[REVIEW] Interrobang, by Jessica Piazza

69 pages, $17.95

Review by Laura Kochman

I hadn’t heard the term “interrobang” before encountering Jessica Piazza’s first collection, Interrobang. Without knowing, it sounds aggressive, or accusatory. It’s a typographical character combining the exclamation point and the question mark, excitement and question, or excitement and disbelief. Two not-opposites made composite, an uncommon ligature. It’s fallen out of usage in favor of a separate exclamation point and question mark, maybe because we are prone these days to the simpler characters preprogrammed in our word processors and text-messaging apps, maybe because we are less inclined to examine the site of overlap. Tying two things together is complicated. Interrobang embarks on that kind of examination, looking more closely at pairings and opposites. All but three of the poems are named after either a phobia or a philia, though there isn’t much tonal difference between the two poem types. Most are sonnets or variations on the sonnet form. Fear and love aren’t so far-flung.

The book is full of pairs—couplets and rhymes at the language level, places and people at the level of narrative, specifically Texas and New York and a certain pair of lovers. Piazza doesn’t follow a hard narrative line in Interrobang, but the narrative of a particular failed relationship is present throughout. The first line of the first poem, “Melophobia,” begins: “They’ll tell you that there are only two ways: flawed / windpipes that knock like water mains behind // thin walls or else a lovely sound like wood- / winds sanded smooth—no middle ground.” We’re set up to think about pairing and sound, and the question of the absolute, all prep work for the second poem, a crown of sonnets in which the speaker continues to make the same mistakes in a romantic relationship. This pair, the speaker and the Lover, also appear in the phobia/philia poems but gets the deepest examination in “People Like Us” and “The Prolific,” the first two sonnet crowns that appear at the beginning and the midpoint—like traditional sonnet crowns, they are linked by their repeated final and first lines, a sequence of sonnets that loops back around to its beginning. I start to wonder about the sonnet.

There’s more than one way to define the sonnet, but I like to think of it as a small thing, an address from one to another, the I to the lover. When it appears, I want to know why a writer has chosen it. Interrobang moves almost entirely through the sonnet, invoking it continuously, and I begin to think of the sonnet form as a kind of interrobang, a connector between the I and the other, a ligature for love and/or fear. What is so pleasing about the typographic figure? It’s the balance of space, the emptiness carved out above its opposite, the pointed period. It makes me think about the relationship between silence and noise, and then I realize I’m thinking about this relationship because the book itself has led me here.

In “What I Hold,” the last sonnet crown, the second section ends: “Without the skips, the beat would not exist. / My hand grasps nothing and still forms a fist.” Piazza has used the relationship narrative as a backbone, as a venue for discussion of so many opposites, but at the end here we still return to sound and space. The sonnet is a kind of fist—a dense mass to fill a void, a voice reaching out. Piazza’s sonnet is a love song to language, noise, volume, and their opposites, without which they wouldn’t exist. Interrobang is full of so much rhyme and homonymic play, like “Ankylophobia,” fear of the immobility of a joint, opening,

Locked here, I’m loch-jawed: a Nessie of
tetanus. Unhook me, unhinge me, this
liquid imprisonment. Taciturn
elbow, mulish talocrural, my
most stubborn joint is submerged in your
tallow. This candle, this window…

We move from locks to doors to prisons to a literal ankle (“talocrural”) that calls back to the title to a candle that becomes a window. That movement through and creation of space is possible through rhyme. The overlapping space is abuzz with the tension, and it’s both satisfying and stimulating.

***

Laura Kochman currently lives, writes, and feeds her cat in Philadelphia. Her chapbook, Future Skirt, was released from dancing girl press in 2013. She is an assistant editor for Coconut Magazine, and received her MFA in creative writing from the University of Alabama. Her work is found or forthcoming from The Atlas Review, Parcel, Sink Review, TYPO, and others.