in the mirror and know that she was unique. I was afraid to say to her, “You are beginning to look like other people.” That was what I wanted to say, but I realized that that was the wrong thing to say.

I don’t know what this is or what I am trying to say. I am still reading Humanimal, maybe that is the thing: I can only respond in fragments, presently, composed of or catching the light of what is specifically written, taking place, in Bhanu’s text, though not that, or anywhere close, of which there is so much, so much color and hair, fertility, folds, sentences, paragraphs of pure flight, otherworldliness. I’m still in it; I’m a reader, a monster, a hybrid of my feelings, attempting to secure an edge with my lumbering, non-enumerative, half-baked response. The writing is phenomenal, literally, hymnal, precise, the colors are vivid, then lurid, then off the spectrum, budding, opening then drunk, invigorated. I sit in a room. The room includes my reading of the book, and hum, quietly, to myself, or go outside and see something green and momentarily vigorous. There is a space opened in the writing—in Humanimal as elsewhere—that is a reflection of Bhanu’s subjects—the subjects of her writing—in a way that implicates the reader in the life of the subject, makes the reader a potential subject, or a potential of the subject. To be blunt: I don’t want the “poetics” of immigration—here, or anywhere—but the poetry, the life: the shocks and ecosystems. By this I mean a kind of TRANS-EXISTENCE. I used the word “intuition” earlier (paragraph 2). It is a coming back to mind—a re-minding—of the way to be. It is a looking, listening. An immigrant is one who is removed, though also one who goes into. Humanimal might be poetry, I’m not sure, or if it matters. It calls itself a “project.” The immigrant is the embodiment of the essay, as the essay is the embodiment of poetry. The project meets itself in the sky, but for the cloud, which disperses everywhere, a concentration, how paradoxical, of belief and desire, all within the sustenance of making, of work. I am still a reader, anyway, writing …

Other readings of Humanimal include John Latta’s on his blog, Isola di Rifiuti (isola-di-rifiuti.blogspot.com/2009/10/bhanu-kapils-humanimal.html); by students of Eastern Michigan’s Creative Writing Program (cw.emuenglish.org/?tag=bhanu-kapil); Tom Beckett’s on Galatea Resurrects (galatearesurrection18.blogspot.com/2012/05/humanimal-by-bhanu-kapil.html); Anderson Reinkordt’s “song-review” in Octopus (octopusmagazine.com/Issue13/Reinkordt.htm); Christine Hume in American Book Review. I recommend especially Olivia Cronk’s in Bookslut (bookslut.com/features/2011_01_017007.php). I also recommend Agnes Varda’s film Ulysses (1982). I think of Varda’s film while thinking of Bhanu’s books—in addition to Humanimal and The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, Incubation, and most recently, Schizophrene. As Ulysses, they make no attempt—are not interested in—an encyclopedic rendering of their subjects, but a more intuitive, though no less immersive approach, entrusting the revelation of their natures with a humble, often fragmented, succession of questions, observations, and feelings: living, vulnerable, therefore incomplete. Each are bounded, yet function as poems, and each rely upon the primacy, as poems, of images. I substitute images for events, my humanimal prerogative. Images are events, perhaps the quintessence of emergence, happening—a “coming out” (in the Latin). Has this been elaborated elsewhere?

In Ulysses, the central obsession is itself an image: a photograph Varda took thirty years earlier. The film is ostensibly about this photograph, and Varda returning to it. She interviews the three subjects of the photograph—a child, a man, a dead goat. Thirty years later, of course, the child is a man, the man is an older man, and the dead goat is still a dead goat, though for the purposes of the film—in other words: the purposes of LIFE—Varda finds a living goat and, in one of my favorite moments, gives the photograph of the dead goat to the living goat. What do you think about this photograph, goat? The living goat eats the photograph, which is, to me, a perfect reading of the image, the perfect expression of WHAT DO YOU THINK. The interviews with all three subjects fail. They don’t remember, or they refuse. Well, maybe the goat possesses true memory. With Humanimal, Bhanu attempts to construct an image of Kamala and Amala from their story, which seems counter-intuitive, until you think maybe a face will emerge from the image, within the dark mirror, as an assured, sensuous color from a dream. Everywhere images are disappearing—from poems, for instance, precise, clear, disarmingly unique, anyway, as from stories, though I’m not sure how this reconciles with the emergence and disappearance of voices, and as differentiated from the narratives that enclose them, Reverend-style. From these stories, I constructed an image of the dying girl as larval: perennially white, damp and fluttering in the darkness of the room.

Was there a gate? Bhanu’s presence throughout is of a hyper-observant child standing on the lip of a volcano, with a retrospective relationship to the world at her back—the past—and an open, studious interest in the flames and fumes that rise from the volcano before her—the past also. One is the past in and of one’s life. The other is of life itself. Hers is a presence between two pasts, at the energy field between the past’s two versions, facing each other, mirrors between which a light might be concentrated, and balance. Hers then is the energy field. That is part of the experience—of the poet, the immigrant, one who goes back to test the veracity of the narratives. Really, the child-on-the-lip-of-a-volcano analogy is totally unnecessary. Humanimal, Interrogation, Incubation, Schizophrene: all states, transitional states, including within them transitional states.

Humanimal ends with a return as perfect and surprising as that of Clarice Lispector’s “strawberry season” in The Hour of the Star: As the plane descended to Denver, I took a dry leaf, a banana leaf with three raised seams, from its place in my book and crumpled it, crushed it really, onto my leg through my skirt. The gesture is mysterious, but we know it, we’ve been there, and anyway, I don’t doubt this is true. There is so much to respond to—a banana leaf crushed into a leg, to begin—it feels right to start with that and as apt a place as any to begin recording the recording. Maybe it’s not fair to say we want it all to be over before it has even begun, if we’re thinking ahead, not unrelated to the Book. Because we don’t. But we do live in multiple, often conflicting times and spaces at once, are often forced to. Under which conditions is the Humanimal more truly an exile? Home is an orphanage. With her biological mother? Abandoned in the wilderness? With her wolf-mother? Taken from her wolf-mother? At Home, the orphanage? In the pages of Singh’s diary? The cruelty of the scandal, of what the scandal wants. In the pages of Humanimal? Yeah, I went looking for photo evidence. I was almost to the gate. I was almost to the gate when a hand reached out and pulled me backwards by my hair, opening my mouth to an O.

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Bhanu Kapil is the author of five books, most recently Schizophrene (Nightboat Books, 2011.) She has recently completed a manuscript: "Notes for a novel not yet written: Ban." For three years, she has been incubating this work in performances, notebooks, installations and talks in England, India and the U.S. Bhanu teaches year-round in the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, and also for the God[d]ard College MFA. She also maintains a part-time practice as a bodyworker, specializing in soft tissue work and Ayurvedic spa treatments. Born in England to Indian parents, she now lives in Colorado.

Brandon Shimoda is the author of four books, most recently O Bon (Litmus Press, 2011) and Portuguese (Tin House & Octopus Books, 2013), as well as numerous limited editions of collaborations, drawings, writings, and songs. He is working on a documentary book (re: wartime internment, glaciology, hell, picture brides, pictorial photography, dementia, the desert, etc.), and is co-editing, with poet Thom Donovan, a retrospective collection of writings by Lebanese-American poet Etel Adnan (forthcoming from Nightboat Books). Born in California, he has lived most recently in Maine, Taiwan, Arizona, and here.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: {Skinny} by Carolyn Hembree

{Skinny}by Carolyn Hembree Kore Press, 2012

A Prose Poem Review By Lisa Levine

Book Review voice, 2012: This is how Carolyn Hembree’s poems make me feel: scared, like a stranger has slit open my dreams without even a kiss goodnight. A killer in flat olive skins tonight inside this far-off island/dream would lean fast under a low ceiling now against the blank, the collection’s first lines read. handstand then against the long wall of a basement of a long dance/hall and out his dual knifeneedle take.

Prose Poem voice, 1995/2005: Shampoo that flecks your hair with glitter, velvet jazz pants, lacquer for fingertips and toes Toes. You know when you suck on a girl’s toes it’s called a shrimp job? Cause they look like little shrimp? - an array of tantalizing colors – mauve, seashell pink, chocolate brown – drops of opium Opium, when did I smoke opium? The night we gave the midget a black eye?

Book Review voice, 2012: Voice? Fuck voice, this book has voices. Bird, Skinny, Old Sweetheart, Mamie, Him, Her. The dialogue poems, layers upon layers, amplify interspersed single-narrator pieces: The Goner, with its opening line They’ll read something like it somewhere – draws my attention with quiet clarity.

Prose Poem voice, 1995/2005: brushed along the nape of an un-tanned neck, under folds of hair, on either side of the narrow bone running between the heel and the low curve of the calf, into the hollow between two trussed and lifted breasts. Clunky metallic earrings slid through the gun-punched penetration penetration. did she say penetration? you bought at the mall at twelve if your parents weren’t kind enough to carry you to the doctor’s, pink, powdered, unaware, to have your ears pierced soon after birth birth? you a mother? that’s funny hell, how would you know?

Book Review voice, 2012: This is how Carolyn Hembree makes me feel: ecstatic. In email conversations, she is ebullient and encouraging. She does not judge. Perhaps she should, but her open mind places her work in an intellectual lineage of her own. Reading {Skinny}in bits and pieces leaves me feeling nascent, myself, as a writer, cut back to my bones. This is good, because bones both catch and refract light.

Prose Poem voice, 1995/2005: anyway –white heels in patent leather, Bikrins and Kellys and totes and clutches with socially did you know cannibalism was accepted in some societies? socially significant hieroglyphs, the whiff of talc in plastic ovals, sky blue and midnight blue and tan and khaki and burnt umber, rose, violet – all the violent, beautiful colors of a recent bruise i’ll fix your belt if you let me whack your bottom with it! breathless pause. turn away from the mirror to face demanding eyes no, i never want to hear you talk about sex

Book Review voice, 2012: Read {Skinny}. {Skinny} is reading you in voices past.

Prose Poem voice, 1995/2005: then, out of slivers and scent and shade and subtle gradations in tone this universe emerges fully formed, constructed piece by piece with a hem here and a loosened curl there, a beautiful island of artifice that floats around this network of veins and banded muscle and soft subcutaneous fat that we call a body, no, call it home.

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Carolyn Hembree’s poems have appeared in Colorado Review, DIAGRAM, Gulf Coast, Indiana Review, jubilat, and Witness, among other journals and anthologies. Her poetry has received three Pushcart Prize nominations, a PEN Writers Grant, a Southern Arts Federation Grant, and a Louisiana Division of the Arts Fellowship Award in Literature. Before completing her MFA, she found employment as a cashier, house cleaner, cosmetics consultant, telecommunicator, actor, receptionist, paralegal, coder, and freelance writer. Carolyn grew up in Tennessee and Alabama. She teaches at the University of New Orleans. Her poetry collection, {Skinny}, is available from Kore Press.

Lisa Levine's fiction has been featured in the Edge Reading Series, Fray Day, and the Odyssey Reading Series. Her author interviews and reviews have appeared in Kore Press, Sonora Review, and Zocalo. She is working on a collection of hyperrealistic short stories titled And Yet I Can Love Each Equally.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Half of What They Carried Flew Away, by Andrea Rexilius

Half of What They Carried Flew Awayby Andrea Rexilius Letter Machine Editions, 2012

Review by Timothy C. Dyke

Is it a conceptual event? Is it a document of performance itself? How might the degree of transparency map this object? In Andrea Rexilius’s latest book these lines are not printed in italics, so I change a line by drawing attention to the line. I might be able to think of ways that language, by definition, is a capturing, a simultaneous failure to capture. What is the sculptural fragment that is revealed by this city? To make the poem a place is not exactly the same as to make a poem of place. To make the work a body is not exactly the same as to make a body of work. I am reading through the book again. Sometimes it feels like work, and sometimes it feels like fun. It is fun work. I should probably say something about genre. I should probably say something about narrative. I should probably say something about linebreaking. I should probably say something about essay. I should probably say less about how I am feeling. I am tilting against the windmills. I establish a continuity. I cannot pin down one side of the territory. I am an open mouth and a factory. I am yellow, or red. I was asked if I am myself. I am myself. I should probably say something about pronouns. Their name is William. They are born a little girl. To review the book is, what? To narrate the experience of reading the book? What if the book doesn’t defy narration as much as it ignores narration? Pronouns and time and place and image, and then there’s experience, and theirs becomes memory. There is never a story as soon as they say there’s a story. What if the book ignores narration as a way of questioning narration as a way of acknowledging narration? Half of what they carried flew away, and what I am left with is some space between the thing and the description of the thing. Right? I am sounding pretentious again. My understanding is not convoluted. I am talking about myself again. I do not know the limits of my own distinction. Human space is a cohabitation with fog. I am skipping over some really good stuff about Christopher Columbus. There is this one reference to incest. An actor friend asked me what this book was about. He was wearing old man makeup. I said her book was about words and different kinds of nature and history and time, and then I thought to myself that all good books are kind of about those things, and I said, “you just have to read it.” I read him the line about igniting the cloud. You and I are in a relationship. To organize the language, the poet divides the book into five residences: Desire, Water, Emanation, Weather and Territory. We are glistening with what it evokes. I forget which pronoun she uses for the glacier. There is that reference to God and the cutting of photographs. A long, white tongue to read the parchment. There is much I can’t say about trauma and loss. It is the result of deep amnesia

--- Andrea Rexilius completed her Ph.D. in Literature and Writing at the University of Denver. She is the author of To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) and Half Of What They Carried Flew Away (Letter Machine Editions, 2011). She is currently the co-editor of Marcel Press.

Timothy C. Dyke has published fiction in Santa Monica Review, Kugelmass, Drunken Boat and Spork. In 2011 he was a semi-finalist for the Sentence Book Award. He has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Arizona, and currently lives in Honolulu, Hawaii with parrots.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch

Ten Walks/Two Talksby Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch Ugly Duckling Presse, 2010

"Emotion as Description as Conversation"

Review by Olatundji Akpo-Sani

Ten Walks/Two Talks by Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch is a collaborative effort, born from the mind, of collaboration, friendship, and attention. Andy Fitch is a poet invested in the idea of movement, less the blind wanderings of the easy commute - more the stark instances, that if we are attenuated, may infiltrate and mold us into who we become. This is a wonderful match for Jon Cotner, a poet enthralled in the movement of dialogue and the transitions of meaning and thoughts through conversation.

Jon: After reading Sixty Morning Walks, I told Andy I’d wanted to transcribe dialogues between me and people I met at Union Square Whole Foods while eating stolen food. Something about that space evokes the ancient Greek agora (or marketplace), so it seemed the perfect venue for a project at least loosely connected with Socratic dialogue…(Robinson, Adam)

These two ideas of movement blend into the sensual city of not only New York, the sky line and impending unorthodoxy of a chaotic bauble entered into with the brisk steps form one’s own domicile, be that a home or a mind, but also into the sensual city of poetry, language, and friendship.

The first time I read this book through I was floored by the descriptions of the environment that surrounds Andy during his ten walks through the city streets, but on subsequent readings the conversations held sway. Together they shine a spot light on what it means to be in intimate relation to something other than one’s self.

What most people take for granted while simply moving from point A to point B is illuminated in these daily poetic romps. While reading of these walks through one of the biggest cities in the world one might expect the city’s inhabitants to shine bright but not here. Here they play a mere side note to the environment the poet passes through.

Kristin came from the elevator, which smelled like coffee. The florists had installed yellow daisies, yellow lilies. At 8:12 I flinched against a frigid gust – couldn’t get my lips wedged under a scarf. People’s eyes expressed abandonment. P. 12

The idea of a linear narrative about where we go and how we get there is disassembled and reassembled – transformed into something we feel in our gut, not just witness with our eyes. The emotive quality of the city takes over, propelled through these snapshot like descriptions. Meaning and emotion are found as the scenes stack upon each other, not in any individual moment. Not that each moment is not important, in fact, each moment’s importance is heightened in this process, and like a movie, these snap shots connect one after another to create something synergistic.

The intimacy built in the first two lines through the reference to, Kristin, Andy’s girlfriend, along with the ideal of flowers in spring is slammed shut with the flinch of the frigid gust. The abandonment expressed in eyes is thus felt as we are stripped from our place of initial comfort. Kristin, as with the other few proper names sprinkled throughout the walks, is no more important than how the elevator smells, what flowers are installed or the feeling of loss seen in the eyes of a passersby. These objects give us time and place. They give us movement, but through the author’s poetic sense the city shifts from place to emotion.

I crossed through scaffolds strung with caged lamps. Icicles and nails poked down near the exit. Silence and light gathered around tabloid salesmen seated on milk crates at 110th and Lenox. Slashed garbage bags spilled their contents. Shredded documents clung to each other. P. 14

Each sentenced detail can be taken as a separate occurrence but when read together we feel the disappointment of a cold early spring (the title of the chapter that begins the book and that this quote is taken from). Caged lamps mix with icicles and nails. “Silence and light gather around tabloid salesman” (p.14) and even the garbage, those things discarded and torn, must cling to each other. We feel the forced imprisonment and the yearning to break free. What is exposed needs compatriots to keep away the lonely cold, which has become dangerous and sharp in our impatience for warmer weather.

These are not passive walks and commentaries. After all, the act of observing is a visceral conversation one has with his or her surroundings. This book reminds one of the importance of that conversation. When we attentively walk through streets or fields isn’t that what we are doing - conversing? When writing Walden; or Life in the Woods Thoreau was conversing with his environment in the hope to understand society and himself better. Basho (an inspiration for this collection) used his time walking to converse with nature - succinctly transforming his observances to profound commentary. We see the same ethos at work in these ten walks.

The people and objects passed tell us something of ourselves in how we perceive them. We are interacting with our surroundings whether we willingly understand and notice the millions of minute disturbances and beauties as Andy does, or we walk blindly forward stumbling over cracks and curbs, seemingly becoming lost in the terrific rush. Ten Walks/Two Talks shows us the beauty of attention.

When we reach the end of the first five walks we are presented with the first Talk, which jars us out of our sensual attention. This juxtaposition works to round out the whole of the book. At first the easy, aimless, and occasionally distracted talk seems so distant from the precise and propulsive flow that is established in the walks. Yet they express the ease of friendship without which the beautifully described walks would remain mere descriptions. Within the dichotomous elements of the drifting talks and the pointed descriptions of walks I begin to feel a balance. Andy walks without destination. The conversations meander on without direction.

A: General… J: In general? A: [muffled] all momentum, barely finished the paper, and decided twenty’s too young for graduate school. J: So I took a walk this afternoon after talking to Amanda – to to relish our conversation and imagine spending… A: Just bef… J: new loverly moments together. As I stepped out I saw a Carribena church service start. To my left stands the Celestial Church of Christ, in the Alare Alua Parish. A: Do you find it hard to read whole church names? P. 72

In the walks rights and lefts are taken arbitrarily, while in the talks topics change on a whim. The friendship inherent in these two talks lays bare the friendship between an inhabitant and his or her surroundings. These two participants are talking with each other more than to each other as only dear friends can. And here in lies the key that ties the two parts of this book together to make the whole. The walks themselves can be seen as pointed conversations and the talks can be seen as walks through easy fields. As with all things familiar direction is lost and what replaces it, while cloistered in the battlements of inside understandings, carries the reader past the need to understand the particular and into a realm where understanding is something that is felt through reading/hearing the breaks in conversations and the heady flow of the streets of New York.

This is a beautiful book, easy to read, but complicated in its scope, which is not an easy task, given that New York city (or any city) is known for its complexity and friendship is a balance of competing desires and attitudes. Yet no part of this book feels weighted. It left this reader feeling light and hopeful that the next time I leave my house or converse with a close friend I too will have the attention and where-with-all to let my mind wander and notice the inherent beauty that encompasses all our interactions.

Work Cited:

Robinson, Adam. "Ten Walks/Two Talks: Interview with Jon and Andy HTMLGIANT."Ten Walks/Two Talks: Interview with Jon and Andy | HTMLGIANT. HTMLGIANT, 28 June 2010. Web. 24 Oct. 2012. .

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Jon Cotner and Andy Fitch are the authors of Ten Walks/Two Talks, which was chosen as a Best Book of 2010 by The Week, The Millions, Time Out Chicago, and Bookslut. They recently completed another collaboration called Conversations over Stolen Food. Cotner and Fitch have performed their dialogic improvisations across the United States and internationally. Cotner has done walk projects for the BMW Guggenheim Lab, Elastic City, and the Poetry Society of America. Fitch has books forthcoming from Dalkey Archive and Ugly Duckling Presse. Cotner teaches in Pratt Institute's Creative Writing Program. Fitch teaches in the University of Wyoming's 

Olatundji Akpo-Sani is a poet, writer, publicist, and lover of each and every morsel of life who currently resides in a very small town nestled within very old mountains. His work has appeared in Monkey Puzzle Issue #5, The Rag, Pismire, Fast Forward Vol. 2, and The Barcelona Review - amongst other places. Be assured he wishes you well.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Honorary Astronaut by Nate Pritts

Honorary Astronaut by Nate Pritts Ghost Road Press, 2008

Review by Emily Thomas

Nate Pritts' Honorary Astronaut speaks the truth about what it means to be a human. A reader who finds herself inside of these poems feels as though she's in a cozy room with a ceiling open to a snow-spotted night's sky. The speakers in Pritts' poems are warm and insecure in the same moment, often dwelling momentarily within spaces that emphasize the loneliness of living in the world. "I am full of missing" defines this work: "Surrounding each of us is a vast cushion / of something missing & we're all / honorary astronauts sent into the vacuum to report back." Pritts' poetry never shirks from the implicit. In fact, his speakers transform the implicit into the explicit; they exist in the liminal spaces that most people deny in favor of a more conventional method for locating the self.

Pritts' poems also meditate on the sides of the self that are foreign. In "Circus," the speaker recognizes the multivocal nature of the self: "Then, the giant green bubble that bounces / around the sky & sounds like all voices together, / like the tv & traffic & noise & noise, / distracts both of them & leaves them together / separate, staring & then a flash / of green light & the giant green bubble expels / the pale gray man who looks lost & homeless / &, yes, helpless." The two subjects of the poem, a "yellow fish girl" and her "blue water boy," are separate, together, torn apart, helpless, and in love and noise. We are the people we love and they are us, which is strange and comforting. For Pritts' subjects and speakers, getting closer to the self means connecting with the world in a state of disarray. Rather than turning away from the loneliness and impossibility of existence, we must remember that the most honest and terrifying method is, quite simply, to "stay and sing beautifully."

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Nate Pritts is the author of five books of poetry, most recently Sweet Nothing which Publishers Weekly describes as “both baroque and irreverent, banal and romantic, his poems […] arrive at a place of vulnerability and sincerity.” He is the founder & principal editor of H_NGM_N, an online journal & small press. He lives in Syracuse, New York.

Emily Thomas has lived on both coasts of America but never in between...until Arizona. She spends most of her time teaching--sometimes humans, but primarily unicorns, on how to stay mysterious and obscure. She lives in Tuscon.

CUTBANK REVIEWS: darkacre by Greg Hewett

darkacre by Greg Hewett Coffee House Press, 2010

Review by Tristan Beach

There is much to love in Greg Hewett's esoteric, yet highly emotive poetry collection, darkacre (Coffee House Press, 2010), a Lambda Award-finalist. The poet forges meticulously structured verses that resemble both visually and thematically landscapes, cities, outliers, and residential developments. Aware of his choice of form, Hewett often alludes to the confines of space (keeping with the above physical imagery) and the limits of one's ownership over the body, the soul, the mind. darkacre is composed of several short poetic sequences, divvied up into sections within the book. The first section, the eponymously titled, “darkacre,” portrays in at times highly formalized legal jargon, the physical limitations of “darkacre,” or one's own identity, and the conferring of “darkacre” (as inheritance) to others:

dominion granted over darkacre in perpetuity measured from the northeast corner of the deconsecrated church past memory to the ancient oak somehow immune from hewing at the northwest [. . .] dominion granted in perpetuity for as long as a fertile octogenarian can pass it on

Following this poem, “darkacre” is conferred to “whiteacre”: “darkacre conveys deed to whiteacre / at the boundary where snow falls / (or is it petals? ash?) slowly down.” The next several poems depict darkacre passing on rights and privileges to other “-acres”, including “grayacre”, “redacre”, “greenacre”, and the like. Each “-acre” owns a respective poem in the sequence. Each poem frequently demonstrates a poetic style highly invested in the intricacies of language, ever pushing the boundaries of thought. The jargon is intermixed with extremely evocative language and physical descriptions. Comparing one's identity, which Hewett suggests is composed of innumerable elements including memory and socioeconomic history (the very idea of ownership conjures these up), to property rights is a very intriguing approach to something so intuitive, so intangible. These poems don't feel confined in space (especially given the lack of punctuation), rather they convey an ethereal sense, a fluidity that keeps each verse engaging for the reader despite the visual confinements and strict ordering of words.

The age-old struggle between order and chaos is portrayed through several other sequences in the book, including “Under Auspices” and “The Structure of Crisis.” “Under Auspices” begins with the poem “Tornado Edifice”: “It's the order of things. / Steel cables fray then snap, / Concrete caves in and I-beams collapse.” The poem, composed in loose, frequently slant-rhymed tercets, is particularly striking both for the liberties Hewett takes with his poetic form and for his sweeping language: “Arcs of desire routinely crumble.” In “Tornado Edifice”, as in the other two poems in this sequence, the future is conceptual, and prone to being chaotic, thus humanity is obsessed with predictions, providing an order to this chaos. There is nothing more frightening than the unknown. Hence the title “Under Auspices.” However, each poem works so well, which begs the question, can't order and chaos exist in tandem? Perhaps only on the page. Perhaps otherwise.

There are several other poems in this collection that impress and linger. Too many to mention here outright. Yet despite Hewett's success, darkacre might strike some readers as being frigid; Hewett's idiosyncratic mix of jargon (minimal in the second half of the book) and his at times roundabout way of conveying emotion and thus maintaining a connection to his readers, may put some off at the outset. As the book progresses, the emotional weight of his poems grows heavier. darkacre requires multiple readings, and perhaps some deep inquiry into what he's actually saying. For those who commit to this book, they'll certainly be rewarded in the end.

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Greg Hewett is the author of four books of poetry, most recently darkacre (Coffee House Press 2010). He has received Fulbright fellowships to Denmark and Norway and is currently Associate Professor of English at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota.

Tristan Beach is an associate editor for The Conium Review. He received his BA in English from Saint Martin's University, and is currently pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing at Goddard College. His poetry has appeared in The Pitkin Review; his book reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in The Conium Review and Cutbank. You can follow him on his blog: http://firespoets.wordpress.com/

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Echo Gods and Silent Mountains by Patrick Woodcock

Echo Gods and Silent Mountains Patrick Woodcock ECW Press, 2012

Review by BJ Soloy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CUTBANK REVIEWS: Nothing is In Here by Andrew Levy

Nothing Is In HereAndrew Levy EOAGH Press, 2011

"The United States of Andrew Levy"

review by Matt Reeck

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Constitution.

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

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

Well, no. Or yes.

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

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

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

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

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

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Polysemous Texts.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Utopia.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Beauty.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[3] Beauty quotes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Postscript.

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

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Works Cited.

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW: The Invention of Glass, Emmanuel Hocquard

Canarium Press, 2012

Translated by Cole Swensen and Rod Smith

Review by Brett DeFries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Works Cited:

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

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

REVIEW: Already it is Dusk, Joe Fletcher

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

REVIEW: Teahouse of the Almighty, Patricia Smith

Coffee House Press, 2008.Review by Tristan Beach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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