[REVIEW] Navigational Clouds, by Alina Gregorian

30 pages, $10

Review by Anaïs Duplan

“apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist”

– Inger Christensen, Alphabet (1981)

It’s difficult to know how to begin to speak about Alina Gregorian’s Navigational Clouds. Each of the thirty poems is, in itself, both a diagram of waking life and a personified map of America. “Unlike the snowstorm in Arkansas, nothing seems wrong with my teeth. But the world is strange” (“Atlas”). Over the course of the collection, Gregorian acts as our cartographer, acutely illustrating what it means to search, perhaps desperately, for some direction, for some sense of purpose in largely uncharted territory. Fragmented, enigmatic and yet logical, Navigational Clouds demands that anyone who dares traverse its landscape learn the lay of the land. In other words, it would seem that the only way to talk about Gregorian’s chapbook would be to mimic the diagrammatic quality of the writing itself.

I. The Cartographer

Gregorian’s speakers are often distanced and aloof, but not for ignorance. Instead, her speakers embody some unnamable coordinate at the epicenter of wisdom, ennui, and skepticism. In “Everything is Happening,” the speaker states, “If everything is the way it could be, then nothing would get done around here.” This particular poem is important. If Navigational Clouds is an ongoing experience of ‘shared attention’ – the readers’ gaze is directed in whichever direction the cartographer chooses – then “Everything is Happening” is pivotal because it widens our focus from a singular incident or place to the global, the universal. A poem like “Untitled,” for example, feels much more microscopic: “You are a daisy pinned to my lapel,” and we spend much of Navigational Clouds reflecting on the minute, just as we do here.

Conversely, “Everything is Happening” is the answer to the question: What happens when, as an individual, you become aware of all the workings of the world simultaneously? Gregorian, of course, doesn’t purport to know but instead posits the answer by writing-into-existence a series of speakers who demonstrate a calm, omniscient reserve. “I knew about your April, but I didn’t say why.” In the cartographer’s mind, there is more power in not-saying than in saying – so that the very idea of interaction is always deprived of its essential mystery: the problem of other minds simply ceases to exist.

II. The Topography of the Interpersonal

The interactions in Gregorian’s poems feel delightfully bemusing. “We have slipped unawares out of the economic field of psychology. Freud said. So many absurdities to keep track of, how do you manage. I said” (“This Can Be My Habitat”). The dialogue is often grim and irreverent, carrying on with a logic of its own – a logic which is only available to the interactants themselves. And it is in this part of my own diagram that, ironically, I stumble. Any reader of Navigational Clouds, I imagine, would agree that the collection deals, in large part, with intimacy (whether it be the fear of intimacy, misplaced intimacy, or simply the desire to understand intimacy) – and yet, Gregorian-as-cartographer doesn’t broach the topic directly. Instead, we come to understand what intimacy means through the cartographer herself, through landscape, and through our dreams.

III. The Great American Contour

Cartographer of the American dreamscape, Gregorian simultaneously nourishes a sense of place while at the same time eschewing it. The names of the United States set the stage for a series of unanticipated interpersonal interactions. “We crossed a border. The people of Maine asked about our favorite molecule” (“Happiness in a Triangle”). And in that way the science of landscape becomes inextricable with the sciences of the body and of intimacy. After all, our very reason for traveling across America is to carry out a set of impossible missions. “I want to place a bucket of affection / on your doorstep. I want to walk / around the galaxy twelve times” (“Boise”).

IV. The Diagram of Memory (the Memory of Diagram)

As we travel from Kansas to Utah to Idaho, we also travel through memory – yet, we do this from the viewpoint of a speaker who is at once removed from the space and time she describes (or circumscribes). The speaker’s voice is decidedly retrospective rather than forward-looking, and in that way, the scope of mapped places is limited to the once-inhabited. “As for me, 1927 began again. For you, there is winter enough to spare. Especially the afternoon starts to remember a remnant of our former selves” (“A Winter’s Tale”). These are maps of tracks once lain. Yet memory is not set in stone. Just as the memory trace (the engram) is permanently modified each time we recall a memory, so too do the speaker’s memories seem to transfigure each time she recalls them. Even within the course of a single sentence, our world is subject to transmute. “Knowing is a kind of being which states / that you and me times three equals: / a hammer fell out of the sky” (“Mathematics of Our Generation”). This lends at times a grander quality to Gregorian’s speaker – an omnipotence – and at other times, a smallness and specificity – so that even our guide, our cartographer, morphs along with the ever-morphing landscape. But of course. Navigational clouds: how could those amorphous sky-ghosts provide, of all things, orientation? Perhaps the point is just that very fact: they cannot.

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Anaïs Duplan is the curator and founder of The Spacesuits, a network of Afrofuturist artists and musicians. Her writing has appeared in publications such as Hyperallergic, Phantom Limb, Birdfeast, and others. She is a music writer for No Fear of Pop and Decoder Magazine and is currently an MFA student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.