The Opposite of Work by Hugh Behm-Steinberg (A Review by Tony Mancus)

136 pgs./$14.00

Working in clipped phrases throughout the whole of The Opposite of Work (Jack Leg Press, 2013), Hugh Behm-Steinberg has built a dream-rattled space. It is a space of stretched ideas and ideals set in the pursuit of reconfiguration and reimagining—or at worst, the sand-refined dream-filtration—of many of the pillars of western myth: Egyptian (“Horace”), Judeo-Christian (“Eden,” “Adam,” “Lot”), American political/economic (“A Senator,” “The Truck,” “In the New Economy”), and domestic (“Radish,” “Not Sleeping”).

His poems, situated on the right facing pages, are paired with pretty mysterious and intriguing images on the left-facing pages. The images, which operate as a flipbook, were created by Mary Behm-Steinberg, and contain all manner of things, from eggs in crowns to humans transforming into crows. It’s pretty wild stuff that seems in many instances to have jumped to life directly from the opposite page. The images work to directly extend and comment upon the content, creating a larger world for the poems. Instead of building towering and narrow poems – pieces that spire ever upward – or drill through the page, as it were, Behm-Steinberg has chosen to work horizontally in effect flattening the content in a mirror of the two dimensional imagery that accompanies each piece. As in “Again”

Tap your head twice          to let the rust out.
The thought as it          stumbles in you.
It has rhythm but you have to wait you have to wait
a while for it to repeat until you are asleep you have to wait
because you have to. Because your body is a small country and
small countries wait. Knowing how small is the wine we are all
sobered by. We drink          small sips… (p.71)

I don’t mean to say that these pieces are not things that burrow into their subjects, as you can witness above. Starting with a directive, the poem’s speaker hints at violence that can be read as suicidal. If one were able to “double tap” one’s own head, “the rust” would certainly pour out. But this is only a hint, and echoed from the word “Tap” and “twice” and the red drummed up from the image of rust “let out” from one’s head. The actual act of tapping one’s head is meant to clear it, to let the thought of the second line get on to its stumbling. By the third line we’re called back to the start, though, to the rhythm of the taps, which are then echoed in the repeated phrase that follows the simple description: “It has rhythm”. A long pause gets inserted into the space between the two taps create that “rhythm” in one’s head, which is now attached to stumbling, thought, and the action of the first line. The sound that would occur if the reader were to actually tap one’s head gets echoed again by the repetition in the fourth and fifth lines. By this point it’s a heart, and a head, and the idea of something that thumps and stumbles inside a person.

Things are happening fast and slow here. And throughout most of the poems in this book the clipping of sentences into smaller syntactical units performs a similar effect for the reader as line breaks would. But given the buffering that occurs with white space between units that are working to accumulate meaning and sense within the poem, the form of the poems creates a dual sense of time. The reader can push through the segments rapidly but meaning accretes a bit more slowly than it would have, had these poems been set up vertically. And that meaning is refracted as the reader moves from unit to unit. There is something similar to dream time built into this form, where worlds can be crafted and dissembled within the frame of a single night. And contrary to the effects that this type of distortion may have on a person in real life, in Behm-Steinberg’s poems it seems to work to ground the reader, and it works quite well.

It’s hard to really address this book effectively without saying that it’s dissimilar to most other poetry books that I’ve encountered and I mean this in a very positive way. It’s larger than most books of poems and similar in dimension to the stellar journal, Eleven Eleven, for which Hugh Behm-Steinberg acts as the faculty editor, though it’s a little taller and a bit narrower. And by the time I got to the poem that the flipbook is made from, I was ready to take another dream ride on the serpent’s back between the birds and eggs and everything that peaks and burrows.

Tony Mancus is the author of three chapbooks: Bye Land (Greying Ghost Press); Bye Sea (Tree Light Books); and Diplomancy (Horse Less Press). In 2008 he co-founded Flying Guillotine Press with Sommer Browning. They make small books. He works as a quality assurance specialist and a writing instructor and lives in northern Virginia with his wife Shannon and their two yappy cats.