Jen Lambert

[REVIEW] Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts

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pattern
Smoking Glue Gun
46 pages, $8

 

Review by Jen Lambert

 

What’s the word for when you’ve been doing something your whole life, like, let’s say walking, and suddenly you become so very aware of how you do it, maybe you put more weight on your left foot or you land on the balls of your feet just so, and now that you know this, you can never, ever walk the same way again? Now, the way you move is altered, and you can feel it with every step you take. What is the word for what this walking has become? This book is full of this word.

Pattern Exhaustion, by Nate Pritts, is everything I fear, the collapse of what I know and expect and the period after, the fumbling, the tripping through, until the new becomes the known. Maybe it’s everything we all fear: a brokenness, an unraveling of the familiar. Pattern Exhaustion is a manifesto on how to learn to be human when you are already human, or maybe it’s a lesson on the recovery of being too human, a nervous breakdown of the mind and the heart, the softening of everything we know until we don’t even recognize our own bodies, until we are empty, until we ask “how do I love when there is no one there?” Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Nestuary, by Molly Sutton Kiefer

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Nestuary

Ricochet Editions

97 Pages, $15

 

Reviewed by Jen Lambert

 

Reading Molly Sutton Kiefer’s Nestuary is like getting a glimpse into the inner workings of the maternal hive: that sacred colony of sleeping and feeding, the sweet wing beats of purpose and ritual, and those tiny humming bodies. The days are swift and ephemeral, but Sutton Kiefer reminds of the intensity, the warm, buzzing socket where drowsy becomes the new wake state,

This tunnel is my home. Eye-locked, wintered-in.

We build a fire to keep the melt. My body warms to theirs;
I am no longer the tinder but the fire itself.

We nestled in, we shipped, we rode that blue sea…We were mapping
the body and its new workings. Continue reading →

[REVIEW] Intimates and Fools, Poetry by Laura Madeline Wiseman with Art by Sally Deskins

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Intimates and fools

Les Femmes Folles Press

38 pages, $14

 

Review by Jen Lambert

 

One of the things I admire most about poetry is that sometimes what’s not on the page is what’s most important. This vacancy is like an invitation in to the intimate space of self-interpretation, and it speaks volumes about the poet’s trust in her readers.

Intimates and Fools, a collaborative art and poetry book by Laura Madeline Wiseman and Sally Deskins, dedicated to the sometimes complicated female relationship with the bra, is the antithesis of vacant. Deskins’s own art, colorful sketches and body prints, unapologetically splash across the page in bright strokes while Wiseman’s handwritten prose snakes up and around, balancing and accompanying the art. The white space and sparse font that usually turns me on is clearly abused in this collection, but nonetheless, I found myself intrigued. This book required a different kind of poetic experience than which I’ve grown accustomed. It made me want to linger, to touch the page, run my hands across the color and script. It was more of an experience than just interpretation. The poems themselves were artistic, relying on a loopy longhand font, which at first I found distracting, but ultimately I grew to admire its comforting lines, personal and familiar. This collection has been called playful, fun, a “table top” book of color and tongue in cheek commentary on feminism, and while the premise is lively and energetic, even a bit feisty, I think it would be a shame not to recognize its deeply contemplative side as well. While the pages of this collection are full – Deskins’s brushstrokes and Wiseman’s stanzas crowd up against each other on every page – it’s what’s just under the busy surface that’s most appealing: the wildly complex social constructs of female body, and the symbol of the bra as the ultimate carrier of all things female: shame, sexuality, strength. Continue reading →