by Julie Doxsee
Octopus Books 2008
Reviewed by Ben Mirov

Refigures

Many of the poems from Julie Doxsee’s Undersleep feel like descendants of early Robert Creeley poems, especially those from Words. The torque one feels moving from line to line is very much like the experience of reading a Graham Foust poem. The density of other poems and the way individual words seem packed full of content, bear similarities to the work of Rae Armantrout. For the most part, however, Doxsee’s poems are exotic and lack strong comparison. Perhaps their most unique characteristic is their obtrusiveness, which derives from predecessors while simultaneously creating an architecture all its own. Take the poem “Ice Shapes,” which contains many of the idiosyncrasies that can be found throughout Undersleep:

 A mercury spill
 follows you, spelling
 between figure 8s:

 the large cloud
 fell from the wall
 with sugar-water before

 leaping to the magnet
 wall. A curl of my
 pillow-head-you

 goes upsidedown
 with a vase of orchids
 as the evening

 new pulls a flood
 of ink from every
 pen on earth.

“Ice Shapes,” like many of Doxsee’s poems, seems to exist in a realm where imaginative language flirts with physicality. The “mercury spill” in the opening line of “Ice Shapes” creates an unfamiliar context. The inclusion of the nonspecific “you” in the second line abruptly brings the poem back into focus by forcing the reader to consider itself within the zone of this bizarre circumstance. This conflation of poem-world and reader-world allows the “Ice Shapes” to unravel in a way that is wholly mysterious, as the “mercury spill” proceeds to write “between figure 8s.” Much like the “mercury spill,” these lines have an affronting quality built upon an internal logic which is both impressive and opaque. The “figure 8s” might be taken for infinity symbols and/or a type of knot; but what matters more is that their presence is integral to the construction of the poem. The “mercury spill” that precedes them and the strange procession of objects that follow seem welded together. Each one is a keystone.

The lines that follow are similarly confounding: a cloud falls from a wall with sugar water “before leaping to the magnet / wall,” “… as the evening / new pulls a flood / of ink from every / pen on earth.” While one could easily take on the task of ascribing meaning into each moment in the poem, the integrity and significance of Doxsee’s poems comes from their sculptural qualities. Each poem in Undersleep affects the space around it; the space on the page, perhaps even the reader’s space, the brainspace one uses to conceive the more chimerical compositions of poetry. Many of the poems in Undersleep function like sculptures in a gallery; they force an observer to navigate through and reconsider the space they inhabit. This is an array of poems that touch you in unique, troubling and frequently pleasurable ways.

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