by Rachel M. Simon
Hollyridge Press 2009
Reviewed by Rachel Mennies

“no word, wetted memory”

The chapbook, a focused creature, often shows a reader the author’s preoccupations or fixations: what she’s metabolized lately, or what’s she’s turning over in her mind. Rachel M. Simon — author of the full-length book Theory of Orange — gives her full attention to a contemporary cultural realm of television and food, relatives and celebrities, in her chapbook Marginal Road. Compact, evocative lyricism moves us between ketchup bottles and Hilary Clinton, or STDs and Julius Caesar. The poems are densely packed and sparsely adorned with punctuation, building momentum with enjambment and wry, humorous, wild imagery that concerns itself with the amassed memories of a particular perspective within a vast, undependable American landscape.

“Build your memory directory with this,” commands the speaker in “Game One of the World Series with Your Father.” Inside the “directory” of this particular poem, we find “The racial insensitivity of scalpers / and Wahoo cut by mid-memorabilia,” “[t]he testosterone thick / for levitation and towel swinging.” Far from an American baseball pastoral, “Game One…” hunts down the specific and the strange, and the poem stands instead for a postmodern America, one where seams and artifice are a suddenly visible component of a polished front. A similarly disillusioned look at memory-making comes in “Late November,” a poem examining the days after Thanksgiving:

Every lunch sack contains a turkey sandwich
the Monday after Thanksgiving.
United: poultry, potatoey, we trudge back
to desks and jackhammers. Parts of our day
resemble standardized tests.

Here, we eat the same food at the same time, performing jobs with the same rote affect and a “standardized test”-like robotic mindset. United by the American holiday, we’re also united in its drudging aftermath. And, of course, the day has its penalties: “the cost of seeing your childhood roof, / the place you learned to inhale a cigarette,” has left us “nostalgia fluffing on the company dime.” Remembrance in “Late November” becomes indulgent, a distraction we shouldn’t be taking from the task at hand — and an unbreakable element of contemporary American anxiety.

Simon has an impressive pop cultural memory, and in her examinations of contemporary moments, her chapbook’s dark, impressive humor comes to the foreground. “America’s Next Top Poet” skewers fluff reality TV shows, with the poem’s speaker directing a second-person “you” to do various tasks in her new elected position: “Your first challenge,” orders the speaker, “is to sleep in the home / of a famous dead poet evading security / mimic the ghost’s style without mocking. / Hidden cameras will asses your breaking / and entering, poetic posture, line breaks, / and attention to historical hairstyle.”

Like the bizarre activities contestants must endure on America’s Next Top Model — recent memory, I admit, recalls a circuitous New York City scavenger hunt — Simon’s Top Poet must travel the country performing absurd acts, only to “return / to adjunct salary and piles / of student poems.” As the poem ends, and as we laugh at the strange idea of a Top Poet TV show, Simon portrays the strange reality we welcome into our daily lives with the same attention. She shows us the writing world’s absurdities; we are all jumping through narrow hoops, “smelling of underachievement.”

Simon favors enjambment over end-stopped lines. In short, dense poems like “In the Aftermath,” each line has its own small life, heightened by the sparse use of punctuation:

wall of water drapes your town
wind is named by alphabet
now a ‘copter overhead

sea wall, inlet, undertoe
grey demolished house on stilts
no word, wetted memory

These seven-syllable, generally trochaic lines conjure a post-hurricane town through images as particular as they are gripping, revealing both man-made (“wind is named by alphabet”) and natural (“wall of water drapes your town”) forces at work in the days after disaster. Here, too, we see a compelling example of Simon’s memory-based examination — in this poem, the work of the past is “wetted,” inevitably also damaged in the storm’s aftermath.

At times, the poetic line in Marginal Road becomes so discrete that it requires a new form to realize its full expressive potential. “Postmark from the Transition” — an almost-sonneted fifteen-line numbered list — turns the line into a labeled unit:

…4. costumes of our drama
5. soup stock of animal and bone
6. thigh, syringe
7. non-ninety degree staircase…

Readers glean only snippets of plot (a gender transition?) through this list, and the image juxtapositions, weird and peculiar, at times evade understanding. By making a list, Simon seems to suggest that each line asserts its own story. This technique risks obfuscating a reader, but it also mimics the flashes that memory often grants: sometimes associative, sometimes elusive.

It could be said that Simon relies on artifice a bit too much — the list, the reality TV gimmick, may turn off certain readers who won’t necessarily find their way back via her less accessible material — but perhaps the same reliance on artifice could be attributed to the culture that Simon depicts. If a chapbook grants a brief peek into a writer’s preoccupations, Marginal Road reveals a universe fit to burst with images and sounds, memories and found objects. Simon strips her poems of nearly all else, privileging the sharp image over the traditional stanza or line. By doing so, she makes a world that’s spectacularly hers.

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