Alexis Orgera’s how like foreign objects: A Review by J. A. Tyler

Alexis Orgera broke up with me. She did it in a book. The book was how like foreign objects. One minute we were dating and so intertwined and then I became a pit in her stomach and near the end we were banished from one another, Orgera tearing the relationship out of me like a hot knife.

from ‘Road Tripping’:

I’ll check the windows of your house, which is to say

the open air, for drafts or oncoming traffic.

I’ll check your hair for beautiful noise

and pick the notes from the base of your scalp.

We’re out in the open, specter.

We’re like two field mice on a streetcar.

This is how we fall in love, Orgera and her reader, the crafting of her language putting notes in our hair, making noise beautiful, pairing us with her as she pairs everyday objects with unexpected movement. The foreign object is both our reading and her language, each a new substance in a complex game.

from ‘Rules of Gravity’:

The two of us in my car,

darkness rose through bottlebrush

and Brazilian pepper

in the driveway

in droplets of blood.

Rose, an oubliette of mean fire,

through your body

then sank

a lodestone in me.

It is love until there is too much, until the language becomes so dense that we cannot stand one another, that we begin to infect each other, as a foreign object in the body, as sometimes even transplants are rejected, Orgera’s conversational banter growing ever more present at the head of each poem, chastising us as only lovers can.

from ‘Unlike Many Land Mammals’:

Until one day you began dying,

you were the bug of my life. To continue

this metaphor would be profane,

but remember that bug sounds likes love

beneath the din

of iTunes across a long, narrow space.

We lived in an extra-long shoe-

box. We lived in the delinquent shadow

of bamboo. We lived as rats

clipped their nails on our walkways,

as humans screamed and punctuated

our infrequent lovemaking.

And then it was over, Orgera flinging us from her poetry like a couple tosses one another out of their lives. We fell into and held one another for as long as could, but then we broke. how like foreign objects does this, and so much more, in its dense and beatific pages. I’ve never met Orgera, and I’ve never read her work before, but through how like foreign objects I became both close to and far away from what she writes, how she writes, and the maneuvers she uses to pull me in and then eject me from her poet’s heart, from her cavern of immense vocabulary, from her poetry as thick as love.

how like foreign objects is available from H_NGM_N BKS.

J. A. Tyler is the author of A Shiny, Unused Heart and A Man of Glass & All the Ways We Have Failed. He is also founding editor of Mud Luscious Press.