Heeldragger, by Chelsea Tadeyeske (A Review by Sean Ulman)

32 pgs./$5.00

In Chelsea Tadeyeske’s”Heeldragger,” a pocketful of space-conscious (cautious) punch-packing poetry spliced among collage-carved graphics (stocking’d legs, heels, domestic furnishings, women’s bodies with blank faces that mimic mannequins), the opening canto blots the page like a staircase to a detached basement; a step or two might be sundered or skipped, the descent’s danger dealt sensibly discrete.

“who leaves

laurel-wreathed,

sweat and sparkle

heels in parade

will stump and shove to see

the rising of balloons

the holy animal stroked to transparency”

The second poem is two words footnoting the page’s bottom left corner. The first word is “i,” the other is “possum,” so the reader can delight at the outset in the absurdist shmaltz and schist to follow.

The third poem descends 3 two-letter wide, 4 and 6 word elevator columns, and strides a 3 word, 10 letter catwalk, before sinking a 3 word freefall, landing on the next page, where centered, as if off the break in Scrabble, if/then statements intersect:

“impossible to

i ate too much at dinner.

lick clean”

The lyrical plug,”dulled to a thin papery feeling,” that appeared beside a collage that features quilting and a scotch-taped window on a shadowed figure, made me flip back to the tactilely-opulent tracing paper that lays over and masks the title page with chary hooked scribbles.

The 7^th page (of writing, not pictures) is the first and only one that fills in, what would be a typical prose page if the space weren’t jammed with same line, “this door leads to another door then down a hallway,” 35 times, in various wells of boldness, often overlapping, the typewriter offset.

I enjoyed positing whether I would’ve conjured the flapping of repetitive pages, the sentence “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy,” in Stanley Kubrick’s”The Shining,” if I hadn’t happened to have screened the haunting film for the first time the same week that “Heeldragger” appeared in the mail. For primer, there is the previous (and forthcoming) constructive, creative use of page space which Nicholson’s author/hotel caretaker also finds recreation in, as well as references to “doors”upon “doors” and a “hallway”, albeit no ax hacks, nor ticking big-wheel wheels, nor floods of blood gushing down the hall.

On the adjacent page, I interacted, rotating the book one tick clockwise, so the darkly imaginative,

“imagine death

as a spore or

a loosening hood,”

appeared on its side in the upper right corner like a postal stamp on a thank-you-note-sized envelope.

A common human demand (at least in thought), “go away more quietly next time” is embossed center-page, and center-book, beside the black thread tassel of this dandy handout’s hinge.

Augmented space arrangements persist with prescribed intent. An ant farm shake-up dribbling of crossword crumbs leads to 4 brusque verses strewn cross two pages. “Heeldragger” is a proficient exhibit of copious cerebral ways to drift words and letters in space. As for what it depicts, readers have a tersely expressed surplus to pick from.

I did wonder if the work didn’t advise itself, as the 2^nd half is quite softer than the imposing 1^st.There is of course a defendable design of easing off, relaxing image and language, but I for one wanted the verbal stomping to crescendo again at the end, rather than nimbly shuffle away.

Sean Ulman, worder birder baller server, is writing a long novel about Seward Alaska and Art. sean-ulman.tumblr.com