Archive for April, 2008

Forget Reading

Wednesday, April 30th, 2008

by Anthony Hawley
Shearsman Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Broken/Beautiful

hawley cover Anthony Hawley’s second book Forget Reading is an insightful, relevant collection of poems that exist in and around the sonnet form. Though many of the poems are conspicuously labeled sonnets, their distance from traditional sonnet form speaks to the overall project of Forget Reading. Many of the “sonnets” even exceed fourteen lines. The poems in the final section, “Productive Suffix,” have a great deal of space between lines, making them feel exploded. Poems from other sections, especially “P(r)etty Sonnets,” have short choppy lines giving the feeling that the other half of the poem has been deliberately torn away, leaving only the left side. Most of the poems in Forget Reading feel like sonnets in a state of disrepair.

As the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets“ suggests, imperfection and beauty are integral to each other in Hawley’s new collection. The interjecting “(r)” turns the word “petty” into “pretty,” so that both words seem to exist interdependently. While the parenthetic “r” creates the simultaneous meaning, it also creates a rupture within the word “petty” that is both artificial and disruptive. Many of the poems in Forget Reading try to achieve a similar effect. Take for example these lines from the poem on page twenty-seven from the section “Apple Silence”:

atomized margin

drip of glass

stone wall reduction

heather heather

that obscure object

of the flicker

The opening lines of the poem from “atomized margin” to “heather heather” contain images that maintain their identity via transitory physical states. An “atomized margin” is neither a margin, nor a collection of disparate particles, but a baffling oxymoronic combination of the two. The following line, “drip of glass,” conjures both the image of molten glass, as well as a drip of water that appears to be glass in the moment of our imagining it. And what is “heather heather,” but a girl named Heather that is simultaneously a flower? All of these images are representations of “that obscure object / of the flicker.” Like the section heading “P(r)etty Sonnets,” they maintain their character through their contradictory qualities.

This collection is about more than Hawley’s unique imagery. The oxymoronic images, and the (dis)function of the sonnet form both point towards Hawley’s desire to create a collection of poems that is as elusive as it is perpetual. As the directive title suggests, these poems are meant to maintain their mysterious, contradictory qualities in order to be read again and again. Even if this is a quality most of us seek out instinctively in the poems we read, Hawley’s aim is as admirable as his book is rewarding.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Anthony Hawley, Ben Mirov, Shearsman Books
Posted in reviews

Behind My Eyes

Monday, April 28th, 2008

by Li-Young Lee
W.W. Norton 2008
Reviewed by John Deming

Relative Darkness

lee_liyoung_cover There’s a tremendous balancing act in Li-Young Lee’s poetry: the near-gush of sentimentia and nostalgia curbed by a dark, impenetrable, god-fearing neurosis. Our poet is isolated, fearful and death-obsessed, but he loves to cuddle with his wife. Nighttime is to Lee what high noon is to gunslingers: it provides time and space for an open showdown with the haunters and affronters that harry him by day. These specters—which include his late parents, the fact of human vileness, assorted memories, and of course, some notion of god—coalesce at night. They become one indefatigable mystery, and the poet is driven to interrogate them as such.

From the beginning, Lee established himself as a bona fide lyricist in an era of tubthumping conversationalists, and it’s a safe bet that the long-anticipated Behind My Eyes will further cement his position; despite the fact that is not his best book to date, don’t be surprised to see a National Book Award or Pulitzer nomination. Lee’s lyrical qualities emerge from unrest:

And the man who can’t sleep
and the man who can’t wake up
are the same man.

In these lines, the poet isn’t talking at us; he is presenting a hypothesis. There is constant inquiry in Lee. He sets out to come as close as he can to crystallizing the irresolvable metaphysical source of his unrest: what some might call the imagination, what others might call the divine. When a poem succeeds, it’s not just because the poet has proven his capacity to compose a poem; it is because in his scratching and drawing, the metaphysician has made a discovery, one that we as readers become equally privy to. These poems don’t read like poems that some guy wrote to scratch an itch; they are carefully grafted lyrical inquiries.

If the massless abstraction Lee quarrels with is generally crude in its silence, it has at least provided a stabilizing force: his late father, who has been central to many of Lee’s best poems. He appears throughout Behind My Eyes, for example, in “Descended from Dreamers”:

Why are you crying? my father asked
in my dream, in which we faced each other,
knees touching, seated in a moving train.

He had recently died,
and I was wondering if my life would ever begin.

Looking out the window,
one of us witnessed what kept vanishing,
while the other watched what continually emerged.

It could be said that Lee’s urge to position his dead father in his poems is played out. I don’t think this is the case. He is less the poet’s “father” than he is the image of the father as an entity made wise by death. The very idea of his father helps the poet put a face on blankness and to some extent, regulate his level of dread. He’s one of few poets able to make nostalgia work wonders.

Lee is deft at counterbalancing his imaginative obsessions with hard world evidence. Memories are one of Lee’s greatest imaginative obsessions; they are constantly paved over, betrayed or forgotten, as illustrated in “Descended from Dreamers”:

is any looking back a waste of time,
the whole of it a too finely woven
net of innumerable conditions,
causes, effects, countereffects, impossible
to read? Like rain on the surface of a pond.

Lee is careful with his simile. “Rain on the surface of a pond” is a familiar image, but the fact that the poet first “describes” the image through its metaphysical properties or its potential for metaphysical metaphor (one can visualize the “net of innumerable conditions”) allows the finite and the abstract to blend. More importantly, he is suggesting, not telling.

Sometimes Lee doesn’t do quite enough to counterbalance his wounded side. The book title itself is interesting as a suggestion that the poet’s awareness or unknowing takes place behind his eyes, eliminating any real distinction between “awake” and “asleep.” Yet, the title seems a little easy for Lee, even vaguely illogical, as behind the eyes seems too physical a location. Also, there has always been so much darkness/unknowing metaphor implicit in Lee’s “nights” that when he makes the metaphor explicit, it loses considerable thunder:

… Mother,
my first night with you lasted nine months.
Our second night together is the rest of my life.

“Night” is too blatant a stand-in for “unknowing” or “darkness” here. To be alive is to be in the dark; to term this a “night” is to apply too much force. A poem’s emotional quotient is made too obvious in other poems in Behind My Eyes. “A Hymn to My Childhood” begins:

Childhood? Which childhood?
The one that didn’t last?
The one in which you learned to be afraid
of the boarded up well in the backyard
and the ladder in the attic?

It’s not just that a lamentation over the loss of childhood or the development of fear is too easy or recognizable; it’s that the lines aren’t very challenging or even interesting. Nobody’s childhood has ever lasted, nor has such a thing ever been promised to anyone. Next I start to consider whether anyone has actually wanted it to, and that’s a particularly bland line of thought. The boarded up well is a nice image; by the time I get there, his forgettable indictment of childhood is already fading.

More often than not—and such is the case with all of Lee’s books—a tendency toward sentimentality and cliché is there, but imbued with such lapidary lyrical wisdom that it’s qualified. Whatever the calmness of positioning in a poem, there is always the sense of something impending, something just out of reach that will bring either menace or salvation. The first poem in the book, “In His Own Shadow,” begins:

He is seated in the first darkness
of his body sitting in the lighter dark
of the room,

the greater light of day behind him,
beyond the windows, where
Time is the country.

Lee’s metaphorical darkness starts in a person’s body, and slowly patterns out into light. A complicated synergy emerges, reaffirmed in the closing lines to “Become Becoming”: “Then you’ll remember your life / as a book of candles, / each page read by the light of its own burning.” As each day is burned, so too are a million memories, and we’re left to parse out the debris and find, in Wallace Stevens’s words, “what will suffice.” For Li-Young Lee, it’s the search itself, for his readers, the reminder we’re always searching in the dark.

Tags: 7.5 stars, John Deming, Li-Young Lee
Posted in reviews

The Virgin Formica

Friday, April 25th, 2008

by Sharon Mesmer
Hanging Loose Press 2008
Reviewed by P.J. Gallo

Once a Punk

mesmer cover

My introduction to the work of Sharon Mesmer was a YouTube video in which she reads four invariably obscene poems, titled “Annoying Diabetic Bitch,” “Ass Vagina,” “Squid Versus Assclown,” and “You Fucked Jimmy” at the Bowery Poetry Club for the 2006 Flarf Poetry Festival. I must admit I came to her newest collection, The Virgin Formica, with a sizable set of preconceptions.

While Mesmer still manages to disgust, she does so in doses bearable and often comical. These largely voice-driven poems are not groundbreaking—think Kathy Acker meets Eileen Myles—but they keep alive a vital, post-punk, feminine, American mode of speech. The book is not without moments of utter solipsism and gratuitous sexual explicitness—her poem “I’m Not Sorry,” for instance, describes the smell of male genitalia, “and that area between the dick and the balls / smells like that plastic stuff they sell way west on Canal Street”—but Mesmer’s voice plainly offers a raw and often refreshing sense of uncompromised subversion along with moments of sweet nostalgia.

Mesmer couldn’t have picked a better opening poem than “Canticle.” Not only is it one of the best-executed examples of her varied colloquial voice, but it prefigures the rest of the book. Early in the poem, Mesmer proposes a kind of manifesto for her work when she writes, “but I haven’t been writing much poetry lately. / I’ve been rockin’.” Besides the obvious irony of this line being a part of a poem, we know what she means. “Rockin’” is an appropriate euphemism for Mesmer’s overtly “anti-intellectual” persona. Parts of these poems cannot be examined in the context of academic criticism (in which they would be too easily written off) because they specifically attempt to defy contemporary convention. But Mesmer seems conscious of the problems with this defiance and, in a later poem, her speaker adopts the name “Auntie Intellectual”—a handle that at once embraces and denies her own intellectual tendencies. Also, she is quick to leap from slangy crudeness into a more recognizable poetic mode. For instance, later in “Canticle,” she describes “rockin’”:

Oh Lucifer, light-bringer,
singer of our hymns to failure,
cut us loose from our tribal pieties,
our forebodings at what this new age means,
for we shall be known by new names.

These lines give the dual sense of silly, melodramatic irony and a sincere pleading for the detachment that only a more visceral art can provide, and their complexity affords a certain knowing smile in any reader who has reminisced about the once intoxicating effects of “rockin’.”

Irony is Mesmer’s weapon of choice, but she uses it with sporadic quality. In her flawed “Blue-Collar Typeface” for instance, she describes a series of people who inaccurately think or wish they are blue-collar. In the finale of the poem, she defends real blue-collar people against these poseurs:

I know lots of useless,
imperfectly complicated
blue-collar people.
And their line breaks
kick your line breaks’s
ass.

She is of course being ironic. Nevertheless, these lines immediately reestablish a duality between two classes of people, undermining the poem’s earlier and quite ingenious breaking down of this duality. The idea that blue-collar poets are in some way separate from poets of other-colored-collars, and that these poets somehow need defense against what can only be thought of as some ethereal intellectualist or academic force is philosophically backward. At one point she writes with sincerity, “Blue-collar people often don’t care about / academic poetry, / the breaking of the line,” and in one stroke belittles both blue-collar poets and the conventions of what she considers an academic poetry. This poem is the most obvious example of moral carelessness in the guise of self-righteousness throughout the book, but every dozen or so pages, her work requires a moment of pause, not in contemplation, but in dismissal.

It must be mentioned that the second section of Mesmer’s book is devoted to a poem/comic collaboration with David Borchart called “Madame Bowery.” Surprisingly, the language itself stands out from underneath the shadow cast by the overwhelming novelty inherent in the inclusion of a comic in a book of poetry. In a common and overtly post-modern way, the poem and the art successfully annex some of the themes of Madame Bovary, namely helplessness (at one point the character glides along a set of railroad tracks) and the potential of language (“but that was the golden age, before men figured things out and everything started sounding like Tonto said it”), but the comic’s strength lies in the heroine’s various analyses of self and society. At one point, this strangely drawn three-eyed female speaker provides another broad manifesto for Mesmer’s work saying, “I want to discuss continuity now, imposing chaos on order.” It is in these moments Mesmer realizes the great philosophical monsters hiding behind her post-punk, anti-intellectual aesthetic.

Because Mesmer’s poems are often self-interested, many of the strongest moments in her new book refer specifically to herself and her own voice. A few of the book’s best are “Never Lose Your Sense of Wonder,” “Retarded Aerosmith World,” and “Lonely Tylenol.” In “Stupid University Job,” she writes of her tragic flaw, “Mine is like that of the naked man / who holds up a sign that says I’m ‘naked.’” Of all her mini-manifestoes and moments of self-consciousness, this is her most accurate. The Virgin Formica is antipathetic and subversive, but Mesmer makes no bones about reminding us.

Tags: 6 stars, Hanging Loose Press, P.J. Gallo, Sharon Mesmer
Posted in reviews

The Bag of Broken Glass

Monday, April 21st, 2008

by Yerra Sugarman
The Sheep Meadow Press 2008
Reviewed by Jackie Clark

Kind of Bag

Yerra Sugarman’s second collection of poems, The Bag of Broken Glass, is definitely absent of organizational problems. The poems are neatly divided into six sections with the apropos “Coda” acting as the final section. The word coda always strikes me as a poetic way of declaring the end of something, as that is what it is I guess, but it always does seem a bit fancy, too consciously musical. But my opinion on whether or not it works depends on what it is used in conjunction with, and the mood of the poems it is serving to finalize.

The heightened Poetic-ness of the word coda in this collection is more than appropriate, as Sugarman spends more than 100 pages writing poems infused with religion, death and disappointment. The poems are mostly narrative, mostly confessional, as the reader can infer by the book’s dedication, “For My Mother, in Memory Pearl Maler Sugarman (1919-2000),” and the completely heartfelt first section of the book, “Her Hands.” The poems in this section relay in pretty good detail the horrors of having to watch a parent die a slow and painful death. And because they are about the poet’s mother, many childhood recollections appear, as it is probably necessary to the process of grieving to make sense of the death of the person who gave you life. That said, is it horrible to say that while reading these poems maybe I was slightly bored and anxious to move on to another poem, which only in turn made me anxious to move on from there? Stanzas like,

Solitary my father—
the wool of his voice,

the thinning part we could barely hear
death reel in,
raveling it and winding it around my mother’s dying.

in the poem “The Lamentations of the Crows,” appear again and again through out the book. And it is heartrending and yes, it quiets me with compassion and future fear but that may just be because I feel badly when anyone experiences hardship—not because the poems necessarily speak to me.

It may be though that the experiences she is drawing on are things I have yet to experience or that culturally, I cannot understand. Sugarman uses Yiddish phrases throughout the book and uses her family’s experience as Polish Jews during World War II as the basis of many poems in this collection. It is thoughtful of her to include the translations of certain Yiddish words at the bottom of the page, though at times it felt slightly gratuitous. This is not to take away from their obvious importance to this text. I think overall Sugarman works well within the framework she creates and I can see how people marvel at stanzas like this one from the poem, “Jounral: Rai’ut Coma Ward, Tel Aviv, July 2003”:

And what of our connecting
                 the body’s pain,
                                but also the soul’s,

the mind’s, the heart’s—their pain
               with the pain of the world

Sugarman’s poems are constantly trying to achieve the above. She is trying to understand the synergy of pain and suffering and life and love. A valiant task for sure. But speculations like “Maybe this is what memory is: / God wounds” make less sense than she wants them to. I can no longer suspend my disbelief long enough to posture the possibility of my memories being wounds from God. She’s strayed too far from the center; does this particular God have any particular motivation? The religious fervor and fatalism in this book leave me an outsider. I am sure there are many other people who are moved by experiences similar to the poet’s. I don’t really think that my being an outsider makes much of a difference.

Tags: 5 stars, Jackie Clark, Yerra Sugarman
Posted in reviews

Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse

Friday, April 18th, 2008

by Darcie Dennigan
Fordham University Press 2008
Reviewed by Matt Hart

Atom Smasher

It’s a beautiful Spring day here in Ohio. Things are turning green and bursting. And finally, once again, the sun is upon us after months of “winter events” and gray skies/cold rain. I’m typing in the dining room, and through the windows to my left I can see Melanie outside planting pansies, hyacinth, and mums. Meanwhile, our nearly two year old daughter is “helping” her mother—picking up dirt, pointing at birds (singing “bird bird bird”) and pulling the petals off the flowers where she can. Earlier, as I was trying to bring her inside to eat lunch she wouldn’t let go of the handful of purple petals she had clinched in her hand, no sir. A little fit ensued. The terrible twos. Definitely not a big deal, but her fist would NOT open. Thus, the purple petals now strewn about my living room and kitchen floors.

Of course, this is not a disquisition on parenting, nor is it a description of the Midwest in Spring. This is—will be—as the title promises—a “review” of Darcie Dennigan’s debut book of poems, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse, which won the 2006-2007 Fordham University Press Poets Out Loud Prize—and which, by the by, I have been waiting to read for quite some time.

I plan to argue, here, (among other, unplanned things—we shall see!) that more than with a lot of other books, the title of Dennigan’s Corinna sets the stage—provides an associative backdrop and atmosphere—that when unraveled can provide a useful way of thinking about the book both as a whole and in terms of its individual poems.

Given this, I should perhaps connect the tissue of my initial domestic anecdote, as tenuous as it may be, to the book at hand. At the heart of Dennigan’s book is “A-maying” (both in its title and its content), which my daughter without any prompting is doing right now—that is, celebrating the end of winter via the gathering (and beheading!) of Spring flowers. Of course, it’s important to remember that at the heart of a-maying is May Day—and its various festivities: gathering spring flowers (yet again), the crowning of the May Queen, dancing round the maypole, and in more recent years parades and celebrations in support of labor and workers’ rights, a whole host of left-wing (“bird, bird, bird”) political demonstrations. In other words, to go a-maying is to demonstratively spring into Spring.

However, I can’t also help but be reminded associatively that “May Day” is “mayday,” the international radiotelephone distress signal used by ships and aircraft—as well as by fire and police departments (in “mayday situations”) to declare the commencement of search and rescue operations. Associatively speaking, then, a-maying has its darkside. In fact, “mayday” is a shortening of the French venez m’aider, which means “come help me”. And as long as we’re going out on associative limbs, looking at the French m’aider makes me think of the English “maiden” of which Dennigan’s Corrina is one. Her name is in fact a version of the Greek “Korinna” which is derived from kore meaning “maiden,” and furthermore is an epithet of Persephone, the daughter of Demeter (the Greek goddess of agriculture) and Zeus (head honcho of the gods).

The story, which I’m sure most everybody knows, goes that Persephone, herself out a-maying with her attendant maidens, was abducted by Hades, the god of the underworld. He had apparently taken a liking to her and wanted her to be his queen, so he opened up the earth and essentially swallowed her. A May Day mayday indeed. However, this didn’t sit well with Demeter, who was so forlorn over her daughter’s disappearance that she failed to tend the crops, and thus the first winter came to the earth. By all accounts it was a TERRIBLE one. So bad in fact that Zeus eventually intervened, ordering Persephone to spend half the year in the underworld and half up top with her mother. Thus, explaining the changing of the seasons. And now for a brief hiatus.

I can imagine already people saying: well, if you have to do all of this associative research-y type work just to get the backdrop and atmosphere upon which Dennigan’s world turns, the poems must not stand so well on their own. On the contrary, it’s that they stand so well on their own—they’re rock solid! in fact—that allows them to fly. Spitting associative sparks off both real and imagined landscapes, the poems in Corinna invite readers to excavate, associate, and riff off of what’s given. As Dennigan writes near the end of “The Virgins,” which moves deftly in its first 15 lines from a loveseat on a New England porch to a “porcelain Mary three towns over” that “cries type O blood from her eyes” then onto the myth of Clytie and Apollo and finally to an avalanche scene on Mount Blanc in the French Alps:

…See how
I have gone from home to mythology
to the Alps & nobody has moved.

Love, when I say I want to be close
to you I should say more
about avalanches & bleeding out,
how we will move through eons
& hemispheres in a white clapboard house.

In other words, for me, these poems demonstrate both an incredible groundedness (in terms of form AND content), “nobody has moved” and an associative leaping, inter/woven-ness, “avalanches & bleeding out,” which is immeasurably interesting not only for what the poems say, but for what they point to as well. In a way, these poems work in the tradition of Keats’ Odes, which remain stable (because they’re actually about things) while sliding from one idea to another exploratively. Dennigan’s poems thus demonstrate a 21^st Century imaginative engagement with actual life, which is not only fantastic, but compelling. As Dennigan writes near the end of the book’s title poem:

All the front door keys to all the places
I have ever lived drip from the dogwood tree
& chime in the wind

—which makes me want to read and re-read and also do my homework. But back to the book’s title…

Many people will surely note that the title of Dennigan’s book directly references, and plays on, the title of 17^th century poet Robert Herrick’s “Corrina is Going A-Maying,” a poem that argues against keeping one’s maiden self cloistered away in the protective custody of decorum when one can be out frolicking among the daffodils, etc.

And while Herrick’s poem may not go as far in suggesting/arguing for physical good times (or more darkly, terrible ones) as, say, Andrew Marvel does with his coy mistress, there’s certainly enough ambiguity in Herrick’s poem to suggest that the speaker may have ulterior motives for getting Corinna and her posse out into the wildflowers.

This is a theme that Dennigan herself picks up in several of the poems in her book, including the aforementioned “The Virgins” and the title poem. However these themes are even more acutely tackled in “Orienteering in the Land of New Pirates,” where she writes, “…isn’t adventure always better than stagnant water?/ —I say this standing waist deep in a swamp.” Then later, “I wouldn’t want my boy to think the world is kind./ Wouldn’t want him to think his games have no dark side.” What’s great here and different from her 17^th Century models is the way she takes both sides of the argument, as both the persuader and the persuaded, for better or for worse. Another example of this occurs in “Eleven Thousand and One,” where the speaker, after weaving together the story of St. Ursula and her 11,000 virgin martyrs with a contemporary Boston bar scene of five young women, who she’s rather voyeuristically watching through the bar window, she apologizes to “mom, god, you there” for allowing herself to be lured into connecting the dots and then, more importantly, connecting them to herself. Ultimately, the poem builds to its one unimagined momentous climax. Choosing expression over decorum, the speaker, who’s been leaning against a dying sapling for much of the poem, finally stops imagining the lives and purported lives of others and bursts out with, “I need to make love to something.”

Finally, besides “Corinna” and her “a-maying,” there’s also the apocalypse to contend with—a sense of universal or widespread destruction. In this As Dennigan writes in her poem “Interior Ghazal of a Lousy Girl,” (a poem which indeed does contain a ghazal in its interior:

Kingdom come.
Bring rum. Come

Sling, strum, come.
Stinging crumb, come.

Dennigan mum. Come,
my sobbing plum, come.

), “I am the excess of exuberance,/ one crummy girl swallowing ruin.” That is, the book contends with the apocalypse by eating it (the way Hades made the earth to swallow Persephone) again and again. How does one eat the apocalypse? Very carefully, but also as the interior Ghazal above demonstrates by not giving up in the face of it and by going to the party no matter come what a-maying (“Kingdom come. Bring rum.”). In other words, Corinna A-Maying the Apocalypse is powered by conundrum, surprise, imagination, recklessness, wonderment, earnestness, and above all giant playfulness and smarts. Even as it plumbs the depths, it refuses to take itself too seriously—from the palindromic “Sit on a Potato Pan Otis” to “The New Constellation” (which begins, “I loved the Starbucks”) to the amazing prose poem “The New Mothers” (which tells the story of orphan hospital nurses who invent new mothers for their patients out of cheap wind-up clocks, even as the poem deconstructs its own un“metered” language into a tick-tocking new mother tongue). Just as Corinna A-Maying plays against the Apocalypse that follows it in the book’s title, Dennigan is also careful in the poems themselves to play playfulness (both in form and content) against the book’s more devastating/earnest moments. No place is this more apparent than in the poem “Sentimental Atom Smasher”, which uses the opening of the greatest bar joke ever told as a way to talk about longing, stasis, and feeling:

So this guy walks into a bar and asks for a beer. Sorry,
               the bartender says, I only sell atom smashers

                And the guy says well isn’t that America for you–
every happy-hour Nelson’s a homemade physicist and no thank you,

just an ice cold one, but it’s too late–suddenly, he’s on his butt
                in a ballfield where handsome men are chasing a ball over grass

                sad grass, yellow like the hair of his once-young mother!
and again he says, no thank you–I’ve seen this movie before

And the bartender says it’s a joke and you’re inside its machine…

It’s funny ha-ha in spots, and also funny strange/funny not. It’s a joke alright—the joke’s a “joke,” because it’s actually poem—a sort of ode to Jokes and their shadows, and the poem itself’s a joke, because, well, “a guy walks into a bar,” and as a result we are immediately sucked into its wonderful machine:

A guy walks into a bar,

–actually just the beer-drinking bleachers of a ballfield–and says
                is this some kind of joke?

                 Well, says the bartender who has observed the little lamb
and the tyger burning bright and tickled their particulates,

because your life has lately been stagnant, we have yoked you
                 to a joke and we await the gasp that will gas up the cosmos…

                 Just then there’s a hit at the plate–and it’s going,
it’s going–gone to smash the guy in the skull

                 And since baseballs are made of nostalgia atoms, the guy,
with concussion, says I want to buy a coke for a nickel

                 I want to install applie pie perfumemakers in the crotch of every
                              tree
Bartender, bring me dried nosegays! Start the stalwart pageants!

Who hasn’t been cured of what ills them by getting hit in the head in a joke inside a joke inside a poem? Yes, of course, but what’s the punchline/final line, you ask? Is it an atom smasher that blasts away sentiment or a smasher of sentimental atoms? Well, as it turns out, neither is correct—the punchline is one that no doubt would make Gertrude Stein, Kenneth Koch, and even Robert Herrick proud: “the moonlight and the moonlight is curdling into freon…”

Then again, “If we only stay careful and awake—if we are good people—/ Ha. Then nothing.” Then “The Feeling of the World As a Bounded Whale Is the Mystical.” Then “I killed my heart to feel it.” “…a geologic instant…” Then “The Chrysler Driver blows his horn,” and Darcie Dennigan has this amazing new that you should read right now. Here in Ohio, the sun is going down. It’s a different day. Tomorrow, “There will be a loud report.”

Tags: 8.5 stars, Darcie Dennigan, Fordham University Press, Matt Hart
Posted in reviews

On Spec

Monday, April 14th, 2008

by Tyrone Williams
Omnidawn 2008
Reviewed by Hansa Bergwall

(Puzz[u..]la)r

on spec My mother once gave me a Hallmark card that was both sappy and vaguely offensive. It said, “I am a pearl, in an oyster, under the sand, at the bottom of the Ocean. If you loved me, you would find me.” What gleams in Tyrone Williams’s poems in On Spec proves just as difficult to find. I will grudgingly admit that I found a couple of pearls. Be warned though, this book is cryptic and often seems deliberately designed to confuse and obfuscate. If Williams were in the business of making crossword puzzles, I suspect he would incorrectly number the clues out of spite.

If punctuation were salt for words, Williams has unscrewed the shaker. His periods, dashes and ellipsis heap up on the words that would have anyone brave enough to recite these poems stuttering. I suspect much of his extraneous marks are mere visual adornment. He is also fond of cerebral punning he will use parentheses to fit two words in the space of one: “lo(f)ts,” for example. It’s all very distracting. It either hides what is good in the poems, or hides that there is nothing good in the poem. Here is an example of the latter:

Deventure
                                    (R-Steve Portman, Ohio)
The throne behind the throne—
                 pseud/ascepter—
his mommy (some mammy) [ H.
                 R.40] railroad(s) Freedom—
center(s) liberte
                 fixe—
                                credit deferred
(Portman-/portwoman-/{portar}-/
portress-/carriage-house-/{slave}-
quarters/cabin-(et te) Bush…

I sense this poem vaguely criticizes Republicans. The nature of the complaint is about as clear as someone mumbling, lips barely parted, clearly angry but not yet with enough courage to speak. Much of the book reads like this poem.

Several times in the book, Williams writes something as clear, bright and fresh as anything being written today. With subtle brilliance he delivers on his themes of the African American experience, gang violence, political suppression, a broken incarceration system. These moments, though rare, are exceptional. In “Descant,” a ghost runs from his newly slain body:

Descant
I left my heart in the teeth of jumper-cables—
black tongue, superfluous nipples…

By the time I hit the yellow tape—
it was already turning red…

Of my fair and alabaster love?
My redundant chains drawn in chalk?

Halfway to the stars I stopped—
turned, spat—it’s too late baby…

The poem inhabits its space of a crime scene although the voice rings from beyond life. The heart gripped in jumper cables is as arresting an image as they come. The regret in the voice, of a life wasted hits upon the tragic and expansive. At the same time, the body is fenced off in yellow tape and white chalk. The punctuation clearly aids the rhythm of the voice. If a majority of the poems in On Spec, read like this one I would give it rave reviews.

But more often, Williams banishes his readers into labyrinths of abstraction and theory. The style of these abstract musings varies wildly but it isn’t pleasant in any form:

qua tertium
quid—qua
“natural equivalence”

qua “the unity
of analogy”—qua
The Great Chain

Of Being—qua

It is tedium I wouldn’t wish on anyone. It is particularly disappointing for a poet who shows such raw talent in the rare poems like “Descant.” Line after line of academic theory references will go by without one rhythm or image to bring the reader back to something bodily, sensual, or engaging.

The themes Williams espouses about identity, imprisonment, slavery and prejudice come through on occasion with brilliance. I wish he more consistently brought his language down to earthly sounds and images so that the brilliant ideas ran throughout. But Williams chose the cryptic and cerebral route most often and it proves tedious. I do not recommend this book.

Tags: 4 stars, Hansa Bergwall, Omnidawn, Tyrone Williams
Posted in reviews

Factory of Tears

Friday, April 11th, 2008

by Valzhyna Mort
Copper Canyon Press 2008
Reviewed by Justin Taylor

Monkey Business

mort_cover In late April 2005, Valzhyna Mort had the best week ever! She performed her poetry at the Cuirt International Festival of Literature, and it must have been a knockout show, because three years later it’s apparently the only thing anyone wants to say about her. I couldn’t help but notice that two of the three quotes gracing the back cover of Factory of Tears seem to have been written not about the book in my hand, but rather about her performance (performances?) at Cuirt. The top one tells of the “incantatory quality” her work shares with poets such as Dylan Thomas and Allen Ginsberg, and is attributed to the festival itself. Program guide, perhaps? Below that, The Irish Times rhapsodizes over how Mort “dazzled all who were fortunate to hear her.” Finally, Franz Wright declares “Valzhyna Mort is electrifying!”

Minsk-born but English-speaking (she lives in the U.S.), Mort writes her first drafts in her native tongue as a political gesture. Franz Wright, along with his wife, Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, are credited—along with Mort herself—as the co-translators of this bilingual Belarusian/English collection, which makes it not just a little bit tacky to have Wright’s accolade on the back cover. I know, I know, you shouldn’t judge a book by its jacket, but that’s not to say you can’t.

From Wikipedia I learned that Wright translates German, mostly Rilke. Oehlkers Wright also mostly translates German, but she does some Turkish as well. Now, I’m not saying the Wrights don’t know any Belarusian, but I am saying that I did quite a bit of internet searching and found no evidence to suggest that they do. Other than their names inside of Mort’s book, that is. As it turned out, though, it doesn’t matter whether the Wrights know Belarusian or not because they didn’t actually translate Factory of Tears.

The one item of note I turned up was a short essay called “Translator Notes,” appended to the bottom of a Mort poem on poetrymagazine.org. (Factory of Tears contains no notes or prefatory matter of any kind). The notes, attributed solely to Franz, begin with the story of how Mort and the Wrights met. Turns out they were introduced at—wait for it—the Cuirt International Festival of Literature. To Wright “it was clear to me from the instant she began that…I’d seldom witnessed a performance of such charismatic authenticity and power. Anyone who has had the good fortune to hear Valzhyna will know what I mean.” We might as well take our one opportunity to give Franz Wright some due credit. I saw Mort read last year at the New York Public Library. Though occasionally her impassioned delivery seemed to descend into hectoring, she was on the whole a marvel.

Then in paragraph two (of two) we get some insight into the Wrights’ “method” of “translation.” Here’s Franz: “we are grateful to have had a small part in making her work available to readers. Her English is quite good and getting better, so our role was merely to assist in polishing the English versions of the poems she provided, and as a result there is really nothing to say in terms of the technical problems of translation.”

Is he kidding? Reader, would that it were so. The Wrights weren’t the translators of this book so much as the proof-readers, copy-editors at best. To give them credit—for them to take credit!—as translators is ludicrous; absurd if not obscene. But here’s the thing. The Wrights, even in their extremely limited capacity as “polishers,” have failed Mort utterly. Tenses shift, metaphors and similes lose track of themselves, syntax is regularly mangled, clichés abound. Take this passage from “Music of Locusts,” for example:

god tossed a heart like a coin
inside me
as if I were a pond
he made a wish
and lingered in the air
and everything belongs to me but hope

The “he” in “he made a wish / and lingered in the air” obviously refers to the “god” from a few lines back, but why is god lingering in the air? He flipped “a heart like a coin,” not his own body. Right? Doesn’t Mort mean that the heart that god tossed is what’s lingering in the air? Moreover, shouldn’t “inside” be “into?” The way it’s phrased now, one could argue that god is standing inside of the Mort-pond, presumably underwater, tossing his heart-coin up out of the water and into the air. Does that sound like the image she was going for?

Here is the complete text of the poem “Fall in Tampa”:

it’s our blood that’s dried up
and crumbles through our fingers
like faded leaves
but there is no fall in here
and summer is standing stock-still
like a heron in green water

Nevermind the non sequitur about “our blood”—whose it is or how it got out of “our” bodies (violence? menses? self-abuse?). To what does the word “here” (line four) refer? I assume she’s talking about the city of Tampa, or perhaps Florida in general, but unless she’s talking about being inside of a building (and if so, whence the heron in green water?) what is the word “in” doing there? The answer, of course, is that it’s doing nothing. It’s another mistake. Mort’s English may be “quite good and getting better,” but I think I’m being generous when I say it still has a ways to go. Well, that’s what a translator is for, right? Too bad Mort doesn’t have one—or, rather, doesn’t have two.

Another short poem, “On a Steamer”:

at night from far away
the city looks like
a huge overturned christmas tree
decorated for a holiday
then thrown away
now
it’s lying
with its branches scattered
and its lamps
still glittering
in the dark

Christmas lamps? That may or may not be the literal translation from the Belarusian, but in this country we string our trees with Christmas lights, and the fact that nobody told Mort as much is beyond negligence, it is a form of betrayal. Reading Factory of Tears, one is frequently left with the impression that Mort’s translators were trying to make her sound like Balky from Perfect Strangers.

Another Florida poem, “From Florida Beaches,” begins: “The sun is jumping among the clouds like a yellow monkey.” Then, a bit further down:

The beach pours like an overturned jar of honey
and waves lick the shore with their watery mouths.
In the water—boys—future mages
painting suns with the brushes between their legs.

Future mages? This stuff would get rejected from a middle school literary journal. And for the record, humans lick things with their tongues. (I don’t know about you, but when I do it with my whole mouth I call it something else). Finally, how are those boys “painting suns” while also “in the water?” Isn’t the fact that it leaves no trace the whole point of peeing in the ocean? (Yes.) Soon enough the poem serves up a description of birds as “paper money above the law” who “even put the wind in the doggy position.”

Look. Every aspect of the production of this book is atrocious, and considered asa book, it fails. But the poet herself deserves only a share of the blame for that; hardly the lion’s share. If Franz Wright showed up at your house and kept telling you that your half-baked, barely translated stream-of-consciousness poetry was ready for the big-time, you’d probably start to believe it too.

So what, if anything, can we glean from this book about Mort’s poetry, or at least its potential? Without question, her work fares better aloud than on the page, but the printed versions are hardly flat, or even uninteresting. It’s just that without the rhythms and intonations of speech, and the intimacy of live delivery, an irreplaceable source of their energy is lost. What might through a microphone and speakers sound like delirious intuition, on the page just seems childish and sloppy. This isn’t Mort’s fault. It’s an inherent and irresolvable problem which accompanies all attempts to translate oral traditions into print media.

Also, for an American audience with limited (or no) working knowledge of Belarusian culture and/or history, there’s probably a substantial net loss of meaning. Mort’s hands-off approach to punctuation doesn’t necessarily help matters, but it has the singular advantage of elevating her stronger poems to powerful, hectoring rants that are vitriolic, unpredictable, and sometimes very funny. Take this great exchange from “maybe you too sometimes fantasize”:

your parents never came back
maybe they’re ashamed now
a boy from the neighborhood tells you they’re dead
he says look even the Beatles die
never mind your parents
besides who knew them except you
all their songs were written by other people

Of course, the joke would be funnier if someone had told Mort that the Beatles did write their own songs (one suspects it is the Monkees she was thinking of) but still.

Some of the best poems in the book are very short. Just a few lines long, they’re funny, sexy, playful and just melancholy enough to remind me of nothing so strongly as the better of Richard Brautigan. Most important, they know when to quit. Here is “the memory of you”:

the memory of you
is like a needle in hay
that cannot be found
but every time tumbling with another man
in that hayloft
I’m scared that it will sting me

I’m not sure why she chose “sting” in the last line, where the more familiar “prick” would have bought her an easy and relevant pun, but I say this is a good poem. Here’s another:

“Teacher”
if you are going to be my teacher
you will have to become a tiger
so that you can bite my head off
and i’d have to follow you everywhere
trying very hard to get my head back

When Mort’s intuitive, visceral, free-associative method is working, the results can be quite striking, but as a stream-of-consciousness poet she is hit-or-miss. (What stream-of-consciousness poet isn’t?) As a writer, she really only has two problems: first, that she can’t tell the difference between her hits and her misses; second, that nobody around her seems interested in helping her learn how to. If I may be so bold as to make a suggestion: the problems are directly related. The first thing Valzhyna Mort needs to do is distance herself from Wright Enterprises. The next thing she needs to do is everything else. For what it’s worth, I wish her the very best of luck.

Tags: 3 stars, Copper Canyon Press, Justin Taylor, Valzhyna Mort
Posted in reviews

The Long Fault

Wednesday, April 9th, 2008

by Jay Rogoff
Louisiana State University Press 2008
Reviewed by Melinda Wilson

Good Title

rogoff cover

I’ve been putting off writing this review because I kept holding out hope that I’d find something to say that wouldn’t sound unfounded and embittered. The Long Fault pulls out all the old goodies: Adam & Eve, Cain & Abel, Tristan & Isolde, Helen of Troy, Virgil, Freud, Donne, Shelley, Milton, Einstein, Pynchon. The list is long as it is predictable. Relying so heavily on referencing biblical, historical, and literary figures to induce interest is something I’ve always been wary of as it often distracts from the real substance. Unfortunately, Rogoff’s poems are no exception.

The first poem, “Cain’s Gift” has poignant opening and closing lines, but there is little in between. “The blood cried up from the ground…” Blood gurgling below the earth’s surface is an image that recalls any act of physical force that has created fear and suffering. In today’s world it may be the Iraq war, 9-11, Sean Bell, a child being beaten in the Bronx, a young woman raped in DUMBO, Michael Vick putting a bullet in the back of a pitbull’s skull. It’s meaningful and universal. Blood is universal.

The final line of the poem—“out to beget the world”—gives the impression that the reader is about to embark upon a journey that will lead someplace specific, someplace ultimately knowable, that will reduce the suffering to something that can be understood, something that we can envelope despite our smallness. Not so. But in this way, it is at least realistic.

Though blood provides a reliable thread throughout the first half of the book, it gradually disappears, abandons the reader in dark, threatening territory. That’s what was so frustrating about the collection: themes that materialize and vanish without warning just when we begin to trust and rely on their presence. But we are not left without hope. Often Rogoff supplies us with the necessary motivation to continue, as in “Sublimated.” The narrator of this poem is very much alone. He pontificates on how he would like to die. Not that he would take his own life—if he were possible to choose his end without inflicting it. Engrossing oneself in thoughts of one’s own death is perhaps the most solitary experience that can be achieved but for death itself. However, there is light at the end of this tunnel: “some human element survives.”

So, what does survive? In “Aspirations” we see a deep appreciation for the physical body that transports us through this “journey.” The narrator affectionately exclaims, “I rose to an unpinioned aspiration: / to keep intact my bundle of meat and blood.” The body must survive until its time comes, but during this time it is easy to let such a durable, trustworthy part of oneself go unappreciated, be taken for granted, be abused. This is some of the better stuff in the book.

From there, Rogoff takes off into the world of photography. In Rogoff, real life is more interesting. “In Camera” is the most successful of these photography poems. It gets really good when it gets real and phorgets the photograph. The final lines read:

Neither gin nor
               formaldehyde, not even
      the polished, hand-joined oak
coffin’s casement window
      from which you cast your
                 frozen last look,
                 could put the trick
                       across, the bright illusion
you were at rest, or warm.

Sad, but real. Other than these nice, neat moments The Long Fault doesn’t seem to form a whole, and the lack of consistency or movement becomes an obstacle for the reader and often disables them from connecting with the poems.

When Rogoff gets dense and wordy, I suggest reading the poems in a British accent. It livens things up: “no goony bird hovers.” Try it. Rogoff also makes an attempt to startle the reader, though I’m afraid it falls flat. In “Just Say the Word,” Rogoff’s smart language is suggestive and provocative: “pious girls spread throughout the church.” Maybe I’m just sick, but when I read that, the phrase “pious girls spread” just leaps off the page. It’s among the few moments that do.

Tags: 3.5 stars, Jay Rogoff, Louisiana State University Press, Melinda Wilson
Posted in reviews

Forms of Intercession

Monday, April 7th, 2008

by Jayne Pupek
Mayapple Press 2008
Reviewed by Bryan Stokes II

Tangible Flesh

On the last page of Forms of Intercession, Jayne Pupek’s first full-length collection, a short author bio notes that she has spent most of her career as a mental health professional. The off-kilter verse on each of the preceding pages, however, intentionally gives the perception that they were written from within the proverbial padded room. In a time when taboos have themselves become verboten, Pupek manages to recapture in poems about sickness, infidelity and death the same uneasy awkwardness once reserved for discussions of politics, religion and money. Poems such as “Lunch Hour” carry a continuous narrative through stark, startling images of the carnivalesque and unexpected: “I watch / a woman wrestle a dog to the ground. / She wants his bone.”

Divided into three sections, Forms of Intercession opens hesitantly. The first section, also titled “Forms of Intercession,” begins with a disjointed poem of the same name, each stanza of which holds a tightly wound microcosm of a narrative, unrelated to any other. It takes several poems with loosely connecting threads before Pupek settles comfortably into multi-poem ruminations on death and mental illness. She warns in “Walking in the City” that “sometimes there is no absolution. / Scrape the onions off the bread and keep going, / You do what comes next, no matter how ordinary.” Yet there is nothing ordinary about the poems which follow. After the ghost of suicide Spalding Gray guides a young woman away from a bridge railing, concerned about “the wistful look in your eyes, / and the way your body leans towards water,” the ghost of Sylvia Plath visits in the next poem, encouraging a woman to follow in her footsteps. “Just leave / the children’s milk in a bowl, and don’t forget / to stuff rags in the cracks of the kitchen door,” Plath advises, her disembodied head appearing in the depressed housewife’s oven. Pupek’s unwavering attention to detail fleshes out these narratives, bringing the grotesque form of Plath’s “dirth-blonde head” on which “charred skin peels from her cheeks” into vivid life on the page.

The grace and creativity of Pupek’s effort lies in her ability to spread a single theme across a wide swath of poems without risking dullness or repetition, or without even once acknowledging that the stories are related or that the narrator’s voice is the same across disparate poems. Readers are left to question whether the woman in “Inkblots” who watches as bats “fly off stiff white cards / and circle the room” at her therapist’s office also later in “Puzzle” suffers as:

Red block letters tell me
there are 1,000 pieces.

I find only 999.

I look under chairs, dig under carpet,
bite brittle nails to quick.

On the mirrored side of the window,
I can’t see the examiner reach into his pocket
to caress my piece of sky.

The single, clear voice threading through each poem intensifies the litany of woe that Pupek builds in this collection. Unending and unsparing suffering makes a reader want to turn away (“Broken water and a baby born wrong. / She is not what anyone wanted. She is not what you wanted and / you are her mother.”), yet that urge is overcome by attachment to this well-developed tragic character.

If any flaw must be found in Pupek’s brash verse, it is a flaw no worse than that of a Stephen King novel or a blockbuster horror film: desensitization. By the middle of the collection, the reader no longer feels shocked when, in the poem “Apparition,” an ill woman receives a visit from her boyfriend, dead by suicide, and calmly announces that during their embrace “I found the hole in the back of his skull / and plunged my fingers into its core.” Nor does it surprise that, next to her slivered almonds, she keeps “a jar holding a fetus. Homo Sapiens. Female. / Born to another woman. I hesitate to name her,” which she carries around in public and displays to unsuspecting passersby. The poems come to embody the carnival, where the three-headed dog is no longer an oddity, but a stale part of the everyday fare.

Oversaturated themes are easily overshadowed. Pupek exhibits a rare ability to drag a poem out of the realm of the abstract and compel it to expose the tangible flesh underneath. In “Some Days,” five stanzas of gentle ruminations on past explorations of mathematics are shattered by two stanzas of undeniable substance.

Today, a nurse escorts visitors to my bed.
She assigns each one a name. This is your family,

she insists. Not students. The students are gone.
They stand around, a row of faces

Amid Pupek’s many themes, reality proves itself the most meaningful. The poems of this collection defy easy interpretation, preferring to unveil their secrets slowly as the narrative builds. Pupek’s greatest tool proves to be her scalpel, excising the outer coverings of metaphor and obfuscation that other poems might sheathe themselves in, leaving only the essence. “She opens his vest, pokes with bare fingers, / pulls organs like magician’s scarves.”

Tags: 7.5 stars, Bryan Stokes II, Jayne Pupek, Mayapple Press
Posted in reviews

Parcel

Wednesday, April 2nd, 2008

by Sarah Anne Cox
O Books 2006
Reviewed by Mike McDonough

Tableture

cox cover Sarah Anne Cox’s Parcel reads like a Cliff Notes version of the aesthetics of the fragment. While the book can stand on its own, I think the reader can get more out of it by referring to its predecessors. Long ago, when dinosaurs ruled the earth, and Guy Davenport had recently published the first translations of Sappho preserving the blank spaces and lacunae of ancient sources rather than patching them with complete sentences, Armand Schwerner started writing The Tablets, a series of poems in which a fictional scholar-translator offers translations of ancient cuneiform tablets.

Much of the interest of The Tablets lies in the tension between the ostensibly objective translation of the scholar translator and the anguished identity crisis his texts and glosses reveal. Given the gaps, untranslatable sections and many alternate readings the tablets present (made visible by a set of ostensibly scholarly symbols), we see that his translation inevitably creates a new text for his own personal reasons. In Parcel, though, it is taken for granted that we are looking at the present with the eye of an archaeologist. In one poem, Phaedra writes a suicide note, but the narrator/ archaeologist (my own term) finds only parts of it, making it read like a weird multiple choice test. Elsewhere, women are forced to fill out forms to find their beloveds lost to war. The fragments are very self conscious, which suggests the poet is questioning her urge to create an alternate narrative:

I am afraid of stories, Of where they lead people, of the costume’s various hemlines, of the bleak night that has connected the teller with the fortitude and the moral ground. Even collections of facts are suspect, psychological profiles, a shocking array of imported fruit, a warning to small craft, a slave rebellion, a Papal council.

In The Tablets the scholar-translator’s anxious thoroughness piled up evidence of the subjectivity of his text. Parcel takes subjectivity for granted, and Cox’s female narrator can be read as a contemporary counterpart of Schwerner’s anxious scholar-translator. The fragmentary texts Cox presents here are postcards rather than broadsides, and often carefully pointed with the purpose of empowering the reader. Here’s section 2 from “The Scribes (considering Linear B text)”:

beginning from numbers
the absence of a word for scribe
no special name
your name here
tiresome pictogram
it is said men wore striped gym socks
should there be different words for shoes and socks.

Her modes are various and her work is always smart. She can mix the ancient and the contemporary without sounding forced. This classical veneer lends some weight to Cox’s sharp critique of the current political scene, most obviously in “We of the Capitals”:

god and he by the water cooler, in the limo, in the rec. room
choking over pretzels during football
god loves him because he is rich and powerful but also humble
and ignorant

And Cox knows where this ignorance leads us: “We can no longer use words without becoming dirty ourselves.” Cox is not simply recovering an alternate narrative but trying to create a space where the story isn’t simply a story of dominance and submission:

I dyed my hair blond because of a lack I perceived….

To what extent is this an act of submission certain that there
cannot be two things at once…

dear Phaedra,
It is true we colluded with the things that would undo us
in order to tame them
in order that we could have a say
in our own undoing

In Cox’s work we learn how to read our own narratives in the cultural fragments we find. We confront the simple drama of humans using and being used by language. Here’s section 17 of “The Scribes:”

The thin
tablets
not notebook
size
only
strips
of hard gray.

In the final long poem “Offering Table with Hearth in Center,” the narrator-archaeologist digs into what she calls a “text from the first body.” Her diagrams of the excavation fill themselves with greyed-out background texts in what I can’t help but thinking of as a response to The Tablets. The following section is enclosed in a rectangle with rounded corners, recalling the outline of a tablet:

the running man to the woman of
possessions one to the other marked in
time as

wwww lllluuu kkkhhhaaa

then reduced or expressed more
formally clay tablets not baked
but liquefied lists to be remade the
way of transportation several
men on a ship owning no shirts
owning each counted by the
creaking in the hull

the ship is to the body a chest is smooth
and rippled with goosebumps full
sound wet air untranslatable texts
the weld adheres to steel because
the eye saw to it.

The efficiency of Parcel is admirable and welcome, as well as its unabashed love of kitsch. I do miss the often funny and sprawling contingency of Schwerner’s scholar translator as he begins to suspect his text is self-created, though I admit that Parcel is an easier read. Where The Tablets deals more directly with bodily functions, lust, and decay, Parcel deals more directly with modern life, including for example a poem titled “My Hello Kitty Motherhood,” and a willingness to deal with the very recent past, including a brief, but surprising reference to GM’s late, unlamented, and formerly ubiquitous J Car platform. Cox reminds us that fragments are not just monumental or sacred inscriptions on rocks and parchment, but toys, postcards, forms, receipts, the junk of today, and that anxiety need not rise to a classic, keening pitch. Whatever form the message takes, sacred, secular or banal, both books remind us that human emotions remain unchanged.

Tags: 6.5 stars, Mike McDonough, Sarah Anne Cox
Posted in reviews