[REVIEW] How We Light, by Nick Sturm

105 pages, $14.95

Review by Hannah Rodabaugh

Nick Sturm’s full-length poetry collection How We Light is an interesting foray into the mechanics of grief. At its heart, the majority of the poems concern a failed love affair. They ask questions of how and why we communicate even when that communication fails. While there are other minor themes replete throughout the volume, none of them surmount the near constant repetition of mouths, lips, faces, throats, and voices united in their inability to do what they were designed for. Referenced in almost every poem, they point to what becomes fetishism over loss, a sort of leitmotif for giving grief language.

For example, in “A WHORL THAT ASCENDS,” Sturm writes, “At the exhibit I touch / everything with my mouth My mouth / does not attract much attention.” While not directly about loss, we get the sense that this mouth has still failed to communicate what it needs to. It speaks through tactile sensation, and no one pays attention to what it is speaking. Similarly, in one of the many poems that share the title “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!” Sturm writes, “[T]ell me you love me / is what I want to say but my tongue is not so evolved / My tongue rides a hobbyhorse in a big wet parlor / It acts like a baby.” Other iterations under that same title continually push the theme: “I am a mammal lucky to have a mouth,” one states. “I wake up and muzzle my soul . . . / My mouth automatically dismantles,” states another. This use of mouths united in their inability to do what they are designed for creates a level of hopelessness around the potential for genuine communication. This repetition also seems to say that those who can communicate the least effectively may obsess about it the most. (Though there is no loss of effective communication to the reader even when communicating about how one is unable to.)

When emotional truth is expressed in this collection, there is often something taboo or trivialized about it. This often highlights the shame we may feel in expressing more than we would like under the influence of powerful feelings. For example, in “SPORADIC RESISTANCE,” he writes:

I’m always right here
towing an anchor through the flowers
without you & I don’t want to admit that
sustains me as much as it kills me I’m not
admitting that

It is as if the speaker feels the vulnerability of expression and tries to hide it. We almost get the sense that he is breaking a taboo about speaking because of who he is speaking to. In a later poem, under the often used title “WHAT A TREMENDOUS TIME WE’RE HAVING!” Sturm similarly relates, “[M]y emotions want to make me say things / that will never come back out of you.” In other pieces, the emotional impact of a piece seems deliberately trivialized. In “A BASIC GUIDE TO AUTOBIOGRAPHY,” Sturm writes:

31. Text me snow.
32. Text me Tuesday.
33. Text me the Constitution of Finland.
34. A Basic Guide to Suffering.
35. “I want to fall asleep with you inside of me,” she whispers,
acknowledging how close we are to passing right through each
other.
36. I only vote out of guilt.

I happen to love the list structure of this piece as it reminds me of how Tibetan Buddhists see the world as “not different, not the same.” Similar to this, the numbered items are different; yet, they are all the same, because they are all numbered items. It is this equal weighing however, which mitigates the emotional impact. For example, in 35., Sturm creates a deeply emotional moment in a relationship: “‘I want to fall asleep with you inside of me,’ she whispers, / acknowledging how close we are to passing right through each / other.” There is also a deep feeling of foreshadowed loss there as well. Yet 36. contains what is meant to be an amusement: “I only vote out of guilt.” This juxtaposition almost trivializes the emotion of the item before it. It hides the emotional truth of what is expressed.

Some of the most successful poems in the collection are pieces where the emotional landscape is inverted (felt instead of mouthed). For example, The poem “THE FENCES” consists of nothing but a list of metaphoric fences: “I built a fence out of satellite dishes / and yellow paint I built a fence out of skulls I / built a fence out of my love for you people said it / looked like it would stand forever.” By the end, the list has built to the point that we feel a sense of expansion one often gets with liturgy-like repetition. It reminds me of the implied vastness in the end of Walden Pond, where Thoreau writes, “There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” (Of course, I also acknowledge that an expansion of fences is still about containment.) Other poems with a similar sense of felt vastness are “A BASIC GUIDE TO SUCCESS,” where things in juxtaposition to each other symbolize people in relationships, and “HOW WE LIGHT,” a paean to darkness similar to parts of both Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale,” (Sturm suggests the connection), and Dowland’s melancholic madrigal “Flow, my tears.”

Hugo Ball, the Dadaist writer, once stated, “I want the word where it ends and begins.” This collection, at some level, wants this as well. However, Sturm is also questioning at what level emotional honesty begins in writing and at what level it ends. His answer isn’t always what we expect, though it fascinates us all the same. How We Light offers an interesting foray into the want, need, and hopelessness of love’s imperfect landscape.

***

Hannah Rodabaugh received her MA from Miami University and her MFA from Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School. Her work was included in Flim Forum Press’ anthology: A Sing Economy. Recently, her work has been published or is forthcoming in Defenestration, Used Furniture Review, Palimpsest, Similar:Peaks::, Horse Less Press Review, Drupe Fruits, and Nerve Lantern. Her chapbook, With Words: Verse in Concordance, is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press.