poetry

[REVIEW] Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine by Nick Francis Potter

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(Driftwood Press, 2022)

Review by Alan Zelenetz

I’m imagining Charles Baudelaire shaking off his signature melancholy and “viewing” his way, for a devilishly delightful hour or so, through Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine, Nick Potter’s new collection of “Comics/Poems” (as it’s category-tagged on the front cover). No question, the nineteenth-century Parisian poet savors his twenty-first-century counterpart’s synesthetic blend of sound-sense-color-image splashing rhythmically across the book’s pages.  And then, just before his return to the past, that sullen Frenchman tenders a nod of approval in fraternal recognition of Potter’s artistic vision. What vision? A dark-humored, offbeat scrutiny of the confounding dread and indecisiveness, the obsessions, hesitations, and foreboding uncertainties that constitute the human experiment on this fragile laboratory planet of ours. Global spleen.

To be clear, Potter is not pretending in this collection to plumb the philosophical depths of our existence, but he certainly is leading us, like anxious surfers at the shores of Teahupoo, towards some monstrously heavy waves.

Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine opens with a pair of erudite epigraphs, mischievously misquoted so that “comics” rise to the manifest aesthetic stratosphere of “music,”  “architecture” and “geometric space.” First alert, we’re to be engaged in serious business here. What follows then is, well, to call it Comics Poetry is eminently fair, but.  Perhaps a tad too easy? Semantically efficient, but.  A bit cautiously genre-neutral? What the product of Potter’s creative process really merits—deservedly so and not for the sake of disruption—is that we tweak tradition and stre-e-etch conventional boundaries, like “Hey, make some room there.” BGJM delivers a combo of words and pictures metaphorically akin to nuclear fusion’s release of energy – so why not just call it what it is, “Sheer Poetry” and leave it at that? Sheer poetry vested in the verbal and visual, a marvelous marriage of past traditions and present day pop culture, of classic conventions and contemporary sensibilities.

In one spot the artwork reminds us of Renaissance sketchbooks, in another of French Fauvism; look over here it’s abstract, over there, representational. At one moment words appear as the integral and distinct elements of speech and meaning that we’d expect from daughters of the alphabet, at another they spring a surprise — fracturing into separate letters consigned to corners, or peeking out from a puddle of

colors, or—in grey calligraphy against grey background— playing hide and seek with us ready or not. Some words and letterstransform themselves into lines of art, improvising as they curlicue over and across comic book panels, challenging us to join all this jazz, to enter these boxes of poetry and endeavor to make sense of what we’re reading and looking at—or what we’re viewing, to attempt a term that might or might not better focus our attention on the graphic design, the fluid blend of text and image on the page.

And the poems we view leave little room for doubt that, all influences considered, we’re not in Da Vinci’s workshop circa 1500 or the Belle Époque studio of Matisse. Why, we’re even a whole century past Krazy Kat’s first comic strip appearance. We’re in the very here and now. Yes, in our own fraught post-aughts, where Potter casts an unerring and apprehensive eye on us humans in an absurd new millennium as we sink or swim to soundtracks by FKA twigs and Phoebe Bridgers.

Welcome to a world where vacationers, “People being who they are,” casually ignore a man who catches on fire, while the one woman who does respond intentionally adds gasoline, to extinguish the man, not the flames. An absurd fable fueled with a mean moral.

In this world, the eponymous Jazz Machine of the book’s title leaves a trail of suffering, chaos, and erasure in its wake, while a building’s infrastructure, rather than providing support, bends and hobbles and collapses into rubble.

Here, guests go missing and the disappearance of “Alvin Dillinger’s Brother” is conveyed by means of a worrying Beckett-like monologue with some wordless panels, several blotted black ink stains, and omnipresent forebodings of death.

As for Domestic Objects and Phenomena? Sinister. They portend Life’s design to fill us with recurrent dread, and they include uncertain dinner plans, dying plants, hidden wires, and threats by mom to sell our creature comfort television set. The unremarkable occasion of going for a haircut becomes a “Maybe” filled with indecision, hesitation, stuttering thoughts, and Kierkegaardian angst, all packed into a grid of claustrophobic rectangular panels better suited to an Excel spreadsheet—that product of dispassionate, dreary binary digits, over and over—than to capturing the relaxed atmosphere of an everywoman enjoying a pleasant talc-scented grooming.

And, yes, in this world, water is for drowning.

Not even an “Interlude” brings relief. In scratchy black and white, it suggests storyboards for the ill-fated fetal creature in David Lynch’s underground film Erasherhead.  And by book’s end, the whole earth’s ecological catalog is reduced to smoke, flood, and cyclone. Despite a momentary hint and tint of some exquisite Japanese woodcut, we face a landscape bereft of animal life and a horizon devoid of any particular promise, fading off into a colorless “Epilogue” in grey and black and white, ovoid and jagged and wormy and flinty and sad.

Many of his themes may be dark, but Potter evidently enjoys plying and playing with the tools of his trade, all those letters and lines, words and crayons and colors and grids, fashioning them into his poetry, at times creating a sort of variation on haiku form.

“WHA/ T  S/ HOULD   WE DO/  A   BO  UT  D  IN NER  ?”

reads across four panels awash in soft lavenders and blues, the words doing double duty as both semantic and graphic elements, the pictures not just sitting there looking pretty but propelling the narrative.

 “A HIDDEN / KNIFE BUTTERS / MY HAND IN /THE LEAVES”

reads another set of panels, florally decorated and channeling the brevity, lyricism, elusiveness and, yes, pressed leaves of Emily Dickinson.

True, piecing together these poems requires a bit of cryptographer’s determination, and patience, but the rewards of penetrating the space of the panels, of “reading” into the Rorschach of Potter’s imagination and solving the puzzles he proffers are payoff enough.

Sure, the world might be a dread-full place. And, of course, we readers will recognize characters and circumstances on these pages all too well, as Taylor Swift intones in another context. Who hasn’t felt fretful at times? Boxed into the corners of an existential crisis? Fearful of an uncontrollable future, whether it be minutes, or months, or a millennium away? And yet, when a true artist interprets, depicts, and shares with us that world, those feelings—well, that, that is a joy-full experience. Such is George Potter’s Big Gorgeous Jazz Machine.

Alan Zelenetz is an East Coast – based  writer and educator whose most recent publication is the collection Kull the Conqueror: The Original Marvel Years Omnibus.

[REVIEW] Ultramarine by Wayne Koestenbaum

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(Nightboat Books, 2022)

REVIEW BY C. FRANCIS FISHER

—

The worst kind of reading can become a tussle for tyranny. It is this sort that turns people off of poetry – the feeling that the poet must shroud something important in complicated diction or syntax, dangling a carrot the reader must work to decipher. In this struggle, both author and reader vie for supremacy. The author obfuscates meaning with symbols or other poetic devices, and the reader penetrates the text, lifts its skirt, revealing its hidden meaning through analysis.

Wayne Koestenbaum’s Ultramarine, the third and final book in his trance poem trilogy, calls into question this struggle between writer and reader, or poses another question altogether. In order to read Ultramarine, one must relinquish control. These deeply personal musings are impenetrable if you try to understand every reference or connect each logical leap. Relatively early on in this 472-page tome Koestenbaum asks, “who dominates? or does / no one dominate? and is / domination not the issue?”

Koestenbaum intervenes into the question of domination by blowing it up completely. One is both completely inside the mind of the writer – as evidenced by lack of explanations, shorthand in place of names and other devices – and completely outside insofar as the text remains opaque to us – for example the first page includes a character denoted by “M” whom we will never know. In exchange for submitting to the tyranny of the text, the reader is endlessly entertained. After all, how many books ask “why isn’t smegma / more frequently discussed?”

The themes of these poems revolve around the body: sex, the performance of gender, alienation. The first poem in the book, “#1 [my prostate is a shopping mall]”  leads with a paradox: “I meant to begin / in Barbra’s voice / but I’m speaking in my / own voice as Ralph Fiennes.” Here, we have a speaker who starts at the point of failure and moves in to the self as persona or performance. From the outset the idea of the atomized self so popular in Western thought is no longer tenable when a speaker declares they speak in their own voice as the voice of another. We are always already influenced by the cultures around us; there is no possibility of purity.

The poem goes on to move through a dizzying array of thoughts before landing on “her discovery / of my cock began / to equal my own / apprehension of its / rumored existence.” The alienation of the self from the body becomes clear and collides with external anxieties: in the mind of the speaker other people talking about his cock is more real than his physical cock itself. The notion of self-formation the first poem offers pivots on an idea of influence.

In “#2 [do-it-yourself-placenta],” we arrive at a completely different manner of constructing the self. Here Koestenbaum offers a self forged through otherness. He writes, “closest companion / is my cough – I hug it.” It is through defect or disability that the self recovers from the alienation the previous poem expressed. What does not work in a normative fashion announces itself, thus bringing the self into the body. Later in the poem, “the turtle beheld / [the speaker’s] inhumanity.” The animal returns the experience of the speaker back to himself, allowing him to be seen the way he feels. These explorations in the ways otherness can behold the self point to the possibility of relationality.

Throughout the text, Koestenbaum returns to the performance of gender. Early on, when the reader is learning how to approach the text, he writes,

never taught

how to shave, a lost scene –

figuring masculinity out

by myself, and I never

figured it out

 Here, masculinity becomes something that must be learned–staged, repeated–rather than an innate quality. He goes on later to return to this scene:

waiting for father

to notice that it was time

for me to start shaving –

he never noticed – I wanted

him to buy me a razor

and shaving cream and teach

me how to use them

Desire meets the performance of gender. The speaker wants his father to acknowledge his burgeoning manhood and commend it by teaching him to become even more masculine. However, if we return to the previous scene, the reader already knows this recognition never happens. Thus, desire and manhood meet in a clash that emasculate the speaker, leaving him without the knowledge to perform his gender in socially normative ways.

Similar moments of confrontation and investigation pervade the text, for example “desire / intensified by talking / to my father.” The speaker sidesteps the incest taboo and Koestenbaum accentuates this reveal by breaking the line between talking and the subject, thus raising the reader’s level of surprise. Not only does Koestenbaum surprise us with content, but also with form. The text incorporates all manner of writing from dreams to factual news. It resists privileging one mode over another. Gossip, too, has a place in this world: “Peter / Hujar’s lover called me a sissy / intellectual, a dying breed.” By flattening the hierarchy between different forms of writing, Koestenbaum queers the form of the book. Further, he questions the idea of owning language. One short passage reads:

I cut hair

for the Shah of Iran,

I had an internationally

known hair salon on

Long Island, please

text me a photo of your

Vermont hot tub

This reads like found language, something said to the speaker, or overheard. By choosing not to place quotation marks around this language, Koestenbaum problematizes the notion of ownership.

Despite the self-interested nature of the journal form, this text brings in themes beyond the personal. Questions of antisemitism and the Holocaust arise throughout the text. “#8 [pumpkin childbirth]” ends “when the pustule / vanishes, a pock remains.” This seems to be a key way of understanding Koestenbaum’s project with history – that which is gone is never truly gone. Rather it leaves scars, wounds, the trace of itself on the body.

One hundred years after publication of “The Waste Land” and its ending invocation of “these fragments I have shored against my ruins,” Koestenbaum reimagines the fragment. If Eliot’s magnum opus is made up of gathered fragments compiled into a dam to protect his life from some external force, Ultramarine attempts “to assemble life from fragments.” A century on, it seems all we have is fragments. They no longer protect us from ruin, rather they are the very thing that makes up our lives.

—

C. Francis Fisher is a poet, translator, and critic based in Brooklyn. She is currently pursuing her MFA at Columbia University. Her writings have appeared or are forthcoming in Asymptote, Pacifica Literary Magazine, and the Columbia Journal among other publications. Her poem, “Self-Portrait at 25” was selected as the winner for the 2021 Academy of American Poets Prize for Columbia University. Currently, she works as the poetry editor for the Columbia Journal.

[REVIEW] Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful by Rohan Chhetri

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(Tupelo Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY HANNAH RIFFELL

—

Rohan Chhetri does not write poems for the faint of heart. Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful is a book divided into four parts, the first of which is titled Katabasis, a word that translates to mean a downhill retreat or a descent into the underworld. True to the word, Chethri opens with a monolithic poem that first evokes a bloody folk story before leading into sharp lament for the poet’s own deceased relatives, a transition that weaves subtle inferences of love into a framework of mortality. If the meaning of Katabasis escaped the reader, this introductory poem ought to be a clear forewarning. This physically slim volume of poetry is an emotionally demanding work of art, as Chhetri turns an unblinking eye towards the violent, death-filled nature of reality and questions how it is possible to live in harmony with and to produce poetry alongside the darkness.

“The King’s Feedery,” as the first poem, contains likewise the first lines of the collection, lines that are jarringly stark. “After the rape and the bloodbath,” writes Chhetri, setting the stage for a panoply of poems about sincere pain, but also signalling that the heart of the book extends beyond the actual rape and bloodbath. While Chhetri rarely shies away from graphic details, Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful seems more attuned to the complexities of the “after.” This is a book concerned with the process of remembering desolation and telling stories about agony.

In the first part of the book, the Katabasis section, Chhetri exposes the brutal nature of reality, dwelling on stories of war and genocide and massacres. In “Lamentation for a Failed Revolution,” Chhetri parallels the corporal and psychological effects of violence with a poetic style of disjointed lines, vivid diction, and spliced paragraphs. The images in this poem are horrific: he writes about a man with “blood sluicing down an eye” as he walks to a pharmacy, about a nurse patching together on a fifteen-year-old boy “a medieval coin-sized chunk of skin fallen off the areola,” about “paint-thick blood on the rained streets.” The poem is exhaustive, spanning five pages and nine stanzas; the story does not come quickly or easily to an end. How could it? There is a haunting character to suffering that does not end when the event itself has culminated, something that Chhetri understands keenly. “They dragged our children’s fathers down to the river/ Held them by the hair, pulled their tongues out of their mouths taut like catgut.” This is a historical trauma, one that will affect not only the tortured fathers but the children who observed and will inherit that trauma.

The poems take on a personal note in the second part, called Locus Amoenus in reference to a literary utopia, and seem to describe an intimate effort at reconciliation, as the poet shoulders the lasting legacy of generational trauma. In “Dissociative Love Poem,” he writes that “We are nothing but/ A sum of our history of shame. Grandfather rising/ from a ditch, blood-washed face bloated purple,/ Single pulse beating behind ear, left to bleed out/ By the man who married his only sister- / That’s as far as we talk about in the family.” This is the voice of a man struggling to live in a world where violence is so prevalent, even though it may not have happened to himself in particular. Even so, while Chhetri frequently writes about the violence-marred past of his grandparents and the unspoken griefs of his parents, he also alludes to a lover, who has presumably died, adding a deeply personal layer of sadness to the poems. Indeed, the third section of the book is named Erato, after the Greek muse of love poetry. In Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, the pain is universal and unique and at all times overwhelming. And yet the words are invariably ornate and powerful, while gruesome at times, sheltered in verses that are appropriately unstructured and free-form. This is one response to tragedy: to frame the tragedy in exquisite language, thereby creating a kind of locus amoenus out of the agony. Chhetri’s poetry, however, challenges this response. Is there truly any way to shape the language of ruin into something permanently beautiful, or is the beauty only found “in transit,” the rest blemished by the reality of death?

There are brief and brilliant moments when the poems reveal a glimpse of beauty. “Bordersong” begins quaintly, deceptively so. “We lived downwind of a bakery,/ butter sesame roasted black cumin.” But it becomes clear that the loveliness of the bakery image is short-lived, as the poem spirals into despair, ending with the line “Downwind blew kerosene & ragsmoke/ in some young martyr’s evening.” It is as if the trauma is inescapable, despite the best efforts of the poet to invoke gorgeousness. Nowhere else in the book is the struggle to move beyond grief more evident, until the third-to-last poem, a pentych entitled “Recrimination Fuge” that a forward-motion is suggested, as the poet manages to refine hope through the simple process of remembering grief.

“Recrimination Fugue” arrives in the fourth and final part of the book, Grief Deer, the name of which derives from the title of one poem and is echoed in the imagery of the closing piece: The ravens calling for the wolves to split/ Open the light from the dead deer’s belly/ Jeweled in the dark purse of its pelt. It is not until this moment in “Mezza Voce” that Chhetri finally admits to the discovery of beauty in spite of horror. “We are each given heaven for brief so heavy./ We put down dance small around it.”

In the confusion of these final lines, there is of course a sense of still being lost and murmurs of woundedness, of still being hurt. But there is also, at the end of the arduous journey that is Lost, Hurt, or in Transit Beautiful, something that truly can be called beautiful, something beautiful that can perhaps be made permanent through poetry.

—

A native of northern Michigan, Hannah Riffell is an upcoming graduate of Calvin University, where she is a Writing major and a member of the Arts Collective. Her poetry has been published in the on-campus creative journal Dialogue, as well as The National Writers Series Journal and the 2018 book Beyond Stewardships: New Approaches to Creation Care. In 2021, she received the Academy of American Poets University and College Prize at Calvin University. She intends to keep writing and reading poetry long after graduation.  

[REVIEW] A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving by Katie Farris

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(BPJ, 2021)

REVIEW BY LISA LOW

—

Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body in its Weaving (A Net) is a short, powerful book chronicling the emotional voyage and struggle to survive of a woman diagnosed with Stage 3 breast cancer at age thirty-seven.  In twenty-six poems told over thirty-seven pages (the entire chapbook can be read in a half an hour), A Net narrates a sequence of events following the announcement of breast cancer: a revelatory phone call; an MRI; getting dressed on the morning of surgery; sitting in the waiting room after surgery; looking in the mirror and seeing a monster without hair or breasts; a desire for sex during chemo; spousal tenderness; a walk in the woods; a conversation with Robert Frost; and the finding, beyond the bodily strength and support of a loving husband, of spiritual strength in Emily Dickinson. Each of the poems illustrates one facet in the complex drama of Farris’ trauma: shock, pain, grief, loneliness, terror, alienation, self-loathing, and joy. Winner of The Beloit Poetry Journal’s 2021 Chad Walsh Chapbook Prize, A Net is as easy to read as a Dick and Jane book. Partly because breast cancer is a common scourge (one in eight women are diagnosed with the disease; eight in eight women fear it); partly because the book is so well written; partly because the book’s purpose is to write “love poems in a burning world,” I doubt many English-speaking humans would put the book down without first finishing it.  Everything, every poem and every moment in every poem, tells the story of Farris’s cancer, making the chapbook a unified and suspenseful, hard to turn-away-from story of a person dancing as fast as she can on the head of a pin called death.

Twin American poet mentors preside over this book, Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman.  In a “Row of Rows” Farris and her husband argue about whether Whitman or Dickinson is the greater epic poet. Farris chooses Whitman in the argument, but Dickinson is clearly the mothering rib from which Farris more naturally springs (“you, the voice, I the faithful echo,” she writes in “Emiloma.”) In the book’s last explosive elated poem—“What Would Root”—Farris finds a home in Whitman. For the most part otherwise, Farris is all Dickinson.  Like Dickinson, Farris is a tiny female (“have you seen me?” Farris writes, “so skinny you could shiv me with me”) whose poetry is also “tiny.” Indeed, Farris’s poems are even shorter and slighter than Dickinson’s. “A Week Before Surgery”—which describes Farris’s mental preparation for surgery (“like Giotto’s angels,” the poem begins, “sketched from his studies / of sheep, I open the jaws of my back to the sky”)—is six lines long.  “Ice for Me” is seven lines long. “The Man You Are the Boy You Are” is nine lines long.

Dickinson’s importance to Farris is apparent not only in stylistic and cultural/biological similarities (brief, hyphenated poems written by a slight, white American female on either side of the twentieth century), but in Farris’s frequent references to Dickinson. Dickinson is the subject of five of the chapbook’s twenty-six poems and she carries three of the book’s titles. Dickinson is Farris’s poetic mentor; she is her spiritual mentor as well. In “Emiloma” the breast-afflicted Farris writes, “Today I placed / your collected poems / over my breast, my heart / knocking fast / on your front cover.” In “Finishing Emily Dickinson” Farris grieves the “loss”—the coming to the end—of Dickinson, for she has finished the Collected Poems (some maybe, like Plath’s, written hastily before her death): “Oh, Emily, goodbye! / We met in April and parted in July.”  But Emily is not gone, for Dickinson’s body is the steeple on Farris’s “Church of Mystery—” and the bonging tongue of her steeple-bell rings “on, beyond.”

The most common character in the book besides Farris herself (whose traumatized subjectivity is explored throughout) and Emily Dickinson, is Farris’s husband (the real life poet Ilya Kaminsky) who figures in the following poems as caretaker and lover: “Why Write Love Poetry in a Burning World?,” “In the Event of My Death,” “The Man You Are the Boy You Are,” “Marriage, An Exercise,” “A Row of Rows,” “An Unexpected Turn of Events,” “If Marriage,” “I Wake to Find You,” and “Against Loss.” These love poems—mid-trauma marriage analyses—comprise a third of the book, or nine of the book’s twenty-seven poems. No sisters, brothers, mothers, or fathers wander these pages. Dickinson, Kaminsky, and Farris herself are the book’s primary characters. They alone are Farris’s guideposts; her rock-solid turn tos in a frightening world.

The poems are full of pain, but they are also funny, reveling in black humor. In “Standing in the Forest of Being Alive” Farris writes: “some of us are still putzes / in death, catching bird shit on our tombstones.”  In “An Unexpected Turn of Events Midway through Chemotherapy,” Farris announces “I’d like some sex please.” In “After the Mastectomy” Farris writes, since it’s hard for a “watchtower” (a mastectomy survivor) to hide, “I go to the world with my tongue out / and my shirt unbuttoned, my keys / in the lock” wearing “a six inch scar instead of a nipple.” Funniest of all, Farris writes in “If Marriage”: “If Marriage is a series / of increasing / intimacies, a slow / sweet collapse into / oneness, I / would still beg / your forgiveness / for asking / your assistance / unwinding that pale hair / from my hemorrhoid.”

Besides being brief (a couple of poems are one sentence stretched into a skinny vertical line), the poems are characterized by occasional rhymes stacked on top of each other (attuned / soon; on / beyond; Lupron shot / in the gut; stone / palindrome) and by the knitting together of image patterns. The image of a braid as a ladder recurs. Farris’ braid, lost in chemo, is the rope she tells her husband to keep, for she will need that braid to let herself down into earth if she dies. The word “puppet” comes and goes. Pain enters Kaminsky’s face “like a hand hunting inside a puppet.” Similarly, the sky “always / has its hand in you / as if you were a puppet.” Another recurring image is of a door. In the book’s prefatory poem, “Why Write Poems in a Burning World,” Farris describes herself as stuck in a wedged-open door that is at once a barrier and a shield. The door signifies the moment of annunciation. In that moment when she learns she has breast cancer, Farris becomes trapped like a fly in amber between innocence and experience, looking by necessity into a terrifying future the end of which she cannot fully see.

A Net ends with a truly spectacular breakthrough love poem, “What Would Root.” In it Farris comes to terms with her death. “What Would Root” differs from the twenty-five poems which precede it, first, because of its length (it is five stanzas of eight unhampered lines; eight Whitmanian ego-bursts, each), and second, because of its unrestrained exuberance. The lines are longer; the emotions less bridled; and there is an acceptance of death-in-earth reminiscent of Walt Whitman who described grass as the “uncut hair of the dead” and who said “look for me under your boot soles.” As if it were an exhilarating dream, the poem describes Farris going into the woods, being among the animals, and becoming eventually a part of the woods. Twigs grow from her eyes, she lies down and feels the hairs on the back of her neck rise, and realizes for the first time they are not hairs but roots and that “everything [is] everything.”  As she lies down, the roots in her skull shift “beneath her own branches” and the top of her head blows off, allowing the tentacles that come from her to root in earth and drink. In this poem Farris relaxes at last and the self affixes itself in a kind of permanence to planet Earth.

The poems hold occasional missed notes and ineffective lines, but mostly Farris captures the essence both of tenderness and terror with a few amazing deft strokes. She steps easily, poem-by-poem, from initial diagnosis; to CT scan; to pre-op prep; to surgery; to post-op doctor visit, to being stared at for breast-less-ness; to moments of comfort with the beloved; to staring at herself transformed in the mirror—hairless and without breasts; to relaxing finally in the book’s spectacular ending. Pinioned by diagnosis in a spot of time, she trains herself to live with this terrifying new reality that cannot be avoided; that must be borne and somehow survived.

To the initiating question—“Why Write Love Poems in a Burning World?”—Farris offers several answers. First, the poems express love, both for her husband and the burning world itself. (In “Against Loss,” Farris says she writes the poems to give Kaminsky memories of her and to memorialize their relationship to one another in the event of her death.) Second, the poems form an emotional “net” or hammock to hold her body as it falls. Third, they teach her how to survive, offering her a vision of “what is not hell in hell”; reminding her that the world is beautiful, whatever her condition, and that she is beautiful, despite what chemotherapy has done to her body. Finally, they leave a legacy. They mark Farris’ presence in this world and provide a boat to ferry her from it. Not unlike Emily Dickinson’s stacks of poems tied in neat ribbons left for those who came after her, these poems are Farris’s legacy, written and organized not at age fifty-five, but at age thirty-seven because that’s when the threat of death came to Farris’s body. 

While modern poetry is often derided as unreadable, readability is one of A Net’s most wonderful features. The poems are metaphorically subtle and emotionally ambitious but they speak plainly. Ted Kooser writes that poetry’s highest calling is to move the reader, to change the readers’s experience of the world. A Net meets that high bar well. (My first reaction on reading the book was to tell my friends who have had breast cancer to read it, immediately!) I defy a reader to not instantly understand and be moved by the book. Ted Kooser also writes that the purpose of poems is to be read, to form bridges; soul-altering connections between poet and reader. Again, Farris’s book fits this bill well. Farris’s very purpose is to connect, probably first and foremost with her husband, knowing that her life and legacy depend upon connection, but also with the common reader. In a world where Farris is doomed to walk alone, even without the hand of her husband, she walks less alone in the presumed understanding of the reader to whom she can tell her deepest secrets and speak her most unspeakable pain.

The inscrutability of modern poetry is notorious, blocking even the most enterprising reader from entry, like a dog at the gates of hell. But Katie Farris’s A Net to Catch My Body In Its Weaving is not inscrutable. Step-by-incisive step, A Net chronicles the stages in a plot of terror until we feel first-hand what it is like to face the loss of everything one lives for: life, love, marriage, and happiness. In A Net we learn what it is like to live beneath the waving scimitar of death and to be forced into hand-to-hand combat with it. Farris comes away from her cancer diagnosis awash in a brutality, different and knowing. We come away different and knowing, too; rewarded by her strength; sunk in that terrifying claw as if it were our own.

—

Lisa Elaine Low’s poetry has appeared in Valparaiso Poetry Review, Green Hills Literary Lantern, American Journal of Poetry, Evening Street Review, Free State Review, Good Works Review, Phoebe, The Potomac Review, Delmarva Review, Broken Plate, and Tusculum among other literary journals. She is co-editor with Anthony Harding of Milton, the Metaphysicals, and Romanticism (Cambridge University Press in 1994). She received her doctorate in English from the University of Massachusetts and spent twenty years as an English professor, teaching at Cornell College; Colby College; and Pace University. Visit her at lisalowwrites.com.

[REVIEW] Phone and Pencil by J. Gordon Faylor

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(Lavendula Books, 2021)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

… I worry about you, puckerdash. You were my favorite

while you lived, and now that I wait until sunset

to congratulate our fathers killed, smokes another

so pearly you lost a car accident image “node” to claw

waiting to light the candles with a triggering glare

you’re crossing the road to post and might find

a common mind eating eggs alone to survive. Empty

pockets. Back readies weekend not that personally,

a master form so long as you keep us real from

dome kin post-address play toms on lock wrestle

when I wait for bad faith morphology graphs a play …

J. Gordon Faylor, Phone and Pencil, p. 67

The cover of this new collection allows the reader to enter the text seamlessly. Brett Goodroad’s Expressionist monotype is reminiscent of an Ernst Ludwig Kirchner painting or, better, of Edvard Munch’s famous artwork, “The Scream.” Angst is the prevalent mood, possibly, symbolizing the human condition, itself—reflecting subjective emotion rather than “the thing itself.” This subjective perspective is woven throughout the text that follows the haunting cover image—including, occasional insertions of referential elements [Gompers; Nina], radically distorting what may be the author’s intended meaning or creating a carefully crafted, indeterminate long poem for the reader’s emotional effect and evoked responses.

Phone and Pencil is the most compelling full-length collection that I have read in recent years, and J. Gordon Faylor proves himself, once again, to be a seasoned writer whose practice has not settled into a predictable style—linguistically, in terms of structure, or with regard to content. His brilliant 2016 novel, Registration Caspar [Ugly Duckling Presse], is a haunting, futuristic tale of a humanoid whose end is near. Faylor, now living on the East Coast, has been called a “Bay Area Beckett.” In addition to writing, he is a museum curator, and, as a publisher and editor [GaussPDF], has highlighted the experimental, often, hybrid, work of seasoned, as well as, early-career artists. Faylor mines the potential of the personal landscape with particular regard for understated, respectful communication with his reader in a way that is, at once, intimate and detached. The rare nod to the lyrical “I” or to overt statements never detracts from the author’s resistance to the literal or the didactic, even though political motivation is a constant undertone throughout his oeuvre.

Indeed, the expressionistic sub-text of Faylor’s new long-poem is, itself, political, the modernist artistic movement, Expressionism, having been a rebuke to Impressionism active on the artistic scene in Europe, more or less, from before WW I to the start of WW II. Phone and Pencil disrupts our understanding of what the mainstream regards as conventional verse, employing “language games” and other innovative compositional features in the service of what is often termed, “associative poetry,” possibly derived from Surrealism’s “automatic writing,” but, crafted with the skills in Faylor’s “toolkit,” an automaticity that has been refined and tempered by an apparent intentionality that, nevertheless, preserves the experiential “flow.”

A good example of the author’s facility with quiet referentiality is Faylor’s use of “Nina” as a repetitive element throughout the text. Nina, the name of cartoonist, Al Hirschfeld’s, daughter, was embedded in many of his drawings as a hidden element or concealed message, not unlike the veiled verbal techniques employed by Faylor that, at once, hide truth and cloud perception. These methods land Phone and Pencil squarely in the domain of postmodern poetry that rejects grand narratives to adopt a tentative and fractured world view. In addition to “Nina,” the collection includes several references to [Samuel] “Gompers,” the famous British-American labor leader active during the late 19th Century to mid-20th Century period.

Like John Ashbery, Faylor’s occasional references to material that the reader may be uninformed about does not interrupt focus—an effect that is very difficult to master. Indeed, once I began reading this book, it sustained my attention in a manner that stimulated my emotions and my intellect. Faylor’s methods of concealment do not deceive or foreclose the receiver [interpreter?]  of the literary composition whose effect is balanced and understated—even though I would speculate that the author’s act of creation must have involved a fair amount of “free-association.” Each word seems to have been carefully selected as a stand-alone, as well as, a companion to other words and phrases. Faylor’s expert use of monosyllabic, “hard” words exposes the hand of a mature poet, enhanced by the characteristic that the composition is not self-conscious or studied.

Other features of Phone and Pencil make this a singular literary experience that all readers of innovative poetry will value. Furthermore, anyone curious about experimental writing will find this volume a stellar vehicle for entering the sub-genre. This brief review is an inadequate introduction to the many techniques employed successfully to create a work that is, at once, accessible and challenging. Among these techniques are repetition; neologisms; infrequent, though, effective use of [apparently] “found” phrases bounded by quotation marks; humor; image; music; rhythm—yielding a text that is cohesive, though, non-formulaic. I am, particularly, struck by a playful conceit that enhances the depth, complexity, anticipation, & enjoyment of the experience—that many phrases and sentences appear, upon first encounter, to be sensible, yet, provide a pleasurable, “Ah, hah!” phenomenon upon realizing that veridical meaning is only apparent. Even if you are not a regular consumer of poetry, I recommend Phone and Pencil enthusiastically. This book deserves a large audience, and any new collection by Faylor is to be celebrated.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA.

[REVIEW] Midwest Gothic by Laura Donnelly

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(Ashland Poetry Press, 2020)

REVIEW BY SALLY SMITS MASTEN

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The intertwining of poetry and gardens has a long history, of course, from the pastorals of Hesiod and Virgil to Wordsworth’s daffodils to Anne Spencer’s famous garden and Mary Oliver’s incantatory natural imagery.  And it isn’t new to say that a poetry collection is like a garden, and yet. 

And yet. Laura Donnelly’s Midwest Gothic is the garden of Eden and of exile, the garden of inheritance and of renewal. Each poem in the collection shows her to be a master gardener, deftly pruning the lines, digging into the hard ground, nurturing delicate images, unearthing what’s buried, replanting seeds of hope after sorrow.  Midwest Gothic is inventive, smart, poignant, delicate, sometimes bitingly funny, celebratory, sorrowful. With skill and sincerity, Donnelly deploys the garden, the world of the garden, in all directions—as metaphor and motif, image and symbol. In the gardens are the threads between generations, the living representation of her mother’s courageous act(s), the illustration of the difficulty of starting over and eventual triumphs, the image of the roots of family and also the burial of ancestors and the burial of secrets.  As Donnelly writes in “Summer,” the book’s final poem, “It was all garden / and it was all not.”

For the first section of the book, Donnelly’s first poem provides a framework and an aim: “I will gather you back.” This first section, then, becomes an unearthing, a recovery, a way of preserving stories and memories and establishing the ground from which the speaker comes.  These poems meditate on inheritance—they revisit graveyards and basements, old homesteads, tangible hand-me-downs, and her great-grandmother’s written account of her childhood.

In the most striking poems, Donnelly draws together the stories of her ancestors with meditative, prayerful language and juxtapositions from the garden: death and glory, rot and beauty, the quotidian and transcendent.  In “Alice at Five Years Old,” for example, Donnelly moves from a single photograph of her great-grandmother’s family on their homestead to a handed-down memory: “Someday, when the girl meets / her mother-in-law / they’ll share a bowl of oatmeal / as if it’s the body of Christ.” The poem concludes with the contrast of death and renewal in language with resonant, sorrowful long O sounds, an incantation and prayer: “Hear us, oh Lord, in our longest day’s / shadow of bones— // the delphinium grows / from her body / in a choir of indigo.” Similarly, in “Primula vulgaris (Primrose)”—even the title drawing together contrasting language—the speaker digs into the difficult work of gardening first, with “compost, manure, / the pulverized feathers of chickens,” and abruptly shifts to the difficult work of living:

Grandmother does not want to leave

her house for the nursing home.

Mother does not want to leave

her house for the divorce.

In the next two stanzas, the speaker continues working through this cycle of death and rebirth, a frost and roots exposed, a struggle to stay alive, the fuchsia’s centers “bright as slits of flame.”  This poem is rooted in earth, in “blood and bone,” dwelling on this symbolic burial of the birds’ “remains.” But just as in the paradox of that word, the poem is insistent on remaining, on staying alive, on growing from these roots.

While individual poems certainly stand out, the particular brilliance of this section—and indeed the whole book—is in its careful arrangement, Just as a gardener understands how to pair plants so that each thrives, these poems resonate with one another, echoing refrains and images to build a story, a full and blooming world, creating layers and depth of meaning.

The second section digs closer to the surface with more intimate meditations on childhood, what was observed, what images remain, what meaning to make now of what happened then.  A particularly striking pair of poems appear almost at the midpoint of the book, “Transplanting the Flowers” and “Garden Vernacular,” and between them, Donnelly creates a shift in momentum.  There is something like an electric current moving between these two poems. “Transplanting the Flowers” is a visceral reflection on the speaker’s mother, returning to her house four months after leaving the house and the speaker’s father; in the imagery and line breaks here, again, is an insistence on thriving in spite of it all, on preserving the inheritance that is a source of life:

What she won’t leave behind:

a poor woman’s dowry, the perennials

separated, transplanted,

passed down.

But the poem’s end is uncertain; the act of transplanting—the perennials, her own family—is filled with suffering: the spade “slices root,” rips and tears, with an unraveling of roots like thread. 

The poem that immediately follows, however, points toward the garden, in its new unlikely place—“strange on a city block”—thriving.  There are “gloriosa daisies between cracks” and “ferns lapping up the dusky shade.” In this poem is the transcendent moment of hope, after all the quotidian and tedious work of living, after the difficulty of separating, of loss. The garden, like the speaker and the reader, find restoration and even magic in the final lines: “It was not unusual to see bear cubs / in that garden. It was not unusual // to see that garden breathe.”

In the third section of the book, Donnelly’s masterpiece is in choosing exactly the right source and exactly the right method; these are “The Secret Garden Erasures.”  Donnelly works with this classic of childhood, makes this inheritance her own, releases, like her mother’s garden, its secrets, and unearths new meaning from it.  In this section, too, are echoes of the previous sections; it becomes a kind of mirror for the speaker, a new way to understand her history.  Here, too, is a breathing garden; here, too, are flowers named and blooming.  It ends, perfectly: “I thought / I could dig somewhere.”

The final section of the book moves beyond the boundaries of the garden, family history, and the speaker’s inheritance; true to the title of one poem, “Theme and Variations,” it keeps contact with its roots, in poems like “Perennial” and “Calendula officinalis (Marigold),” but its tendrils spread outward, in content and form.  Here, there is a pantoum, sparse and musical couplets, layered meditations on summer, the “flesh and saturation” of tomatoes, knives in kitchens and surgeries. And there are more directly confessional poems, contrasting forgiveness with a “bitter twang in [her] throat.”  In an echo of “Garden Vernacular,” the poems now, rather than the garden, tend the speaker’s family secrets, transforming sorrow and anger into sharply drawn images and language.    

Donnelly’s book is an inheritance—of family mythology and secrets, the knowledge and language of gardens, and musical and literary traditions.  In 1972, Adrienne Rich published a review of Eleanor Ross Taylor’s work, noting that her poems “speak of the underground life of women…the woman-writer, the woman in the family, coping, hoarding, preserving, observing, keeping up appearances, seeing through the myths and hypocrisies, nursing the sick, conspiring with sister-women, possessed of a will to survive and to see others survive.”  Donnelly has continued in this tradition, sustaining and nurturing it, and adding her own sheer intelligence, deep reflection, delicate phrasing, sharp imagery, and deft and resonant deployment of metaphor and motif.  The poems dig deep for their thriving roots; they do not shy away from “blood and bone” in the soil and the difficult work of unearthing.  And then, they are carefully placed in the book’s garden plot, and both individually and together, these poems create a flourishing, brilliant collection.

—

Sally Smits Masten’s poems have been published in Crab Orchard Review, The Georgia Review, Smartish Pace, Northwords, The Laurel Review, and other journals.  She earned her MFA in poetry from the University of North Carolina Wilmington and her PhD in American literature from The University of North Carolina at Greensboro.  She currently teaches at Western Governors University.

[REVIEW] Book of Levitations by Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion

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(Trembling Pillow Press, 2020)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

Jenny Sadre-Orafai and Anne Champion’s Book of Levitations is a rare book that delivers on the promises made in the title but also delivers much more. This is a book about spells, ghosts, curses, and even instructions on how to make a voodoo doll, how to resurrect a dissected animal, or how to become a she wolf (“Remember,/you were born howling/with blood on your jowls”).

There is a lot of significance in this collection and the atmosphere the poems create is at once absorbing, mysterious, and enjoyable. There is an enigmatic energy at play here, along with an underlying feminist discourse that jumps off the page from time to time (Praise the girl that learns sewing/to stitch herself back up”). However, the best element in Book of Levitations is that it’s easy to read and—and this is rare for poetry that deals with dark topics even in passing—it’s a lot of fun.  Here’s “Spell for New Homes”:

“Sage, holy water, black salt—

stack these in corners, smear

them in new rooms. Tie down

letters and spoons (from people

you can’t miss back)—they

levitate on full moons.

Tell all insides of cabinets

something good, bright.

Hang one plant in each room

to clean the air.

Don’t let in guests with mud

on their shadows.”

The poems in this book often read like rituals or invitations. They may or may not offer solutions, but at the core of each of them are words that deliver a strong message, once that’s loud and clear if you’re willing to listen. Sadre-Orafai and Champion have a knack for economy of language, and they ensure that they pack as much meaning as possible into each poem in Book of Levitations, none of which is longer than a page.

There are some elements of cohesions that give this collection a tremendous sense of unity. The titles are the first and most obvious one as many of them contain the word “spell.” However, as you read, things like water and death weave in and out of the collection. The same goes with you. Yes, there is a constant shattering of the fourth wall here. These poems are for readers; they’re for you. Some apply only to women, but others are clearly for everyone who reads them. Addressing the reader, adding that you to the poems, makes them much more personal. Yes, these poems are great and fun to read, but something about Sadre-Orafai and Champion talking directly to you makes them linger after turning the last page. In any case, don’t take my word for it; here’s “Spell to Stop Harassment”:

“When he tells you to smile, baby,?

do it, but make sure it cocks like a gun.

Make wind chimes of kitchen knives

and hang them in every doorway.

Find your sachet of baby teeth,

bury them in your cervix, and wait

for them to take root.

When you have a shiny row

of vagina fangs, fling your legs?

open like an umbrella in a thunderstorm.”

We all need a little magic in our lives, and Sadre-Orafai and Champion deliver plenty of it here. Read it.

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] The Bench by Cassondra Windwalker

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(Evening Street Press, 2021)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

A bench is a place to rest or a chapel or a home or a stage. That said, we often don’t notice because when things are normal, a bench is often just a bench. The pandemic changed that just like it changed most interactions. In Cassondra Windwalker’s The Bench, which won the 2020 Helen Kay Chapbook Contest, a bench is a stage in which we see the world, the people that inhabit it, and the new reality they inhabit.

Pandemic poetry. We knew it was coming, but we probably didn’t expect it to be as full of light and keen observations as Windwalker’s collection is. From the start, The Bench is an invitation to sit down, pay attention, and soak in the stories we’re about to witness:

“what does a bench say

?but I know you are tired, I know you are weak,?

rest with me.?

this testament to frailty became a repository of strength

in the stories lived and breathed and told?

on its sagging seat and iron arms.?

sit here and listen.?

take the stories with you when you go.”

Some of the poems here are dark. There’s death and a nursing home, people walking with empty souls and bad thoughts. However, there is also a strange light here. Windwalker is a superb chronicler of everyday humanity, and in the short book we see how human resilience shines, how we push through even when we have no guarantee that the outcome will be positive. Luckily, sometimes that outcome is indeed positive, and when that happens, the universe gives us one more reason to keep trying. For example, two women sit on a bench in “small talk,” and their silent, brief meeting has an effect on them:  

“a month ago, they’d have never acknowledged

each other, but now?

they cling to the trappings of society.?

days spent behind doors, behind walls,

have made this brief intersection?

an oasis. the old woman clutches her prescription

and rises, reluctant to abort this connection.?

she waves good-bye as if they were old friends

now, as if this moment mattered.

the woman in the sugar skull mask goes home

to her empty apartment and does not kill herself.”

These are poems where masks and social distancing make appearances, but they have stories at their core, and the humanity they communicate isn’t dampened or diminished by the awful pandemic that frames the writing and some of the timely topics it tackles (“cops keep killing black people, brown people”). Windwalker has trapped the atmosphere of the early stages of the pandemic perfectly, and her words resonate with what the situation has done to many as people are “urgent and fearful and anguished/as they press to their task and then scurry/back to safety.”

The Bench is full of humanity. It is a dark, heartfelt reminder of a time that’s still here, and it demands to be read because I reminds us that, no matter what, we keep going.

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] By Some Happenstance by Dominic Albanese

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(Poetic Justice Books & Arts, 2019)

REVIEW BY GABINO IGLESIAS

—

“these poems are letters

addressed to whom it may concern

general statements about life

the hereafter

the things that puzzle me

feelings I have

and can’t talk about

not from shame

but from ignorance

or unwillingness”

Those lines, which appear in the second poem of the book, serve as a perfect introduction to Dominic Albanese’s By Some Happenstance. Simple, straightforward, and heartfelt, Albanese’s work does away with any pretentiousness and instead focuses on trying to communicate complicated feelings and thoughts in the easiest way possible. The result is a collection that speaks from the heart directly into your heart.

Albanese’s life beats at the core of his poems. He writes about heartbreak, the memories of the women in his life, fishing, and fixing cars at a garage. He shares flashes of cities he’s visited and thing’s he has done. He talks about what hurts him and how “these words offer the medication/my soul needs to say what I mean.” Luckily for readers, he’s great at saying exactly what he means:

“the sameness of the days

is begging to wear on me

like old shoes, too long kept”

There are two things here that go above and beyond what Albanese puts on the page. The first is an inescapable nostalgia. When Albanese writes abut the river or New York or San Francisco, we feel his need to be there, the way those places and the events that happened there touched him. The second element is darkness. This is a collection about many things, and some of those things include death, living paycheck-to-paycheck, memories of Vietnam, broken relationships, and bad nights. Albanese tackles both things with the same candor, and that makes By Some Happenstance feel more like listening to an old friend that reading a poetry collection.

I first read Albanese’s poetry a few years ago when I read his collection of Vietnam poems Bastards had the Whole Hill Mined. His work stuck with me because it was gritty and brutally honest. It also seemed to be aware of how close we are to death. There is a bit of that here as well, and Albanese—now in his 70s—writes of what’s ahead while also talking about everything that came before, the things he loved, and the bad choices he made.

By Some Happenstance is part biography and part collection of vignettes dressed up as poetry. The economy of language here shows that Albanese cares about communicating effectively and getting as much as he can into a small a space as possible. This is a collection once can easily read in one sitting, but the heart of the poems will stick with readers for a long time after they turn the last page.

—

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic, and professor living in Austin, TX. He is the author of ZERO SAINTS and COYOTE SONGS. You can find him on Twitter at @Gabino_Iglesias.

[REVIEW] Atomizer by Elizabeth Powell

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(LSU Press, 2020)

REVIEW BY NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

—

What’s not in a scent? Fragrance? Perfume? Smells? Or the human condition itself? Elizabeth Powell’s brave new olfactory dispenser of poetry, Atomizer, suggests that what’s not in a scent is a knowledge we are not privy too, despite all our claims to ideation, reason, symbolization and transcendence. We are, instead, beings lashed to immanence, as in the ‘odor,’ as in knowing love is not just knowing the idea and word ‘love,’ but the thing—love— itself. You find out what Galbanum means and does. Through the senses.

It’s easy to fall instantly in addiction with the conceit of Powell’s poems when she writes,  “Indeed, our desire to smell pleasant things is from our lost garden” (4). How can a poet go wrong after such an invocation of Eden as the touchstone of all that is valued and always, forever, lost? Extending the lapsarian conceit, misogyny does smell of lily of the valley (4), or whatever tropical fruit of flower might be at hand depending on where the valley is. The associative quality of words that Powell’s  work relies on, of which syntactic and semantic reason know nothing, repeatedly beg this one question: how can a scent not be perfumed with desire? (19). Moreover, agonistically, the poetic qualities of conjuncture and disjuncture, dissociations, images harboring and hinting at sensibilities—“instamatic photos of oceans I was not invited to”—(19) make instant sense because, of course, all our girlhoods have  lighted knowing girls the way to dusty womanliness. Young bones litter the ocean floor. Reading these poems is like reading the retrospective journals of an old girlfriend, or prophetic letters from their future.

Powell’s poetry works on so many different levels—sensorial, intellectual, psychological, associative, dissociative, feminist, post-feminist, passional, intersubjective, intergenerational and trans-species—but the most intense effect it has is that of poetry in the best sense of unrhymed, unrestrained exclamations and ejaculations that form the ‘base notes’ (4) of ‘love.’ When the poems stop referencing olfaction repeatedly or exclusively as in the section Top Notes, they connect to the Atomizer prologue through the theme of rage (as frustrated love) at the Lesbian Mother emerging  powerfully, insistently, as in the poem titled “Escape”: “How can I make this be a feminist text?/ The oppressed Lesbian Mother should be the hero” (21). There is also ongoing iconoclasm beyond the rejection of the Lesbian Mother in rejecting old white men’s modes of entry into the world of the imagination and the fantastic, as in the reference to The Lion and the Wardrobe on p. 18.

But the ends are linked, the circle is rounded, with the exile from the Lesbian Mother’s household to that of the (presumably straight?) grandmother in whose farm lived “the old cow/Alice, on the urine-soaked hay that gave me a love/For ruinous colognes. For a pillow, Alice’s mighty belly/Where I’d listen to the wisdom of her sacred gurgles/During the milking hour at twilight, the time/Mother’s girlfriend called L’Heure Bleue” (21). And out of the abandonment by Lesbian Mothers that literally results in imprisonment via literal closeting of the young daughter at other times in an impossible urban space with younger siblings—a frightening, un-Edenic, small space—some of the most vivid and terrifying language about distillation, about being bottled like a captured scent, occurs only by fantasies of escape and return to the sheltering grandmother’s dairy farm:

“. . . .  I was here, out on good behavior

To this place my mother hated. Heifers jailed in a pen.

Later, she got another place in the city with her secret wife,

Left us sixty miles away in the old closet. I was in charge,

Used laundry quarters for candy bars for dinner.

She’d come back Tuesday/Thursday nights,

Take us for pizzaburgers. The silence was the gag rule,

For which there was no Heimlich.

She was just mother’s friend.

In an escape room you have to figure out

What in the room is a clue. In college, we talked

for days about Jane Eyre and attics. We played “Clue”

In a lounge with windows. I know how the need

To solve for X starts to influence how you perceive

Reality and the resulting adrenaline can be fabulous.

Why look for places to escape from? The room is not

A puzzle, it is a container for the puzzle. Back at the closet,

I was a glass bottle of distilled silence

In an ornate box made of Lavender Scare. My mother

And her girlfriend never abandoned their city apartment

Until they were carried out on long white stretchers

Where their bodies continued to hold that silence

Like a library. And after a long time, I saw free children

In the park playing with their two mothers, marching in freedom

Parades, and I cried. And the vacuumed silence in my head popped.

And one day a window in my heart opened, and I crawled out” (21-22).

Easily some of the richest, explosive, irradiated language about mis-parenting that can be imagined, this is also Powell’s haunting stare at the bomb-blasted ground of womanhood and motherhood as a noxious container, an atomizer, within patriarchy. That container gives off the stench of abuse stored in smaller containers like the ‘Matryoshka girl daemon’ (2) layered within it and called patriarchy, mother, closet, daughter, heifer, haystack, grass, and lastly the essential hidden and minute flower or herb in nature that, distilled and atomized, stands olfactory testament to the idea of ‘essence’ as often manipulated, boxed in, tactically and unscrupulously ‘dispensed,’ as perhaps in a certain narrative of feminist liberation long hailed as the best kind.

Being haunted by boxes and closets—little spaces—continues into “E.Diptych,” where men and potential ‘matches” live in “little” or “Magical” boxes (24), the box reference being, of course, to digital social interfaces like computer and phone screens, but also to the haunting states of isolation in apparent connectivity the ‘social’ interfaces are known to inspire: feelings of being ‘boxed in,’ ‘closeted,’ and ‘distilled’ to an unbearable yet unavoidable nostalgic memory of immediacy as ‘Olfaction’ (2), so phonetically akin to ‘old-fashioned’! The news out of televisions—boxes—sickens and haunts too: “The television is a liquor cabinet to which we will retreat/ after dinner. Change the channel, change your liquor:/ beer before liquor never sicker” (26). And the tyranny of ‘The TV’ is almost as bad as the tyranny of the Lesbian mother who just wants, needs, away, away, away (“The Box”). Indeed, “The Box” is dedicated to “The TV,” which appears forty-six times over 2 pages, not counting minor avatars, laying bare the enchantment with incantations that keeps society and children and women from not vanishing into the TV, the Box (and the boxes within the Box).

The images, conceits, cocktails and fusions uncontained in Powell’s Atomizer are elusive, nebulous and polymorphous—like scent, perfume, smell, odor, stench—but the overall assault of her language on the reader’s senses is to harness an arousal latent in a repressed cross-sensory spectrum revealing the world as ‘objectified’ and ‘commodified’ across a panorama and panoply of not one but many senses and sensoria, making ‘truth’ salvageable from not the triumphal achievement but the unstoppable “desire to smell pleasant things” which is “from our lost garden” (emphasis mine; 4). Though feminist and femino-centric, Powell’s poetry has transcended the boxing of words into political categories and schemas, opting instead for the explosive unmanageability, the smoky ‘perfume’ (‘second-hand smoke’ as in ‘per’ or ‘through’ and ‘fumus’ or ‘smoke’) of the human condition, and of poetry, whereby “We ingest each other through our nostrils” “86,400 times a day” (30).

—

Nandini Bhattacharya is a Writer and Professor of English at Texas A&M University. Her fields of expertise are South Asia Studies, Indian Cinema, Postcolonial Studies and Colonial Discourse Analysis, Women’s Studies, and Creative Writing. She has published three scholarly books on these subjects, the latest being Hindi Cinema: Repeating the Subject (Routledge 2012). Her first novel Love’s Gardenwas published in October 2020. Shorter work has been published or will be in Oyster River Pages, Sky Island Journal, the Saturday Evening Post Best Short Stories from the Great American Fiction Contest Anthology 2021, the Good Cop/Bad Cop Anthology (Flowersong Press, 2021), Funny Pearls, The Bombay Review, Meat for Tea: the Valley Review, The Bangalore Review, PANK,and more. She has attended the Bread Loaf Writers’ Workshop and been accepted for residencies at the Vermont Studio Center and VONA. Her awards include first runner-up for the Los Angeles Review Flash Fiction contest (2017-2018), long-listed for the Disquiet International Literary Prize (2019 and 2020), and Honorable Mention for the Saturday Evening Post Great American Stories Contest, 2021. She’s currently working on a scholarly monograph about how colonialism and capitalism continue to shape India’s cultural production, and a second novel titled Homeland Blues, about love, caste, colorism, and violent religious fundamentalism in India, and racism and xenophobia in post-Donald Trump America. She lives outside Houston. You can find her on Amazon, Twitter; Instagram, Facebook and her Blog.