poetry

[REVIEW] Lima : : Limón by Natalie Scenters-Zapico

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(Copper Canyon Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

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One only needs to look at the current debate regarding reproductive rights in various state chambers across this country to see that there are still political parties and groups that want to limit the legal and social rights and privileges of women, convinced the gap that exists between them and their male counterparts need not be closed. It’s a tiresome fact, and how we as a society view the female body leaves politicians, pundits, and those closest to us with no shortage of opinions. If, however, we believe that literature has the power to spark change, then we must also believe that it acts as a tool to help curate a history we want to leave for future generations, especially if certain narratives don’t align with the realities of marginalized and underrepresented voices. Natalie Scenters-Zapico’s Lima::Limón is not just a collection of poetry, but a conversation that seeks to explore gender roles, machismo, and the figurative and literal borders that simultaneously constrain and liberate the body and its desires.

The collection begins as a snapshot of innocence, with the speaker of the poem “Lima:: Limón: Infancia” explaining that she “wants to be the lemons in the bowl/on the cover of the magazine.” This picturesque image doesn’t last long, however, and three poems later, the speaker is in a completely differently situation, devoid of any still-life serenity.

I lie on my back in the grass & let the weight

of a man on top of me. Out of breath, he searches

for a place on my body that hasn’t flooded.

The only dry patch left is my hair, which he uses

to wipe the sweat from his face. He is disgusted

because I have turned the earth beneath us

damp. He says I am an experience, like standing

in an irrigated grove of lemon trees.

The “man” here, both a specific man and a composite of other men, is dissatisfied with the body in front of him, searching for what hasn’t already be explored and occupied. It sounds harsh using such terms, but that discomfort is what Scenters-Zapico is pushing us toward, and it doesn’t relent when the man says that the speaker’s “moisture/brings mold & [her] body is nauseating.” The image of the lemon enters near the end of the poem, but we are no longer seeing it in the same light as earlier. What was once a symbol of opportunity and tranquility is now an object that is processed for someone else’s pleasure and consumption.

Although the occurrence above might seem mutual (even though there are hints that it is anything but), the speaker, at other times, must ward off men who believe that anything can be bought.

My landscape of curves & edges

that breaks light spectral

 

is not for sale, but men still knock

on rib after rib, stalking the perfect house –

There is a violence here, and that desire to invade and claim the female body, as if it were real estate, is prevalent throughout. Often times, it’s implicit–a husband criticizing his wife for attempting to surprise him for his birthday by jumping out of a cake; a woman laughing at jokes at her own expense in order to maintain a “porcelain doll” image in her household–but there are poems when this violence is visible, and none other is more direct than “More Than One Man Has Reached Up My Skirt.” The speaker recognizes that she has given up protesting not only the act from which the poem takes its title, but other things: catcalling, being seen exclusively as a servant, and even the guilt that comes with having to resort to an abortion. Despite this, the speaker finds herself “lucky” due to the fact that “other girls/work in maquilas” or “work in brothels” or “are found/wearing clothes/that don’t belong to them, or no/clothes at all” or “are found/with puta/written in blood across/their broken bellies.” The speaker, remembering a conversation with her mother and how she used to cover her eyes when they encountered girls working the corner, states that yes, she is “very lucky,” but whether she believes it is a different question entirely. How can a woman truly claim prosperity when the social, economic, and legal forces that govern what women can and cannot do are consistently acting upon her? The answer obviously is that she can’t, since institutions, although favorable to certain races and classes of women, are still a part of the patriarchy, one that actively seeks to control how much “luck” women have in their everyday lives.

It’s ironic that after various violent encounters, the man in certain poems returns to the speaker, unwilling to leave her for fear – we can assume – of being lonely, being emasculated, and of completely breaking who they feel is their right to control. In the poem “Notes on My Present: A Contrapuntal,” the speaker so aptly questions, “How do you write about the violence/ of every man you’ve ever loved?” This is not easy to answer, but Scenters-Zapico has found a way, and it’s fitting that one of the last poems of the collection ends with a mother detailing her advice to her daughters, hoping, perhaps, that she can prepared them enough to not ever have to ask such a question. She warns about police, about taking an exam without a social security number, about men who want to hurt them just for the sake of seeing them suffer, and emphasizes that despite all that life throws their way, they have “good bones/ for hard work” and shouldn’t be ashamed, just as we as readers shouldn’t be either, to try to “make this place beautiful.” Scenters-Zapico has offered us something to help with that; we in turn must do our part to continue unveiling the cruel reality marginalized women face, and bring it to the forefront of conversations we have on how to leave the world better than we found it.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[TINY REVIEWS] Esteban Rodriguez on feast gently by G.C. Waldrep, American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan, and Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner

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When Gabino Iglesias approached me with the idea to write a poetry column for PANK, there was absolutely no doubt that I was on board. Immediately, I sorted through the pile of books I was reading, picked three and began writing. My aim here, and of the column as a whole, is not to provide traditional reviews, but rather short overviews that will hopefully engage future readers to poetry collections they might enjoy. I won’t guarantee that the collections chosen will always be recent (published within the past year or so), since poetry and certain books are, after all (and excuse the cliché here) timeless. Nevertheless, for this first installment, I chose three fairly recent collections that embody today’s social, political, and spiritual landscape. They have cemented their place in the literary world not only by being awarded the William Carlos Williams Award, or the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, or the National Jewish Book Award in Poetry, but by being books that one can return to, as I often found myself doing when writing about them. Let’s hope you find as much enjoyment in these works as I know I did. Cheers!

feast gently by G.C. Waldrep (Tupelo Press)

In his sixth collection, G.C. Waldrep explores the tensions and harmonies between the body and spirit, presenting poems that are both beautiful and devastatingly urgent. Like his previous collections, Waldrep interweaves the universal with the personal, writing in a manner that is philosophical, spiritual, and conversational all at once. The seventh anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan provides a meditation on language and its shortcomings. A real-life funeral expands on the role chance plays in one’s death, and how God reveals secrets we are only briefly privy to. Other poems read like fables (“To the Embalmers” immediately comes to mind), and we are left witnessing the tragedies and daily miracles of the world feast gently so skillfully depicts. Waldrep’s poetry is at times demanding, but if given the right amount of care and attention, you’ll find that you are all the better, and wiser, for it.

 

American Radiance by Luisa Muradyan (University of Nebraska Press)

Winner of the 2017 Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry, Luisa Muradyan’s American Radiance reflects the complexities of the immigrant experience, and, through humor, pop culture allusions, and lyrical playfulness, highlights the exodus from one’s homeland and what it means to assimilate in America. Muradyan’s poems are not only concise, but funny, drawing on a plethora of figures (Prince, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Bruce Willis, Macho Man Randy Savage) that guide us through moments that are nostalgic, bittersweet, and at times utterly heartbreaking. Muradyan’s juxtapositions are clever and surprising, and with poems like “We Were Cosmonauts” (which narrates the speaker’s journey from Moscow to the U.S., while drawing comparisons to a game of Tetris), we see her poetic range, and see how moving a collection can be when it combines humor, history, folklore, and experiences so many can relate to.

Holy Moly Carry Me by Erika Meitner (BOA Editions, Ltd.)

In her fifth collection, Erika Meitner wrestles with the anxieties of modern-day suburbia. Holy Moly Carry Me is an outstanding and relevant collection that never shies away from exposing the tensions one faces in America, detailing, for example, what it means to be a mother raising a white son and black son in today’s political climate, or what it means to live in a region of the U.S. (Appalachia) not fully understood by others. Meitner has the ability to use seemingly unremarkable moments, such as a trip to the Dollar General, to examine relationships, identity, gun violence, teacher salaries, the middle class, poverty, and the responsibility to ponder these questions from a place of relative privilege. This collection is a testament that the mundane isn’t ever truly mundane, and that when it comes to our societal structures and the way in which they influence our behavior, there is always room to explore the truths that lie beneath the surface.

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Esteban Rodríguez is the author of Dusk & Dust, forthcoming from Hub City Press (September 2019). His poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Arts & Letters, The Gettysburg Review, New England Review, Puerto del Sol, Shenandoah, TriQuarterly, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. He lives with his family and teaches in Austin, Texas.

[REVIEW] road, road, road, road, road by M; Margo

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(MA Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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M; Margo (Margo Emm), Editor of the online poetry journal, Zoomoozophone Review, identifies as “transgender” and “non-binary.” I have called them a poet of angst, because of their penchant for dark ruminations about “gender dysphoria” and life, in general. road, road, road, road, road (hereafter, “road”) is their fourth collection of innovative poetry in a conceptual mode whereby precise rules were determined in advance, fixing structure and form. According to Margo, “road is a book of chance-based texts, comprising random wikipedia clusters.” Each “text” includes 50 words, and the collection includes 50 poems.

I have followed their career as a poet and musician since first encountering their writing which is characterized by skillful use of repetition, “psychological transformations,” metaphor, innovations of form and hybridity, as well as, creative manipulation of embedded meanings. For example, road‘s reliance upon the numbers 5 [pertaining to one’s love life or to human anatomy] and 50 [seeking personal and spiritual freedom] invoke a concern for the subjective, as well as, for mathematics and formal operations [e.g., a random numbers device], and the number 5 is fundamental to our base-10 numerical system. Thus, in one “text,”

 

“five menfolk murdered in /

addition     five     suffering /

half-finished facsimile of /

the    groove     a     powerful /

slapdash botanist altogether /

his     lifecycle,     also     a /

longtime     fellow     of     the /

Normal  Times  gone  by…”

 

Furthermore, in addition to repeating the word, “road,” five times in the collection’s title, Margo is most likely calling the reader’s attention to one of the word’s dictionary meanings—“a series of events or a course of action leading to a particular outcome,” a perspective that they no doubt intend to challenge by using statistical probability to compose his 50 “texts.” This bold point of view is reminiscent of Geert Buelens’ comment concerning the “constructed nature” of contemporary poetry that employs “smart, rich, and didactic language.” In addition to possessing these features, however, Margo’s “texts” in road extend traditional definitions of what we mean by “poetry,” and Kenneth Goldsmith, as well as, others, have asked, without agreed-upon answers: “What does it take to be a poet in the Internet Age?”

The first page of road includes an “Author’s Note” entailing 5 statements. The author’s notes delimit and bound the collection, preventing the randomized “texts” from sinking to the levels of nihilism, mimicry,  or gratuity. Indeed, as Marjorie Perloff has stated about “conceptual” poetry, what may appear random or undirected is, in the hands of a skilled craftsperson, work borne of intentionality, choice, and forethought. The first note states: “The road is a literary form that is similar to a poem but not quite the same as a poem.” Paraphrasing Marcel Duchamp, “It is not a poem; it is an idea of a poem.” One would like to know more about Margo’s views concerning what constitutes poetry, particularly, in a literary climate with increasingly blurred boundaries between poetry and prose, indeed, poetry and anything else [e.g., see Flarf, “epic” poetry, L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, internet poetry, vispo, and other experimental forms].

Note 2 states: “The road is a fifty-word text-collage produced by means of chance operation.” Importantly, though, as Goldsmith has pointed out, most literary formulations require a human “hand” at some point in any process, even if random-order machines or tables determine final results [Is there ever a “final result?”]. Perloff has said of “collage” poetry, “Each element in the collage has a kind of double function: it refers to an external reality even as its compositional thrust is to undercut the very referentiality it seems to assert.” Thus, parts of a collage are juxtaposed in relation to others—and the juxtaposition may be “chance-based” or not. Each of Margo’s “texts” may be viewed as a whole, as well as, as a pastiche of discrete units, both with [or, as Margo will point out below, with and/or without] significance to the reader. Thus, “Physical     model     of     a / bacterial     flagellum     is / expressed (hence the season, / first at Pocono Raceway and / tenth at the track for teams / not being allowed to run….” The author’s incorporation of white spaces not only slows the reader’s motion across words, but, also, inserts a visual component, and Ulla Dydo has discussed “visuality” in relation to the poetry of Gertrude Stein.

Margo’s Note 3 asserts that, “The road is a semantic pathway leading to no particular semantic destination.” The author’s “texts,” then, are not goal-directed, contrary to the dictionary definition quoted above, bringing to mind the roles of luck and chance in anyone’s life. There are limits to intentionality and choice, echoing the ongoing scientific debate about the validity of “free-will.” Goldsmith has written that a feature of some experimental works is to be, at the same time, “unboring” and “boring” and that writers need to “re-imagine our normative relationship to language,” a process certainly performed when Margo’s methodology produces lines such as, “(arrowheads and hammering / devices) km team event New / York at the age of 79,….” Goldsmith has, also, said, “We need to employ a strategy of opposites: defamiliarization and disorientation.”—a good description of the effects produced by Margo’s “texts,” in which the author defamiliarizes our common notions about what a poem is and disorients the reader-viewer so that they are unable to make those assumptions.

“The road is not necessarily asemic nor exactly pansemic, but perhaps post-semic.” is Margo’s fourth note. Again, they emphasize that the texts are random but not, actually, random at all. There is, then, “method” to “madness,” and a domain exists beyond physical and material formulations of reality [i.e., according to mathematics, events-in-the-world cannot be random and non-random at the same time], referring back to the numerical symbolism of #50 presented above.

Note 5, “The road is something that can be read or not.” reflects a topic commonly discussed by Goldsmith relative to “conceptual” writing. He has pointed out, “Conceptual writing is a type of writing that doesn’t require a readership.” He goes on to say that unread writing is characterized by “illegibility” that disrupts the normal reading process. I understand these pronouncements to mean, in part, that language, as conventionally understood, can be re-arranged in ways that make a text [sic] un-knowable, thus, in some sense, un-readable. Such manifestations of phonemes, graphemes, and morphemes render some experimental texts, essentially, unreal and inaccessible.

What, ultimately, is “post-semic” or, even, post-conceptual writing? Are we necessarily blurring distinctions between the written word and visual art? Are we inventing “texts” comparable to Kazimir Malevich’s revolutionary black paintings, creating literature’s own version of Suprematism—moving as far away as possible from the representational and the objective—the expected, the learned, the social, the “normal—toward the numerical 50?”  Wherever these inventions take us, I suspect that Margo will be at the forefront of innovation. Every reader-viewer who appreciates, or is curious about, experimental literature, however defined, will want to read road, road, road, road, road, as well as, Margo’s past and future work.

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Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD (USA). In 2019, GaussPDF published her collection, Poems for Rachel Dolezal.

[REVIEW] Songs of the Sun Amor by Wade Stevenson

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(BlazeVOX Books, 2019)

REVIEW BY NETTIE FARRIS 

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As indicated by its title, Songs of the Sun Amor, by Wade Stevenson, is a full-length collection of poetry about love. Stevenson is the author of the memoir One Time in Paris, and two collections of poetry subtitled “A Memoir with Poems.” Understandably, this collection appears to be autobiographical, yet not, necessarily, confessional.

Mother and father appear frequently in this collection, which opens with the poem “About My Mother.” This poem is followed by “The Map of Elsewhere,” which begins: “My mother sat on a wheelchair.” Later in this poem, we hear: “No mother to me, a mother in name, never caught in the act.” We hear also: “Then my father got mad, venting his fury.” The poem ends: “I discovered love in strange places / Real Amor was on the map of elsewhere.”

The love sought in this collection seems to be a supreme love. Something beyond the realm of inadequate parents.

My favorite poem is, perhaps,  “My Teddy Bear.” This poem is about forgetting the past. Living in the present:

A long time ago I lost my teddy bear

Today my white dog barks

To tell me that he’s hungry

Why is the past so difficult to bear?

Why can’t I just exist

Feed the dog, breathe with my breath,

Disinvite the starving guests of ghosts

Exhale, say with simple thanks

Life is good and that’s enough?

Similarly, “Sun, No Son” imagines a new beginning:

If by chance or luck I could be born again,

Emerge another, to learn to love again

I’d seek to become one with God’s eye, the Sun

However, we see glimpses of the beyond, which is the amalgam of opposites:

God, when you find Him,

You’re stunned

To find out

He’s smaller

Than you ever imagined

Bigger

Than you ever thought possible.

When we add opposites, the sum is infinity, as exhibited by “When You Die”:

When you die

You’ll never be lonely

Because you’ll die with the best

Friends and lovers you had

And all those you did not

Meantime, “There is no ordinary, every Amor is extraordinary.”

These are poems about forgetting our past injustices, living in the present, and looking forward to the infinite love beyond this life; for, as we learn from the conclusion to “Promise of the After”: “God’s blow will finish my body hard as a hammer.”

In Songs of the Sun Amor, Stevenson demonstrates an affinity with verbs and occasional rhyme. But most important, he demonstrates an affinity for coherence. This collection is truly a series of lyrical poems that tell a significant story.

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Nettie Farris is the author of three chapbooks of poetry: Communion, Fat Crayons, and The Wendy Bird Poems. She is the former reviewer for Blue Lyra Review‘s Spotlight on a Press feature, and has published numerous reference articles for Salem Press, including micro biographies of 100 world poets. Her essay on Lydia Davis appeared in the Journal of Kentucky Studies and her peer-reviewed article on William Faulkner’s Sanctuary appeared in the Kentucky Philological Review.

 

[REVIEW] musk (musca\muscus\mus) by s. maynard

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

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“[Elon] Musk holds a substantial monopoly on the contemporary gaze.” s. maynard, musk (musca\muscus\mus)

Stella Maynard is a writer in their early 20s living in Australia, “interested in attending to things that sit at the intersection of gender, queerness, technology, the law and desire.” Their pamphlet, musk (musca\muscus\mus), a  semi- “found,” appropriated, collaged, and annotated document (difficult to classify within literary categories or genres), was longlisted for The Lifted Brow‘s 2018 Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction. As the title indicates, the text addresses various philological roots of the word, “musk,” as if they were derived from the person [and, persona], Elon Musk [the subject], the billionaire “techno-capitalist.”

Though unpaginated, the verso-recto format of musk is integral to the pamphlet’s symbolism, significance, and validity as an example of “experimental” and Flarf-like composition since left-hand pages present copies of internet-based material related to Elon Musk—tweets, Google and Facebook entries, photographs—that, in most cases, echo topics addressed on the opposite page. Right-hand (recto) pages present Maynard’s running essay or, perhaps, their long-form prose poem that, because of copious footnotes on virtually every page, reinforces the importance of “found” and appropriated images and text, bringing to mind a comment by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Susan Howe, “I love the play of footnotes.” By relying upon “found” and appropriated material, Maynard places their work in the company of female writers, such as, Katie Degentesh, Sharon Mesmer, C.D. Wright, and Juliana Spahr.

For purposes of discussion, musk can be divided into five parts—an introductory section, a section on each of the three sub-topics [musca, muscus, mus] and their metaphorical relationship to Elon Musk, as well as, a final, brief conclusion. In the first section, the subject is introduced as “a Man of textual superabundance” due to his constant exposure via social media, the press, advertising, and the like. Maynard goes on to say, “Fundamentally, Musk is infrastructural: a man of tunnels, cars, batteries, energy grids, high-speed trains, giga-factories, wires, and inter-planetary transport.” These associations highlight, not only, the protagonist’s masculinity and phallic display, but they, also, imply his access to power as a symbol of patriarchy. Just as significant, Musk is a powerful figure with whom many men identify and through whom many live vicariously, leading me to consider the manner in which Musk’s attraction may be viewed as a kind of homoeroticism.

The next section expands Maynard’s discussion of Musk “as a trace or index of masculinity” by highlighting the relationship between the subject’s defining characteristics and “musk” (musca), technically defined as testicle, scrotum, as well as, a male sexual hormone. Iterations of the subject on the internet are, in Maynard’s words, “instructive in illustrating the ways in which Musk and his vernaculars of techno-masculinity are habitually taken up, reproduced, and updated, eventually becoming naturalised forms of embodied subjectivity.” This techno-male, then, is a mytho-poetic construct—part real, part fake, part object, part copy, part fantasy—“ready-made” (Marcel Duchamp) for an ubiquitous “neoliberalism.” Throughout their text, Maynard extends their analysis to the roles played by Musk and other techno-masculine figures in perpetuating the destructive, mediating, and dehumanizing effects of Capitalism.

In the third section, Maynard employs the idea of a moss plant (muscus) as an interface between “the plant, animal, and human worlds.” They transfer this fundamental, and powerful, function to the subject, stating that, “Attending to our ‘mossy’ networks necessitates an engagement with the ways in which Elon Musk’s infrastructural developments are changing the present and future organization of life.” Maynard introduces Naomi Klein’s term, “philanthrocapitalism,” referring to “a billionaire class who posit themselves as the problem-solver of crises that have been historically (un)settled through collective action, dismantling or the public sector”…representing “a form of corporate environmental paternalism whereby the ultra-rich ‘generously’ tackle some of our greatest crises using their loose change.” Though it is easy to sympathize with Maynard’s concerns and to validate their analysis, the statements may be problematic for some readers since, from a purely artistic and formalist perspective, their didactic, literal nature potentially detracts from the otherwise seamless flow of the text (which should be read at one sitting for maximum effect) and since the overwhelming scale of current global crises, such as climate change, ecosystem collapse, and poverty, all but require solutions produced by concentrated wealth. Nonetheless, in musk, Maynard presents themselves as a political poet concerned, as Adrienne Rich was, with using the “oppressor’s language” [Rich] in revolutionary ways.

The fourth section addresses “the index of ‘musk’: mouse” [mus]. Again, the philanthrocapitalist is presented as a mytho-poetic symbol of power. Maynard writes, “In August, 2017, SpaceX delivered 20 mice to the International Space Station. In fact, Musk’s desire to make human life multi-planetary began with the dream to send mice to Mars; his intention was that the mice would procreate in space, and return to Earth with interplanetary offspring.” Maynard advances Nathan Eisenberg’s notion of a gendered subjectivity, “discursively infused with a system of values that would reinvigorate the men of the nation to deliver salvation.” Invoking the Futurists as representatives of “the Modern fascist man” (e.g., Ezra Pound), Maynard does not mention the paradox that the Futurist movement, though short-lived (~1909-1920), was noteworthy as an artistic project and was the source of some of the creative techniques Maynard, herself, employs (e.g., verbal collage, “found” material: see Marjorie Perloff, 2003, University of Chicago Press). Nonetheless, philanthrocapitalists are empowered by unregulated markets and [masculine] competition, and, as Maynard puts it, “The quest to make humans multi-planetary represents a kind of pseudo-colonial environmental-fatalism whereby men of the capitalist elite give up hope on their environmental survival, and quite literally abandon the planet they have all but destroyed.” Related to this, the author suggests that these men are having unfettered fun at the world’s expense by way of “a pervasive youthful playfulness.” Power play, then, is a gendered game.

Maynard ends their text (each page paired with one or more found images referencing the subject) implicating “white masculinist possession,” calling, instead, for Jordy Rosenberg’s plea to “summon the counterforce of our own desire.” Presumably, this is a statement concerning the power of feminist principles to forge solutions via a “collective state of lived resistance…founded in scenes of ambivalent desire and intimate attachment…beyond (and against) the pheromonal energies of Elon Musk, directed towards new discursive formulations.” In the final analysis, then, Musk is not a fantasy, or an abstract case, but a real threat, and Maynard focuses their creative abilities upon using art in the service of feminism and politics—nationally and internationally. This debut pamphlet marks this young author as a writer to watch as their artistic talents and political sensibilities expand and mature. I recommend this volume to anyone interested in a creative activist, feminist, and civic voice deserving a wide audience. musk (musca\muscus\mus) provides its readers with a unique visual, symbolic, and literary experience, a worthy example of avant garde collage, conceptual, and appropriated composition, and I look forward to reading Maynard’s future work.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal, published by Gauss PDF in 2019

[REVIEW] Fake News Poems by Martin Ott

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(BlazeVox Books, 2018)

REVIEW BY LEONARD A. TEMME

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Simply put, Martin Ott’s new collection, Fake News Poems, is terrific and here’s why; the book is structured around a single idea so simple it’s genius. The idea allows immense flexibility and has roots that go back centuries, yet Fake News Poems is entirely contemporary and as fresh as tomorrow. I suspect the idea for the book came in a flash, a moment of inspiration in response to the Greatest, Most Magnificent (GMM) President of the United States (POTUS) Of All Time (OAT). So what is the book? What will you find when you read it, which I recommend you do?

It’s a kind of almanac, a collection of 52 poems, one a week for the year 2017. The title of each poem is a news headline complete with date and source. For example, the first poem in the collection is Automated Book-Culling Software Drives Librarians to Create Fake Patrons to ‘Check Out’ Endangered Titles. This headline appeared 2 January in the online zine Boing Boing. All 52 poems follow the same pattern: date, publication source, headline, and then the poem.

The poem does not present the news; the title tells us all the background we need for that. Books are in trouble again, and librarians are coming to their rescue. Beginning with a report that Fahrenheit 451 is in danger, the poem presents a dystopian vision of AI deciding which books to keep and which to cull. As the poem progresses, references grow increasingly personal until we realize that we are in love with books, each one intimate, like a friend, teacher, and lover, and we are on the verge of losing them.

Fake News Poems continues this way. For the most part, each poem fits on its own page and each has that poem-ish appearance that contrasts with the facticity of the date, source, headline / title.  The contrast is certainly intentional as telegraphed by the book’s inscription from William Carlos Williams’ Asphodel, That Greeny Flower: “It is difficult / to get the news from poems / yet men die every day / for lack / of what is found there.” This reference is what Fake News Poems is really about.

Despite the close association of the GMM POTUS OAT with the phrase ‘fake news,’ to its great credit the collection explicitly references the GMM POTUS OAT in only a few poems. For example, the second poem, in response to a January 13 Mondoweiss News headline Origins of a Golden Shower, considers the rise of the GMM POTUS OAT through a series of six tercets (note the poem-ish form) to conclude with ‘musing on how the waterfall of humanity / gushed in his presence, history in the taking.’

The third poem, from 15 January, The Inquisitr (sic), riffs on the closing of the Ringling Bros Circus, quickly shifting from news to family drama. This is the poet as reader responding to the headline in nine couplets. The structure could not be more clear; the flat facts of the headline at the top of the page inspires, or provokes, the poet’s response, captured in the poem that declares itself to be a poem by its shape. This pattern delivers fifty-two doses of the good Dr. Williams’ prescribed antidote to the poison in the fifty-two headlines, which are a sampling of what we experience daily. Note, I spot checked about a dozen of the headlines via Google and they are all the real news.

The table of contents alone, the list of poems titles, is provocative reading as the news of our society, reflecting who we are and what we read; but where is the GMM POTUS OAT in this? He appears in about a dozen or so poems but almost never by name, yet his shadow lurks in much of the book. While most of the poems do not explicitly tackle politics or social issues head-on, his shadow is easy to see as consistent with the tenor of society and consequently, the tenor of the poems. The GMM POTUS OAT doesn’t have to suck all the oxygen out of the news cycle, he is part of it, fitting in perfectly, fouling the atmosphere.

There are many great poems in the collection as there are many great headlines. The cover picture is of a man in a red tee-shirt and blue shorts pushing a lawn mower through his backyard, enclosed by a tall, wooden privacy fence, the very picture of self-contained stability. But we see over the fence to the tornado filling the sky, coming his way. Meet Everycitizen. The picture refers to the 5 June, Huffington Post headline and poem title: Determined Dad Won’t Let a Tornado Stop Him from Mowing the Lawn. The poem, with as many end and inner rhymes as any rap lyric, appears on the page in eight, nice-and-tidy couplets that remind me of the steward dutifully aligning the deckchairs on the sinking Titanic. Ott doesn’t ridicule the situation, he understands it, and relates it to his father and to us. Given the current chaos, we do what we can to establish and maintain what order is possible.

The two midyear poems are worth noting because they are consistent with most of the book, not polemical or political, they capture the surprise of real life, struggling humanity trying to normalize the absurd. The L. A News of 26 June is the source for a seven couplet poem reacting to the headline: Suspect Hands Monopoly ‘Get Out of Jail Free’ Card to Deputy. The final couplet: “Love is a game with rules inked each day / The joke was that he still held out hope.” So do we. The second midyear poem, from July 5, CMBC, is a single sentence spread over a dozen lines organized into four neatly arranged tercets reacting to the headline, Sex Robots Could Make Us Lonely and Unable / to Form Relationships with Other Humans. The poem begins “When the dollhouses become our houses” and concludes with ‘when love may tear you limb from limb / there is no hope without beginning or end.” With these poems we are visiting true but tragicomic reflections of ourselves. The headlines are absurdist reality; the poems strive after order.

Like bookends, the last two poems of the book balance the first two. Recall the second poem turns the golden showers on the GMM POTUS OAT while the penultimate poem, dated 19 December from CNN, has the headline / title “Disney Adds Trump Robot to Its Hall of Presidents, which congers an image sufficient to give every reader pause: the GMM POTUS OAT surrounded by all his inferiors, from Washington through Obama. Extraordinary. Reading through the Fake News Poems we realize we finally elected the president we deserve.

The last poem, completing the year’s cycle, dated 26 December, reacts to the headline, “Man Beats up an ATM for Giving Him too Much Cash,” which appeared in USA Today. The poem feels like a coda, rounding out the year with an absurdist Chaplainesque image updated from Modern Times, futile but heroic in the way librarians protecting books heroically resist the inevitable. I can almost hear Ott reading this last poem with its many internal rhymes as rap. And so it goes.

—

Leonard Temme is a research neuropsychologist in a government research laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis, and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared in numerous literary and small presses. He serve as Poet Laureate of Northwest Florida between 1989 and 1992.

 

[REVIEW] Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky

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(Graywolf Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY LEONARD TEMME

—

The long-anticipated publication of Illya Kaminsky’s Deaf Republic is an important literary event. The title page identifies the book as “poems,” which is as misleading as it is true. True, because the book contains 59 poems, each capable of standing alone with its own structure, sound, meaning, and music. Misleading, because the book is a single work of art, to be encountered as a totality from beginning to end. Taken together, the poems form a two-act play describing the military occupation of Vasenka, a fictional Eastern European town. The 36 poems of the first act tell the story of Sonya and Alfonso Barabinsky, while the 21 poems of the second act tell the story of Mamma Galya Armolinskaya.

The play opens with the poem, Gunshot, which begins:

Our country is the stage.

When soldiers march into town, public assemblies are officially prohibited. But today, neighbors flock to the piano music from Sonya and Alfonso’s puppet show in Central Square….

 

An army jeep swerves into the square, disgorging is own Sergeant.

‘Disperse immediately!’

 

The poem continues with a description of the puppet show, the Sergeant, and the townspeople who watch the deaf boy, Petya,

 

… lean back, gather all the spit in his throat, and launch it at the Sergeant.

 

The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.

 

With the Sergeant’s unheard gunshot the book earns its title, Deaf Republic, for the people of Vasenka can hear nothing.

These poems have multiple backstories, some clearly biographical. Kaminsky was born in Odessa when the Ukraine was still part of the former Soviet Union and is himself deaf. Moreover, Kaminsky published a related sequence of 16 poems in the May 2009 issue of Poetry Magazine and that sequence is still available online. Several of these earlier poems are not included in the book while some have been radically rewritten and a few remained unchanged. In a note accompanying the 16 poems, Kaminsky writes that they are from an unfinished manuscript, Deaf Republic, found under the floorboards of a house in an Eastern European town, and that they tell the story of a pregnant woman and her husband during the occupation. He adds that several versions of the manuscript exist.  The fiction of the floorboards as well as the many differences between the 16 poems of the sequence and those in the book point to several more backstories. And let’s not overlook the backstories that make these poems immediately relevant to our lives in America today.

The book includes a dramatis personae listing the characters who populate the play, but not every character speaks. Act One has two voices; one voice is the Townspeople, a narrator who provides action, context, and continuity, not unlike a Greek Chorus. The other voice is Alfonso, the husband of pregnant Sonya. They are puppeteers in Madam Galya Armolinskaya’s puppet theater.  Act One describes the newlywed couple and the Townspeople under the military occupation. Sonya gives birth to her baby girl, Anushka, and is then summarily shot. The soldiers take Anushka from Alfonso and hang him. Act One closes with:

There will be evidence, there will be evidence.

While helicopters bomb the streets, whatever they will open, will open.

What is silence? Something of the sky in us.

 

Act Two also has two voices, the Townspeople and that of Madam Mamma Galya Armolinskaya, the charismatic, dynamic, active resistance fighter, who at 53 is having more sex than any of us, and who whipped a Lieutenant with the leash of his own patrol dog / and there were thirty-two persons watching / (for the baker / insisted / on bringing his sons). The Townspeople admire and hate Mamma Galya, the luckiest woman in our nation, as they remain deaf to the horrors and cower. They would give anything

… to ride away from our funerals

beside you, in a yellow taxi,

 two windows open,

leaving loaves of bread

in the mailboxes

of the arrested.

 

Larger than life, she rescues the baby Anushka hidden in a bundle of laundry, raises her, leads the resistance, is betrayed by the men of Vasenka, executed, and buried.  Read these poems aloud and weep.

Describing the aftermath of Mamma Galya’s funeral, the anonymous voice of the Townspeople declaims:

Today

I have to screw on the expression of a person

 

though I am at most an animal

and the animal I am spirals

 

from the funeral to his kitchen, shouts: I have come, God, I have come running to                                                  you –

in snow-drifted streets, I stand like a flagpole

 

without a flag.

 

The play takes place in the historical past, and in a county with alien Eastern European names we associate with oppressive authoritarian governments. We recognize that the play describes the kinds of violence that have happened many times in many places. Far worse things are reported daily today, just not yet here for most of us. So we in America, safe within our boarders, read the play at a safe distance, shake our heads at the horror and suffering, confident, right down to our toes, how wrong it all is, how horrible, and are outraged at the atrocities, with the subtext not us, not us running sotto voce through our heads as we read.

The book sandwiches the play between an opening and a closing poem that cut deeply because they dissolve the distance between America and Vasenka to place us in the middle of the Deaf Republic. The opening poem is titled the indictment, We Lived Happily During the War, and begins:

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

 

protested

but not enough, we opposed them but not

 

enough. I was

in my bed, around my bed America

 

was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house –

and continues with the closing indictment:

In the street of money in the city of money in the country of money,

our great country of money, we (forgive us)

 

lived happily during the war.

The closing poem titled, In a Time of Peace, is the reply and begins:

Inhabitant of the earth for fortysomething years

I once found myself in a peaceful country. I watch neighbors open

 

their phones to watch

a cop demanding a man’s driver’s license. When the man reaches for his wallet,

 the cop

shoots. Into the car window. Shoots.

to conclude with:

This is a time of peace.

 

I do not hear gunshots,

but watch birds splash over the backyards of the suburbs. How bright is the sky

as the avenue spins on its axis.

How bright is the sky (forgive me) how bright.

We, the American deaf, who protest too little to be effective but enough to assuage our conscience, who catch the daily atrocities on the evening news, are called to examine ourselves. Regardless of how self-congratulatory we are for ‘America as the shining city on the hill,’ we are part of the history of humanity, no better, and, we hope, no worse than most.

Deaf Republic may be described as a hybrid, with text on a continuum between prose and poetry with each piece a dramatic monologue that moves the story forward. The intention, shape, and scope of the piece, a play, mostly poetry, intended to be read rather than staged, puts the text in the tradition of Closet Drama, a form that had some popularity during the Elizabethan and Jacobian periods and among the nineteenth century romantics. This form has been subsumed by the modern radio play or today’s podcast, and it is hard not to imagine Deaf Republic being performed as a reading, possibly with music. Reading the Deaf Republic sent this reviewer to revisit Schoenberg’s A Survivor From Warsaw; the two are close cousins.

This is political writing at its best–not ideological or hectoring poster board invective but the sound of human anguish–read the poems, weep, and be shaken.

—

Leonard Temme has a doctorate in neurophysiology and is a research scientist in a government laboratory. He studied writing most extensively with Marie Ponsot, Sue Walker, Josh Davis and Kristina Darling. In addition to his professional publications, his writing has appeared numerous literary and small presses. He served as Poet Laureate of North West Florida between 1989 and 1992.

Friday Feature: Logan February’s Mannequin in the Nude

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Our Editorial Assistant Erinn Batykefer sat down with Mannequin in the Nude author, Logan February  to discuss all things poetry.

In his engrossing collection, poet Logan February documents and interrogates grief, and God and examines what it is to be on the outside, even in the family setting — the reality of having a queer identity in the African world. In this volume, eroticism and manic depression are navigated alone. Some of the poems use a mannequin as a projective tool to dissect self hood, histories, and family connections in the aftermath of a fundamental bereavement. February additionally explores religious concepts to further mythologize the self, collecting Buddhist philosophies and Yoruba proverbs and myths, and putting them adjacent to the toxic tenets of Pentecostal Christianity, which is widespread in Nigeria. In the vein of confessional poetry, the narrative takes its pride in exposing the elements which are deemed taboo and advised to be hidden away. The poems are equally fearful and raunchy, tender and defiant, morose and youthful.

Erinn Batykefer: Your new book, Mannequin in the Nude, is voracious in the use and transformation of forms (cento, haibun, sonnet (a crown of them!), alexandrine, villanelle, etc) and language in a way that makes them belong to this book. Is all of your writing acquisitive?

Logan February: Thank you for noticing all of the forms in the book! I like to think of form as method. It can be quite exciting to make a task out of a poem’s execution. The sonnet crown, especially, is integral in the dissection of projections and the self, but also in furthering the narrative arc of the book toward some semblance of a resolution. But the poem does not always want to be methodical, sometimes it desires indiscipline, to not be constrained. I try my best to honor that, too, to ensure I am writing the truest incarnation of the poem. It changes as my mental landscape changes, and I’m grateful to have a bounty of forms to keep up with the flux. I think the most important thing is that I’m not bored by the poems I’m writing.

EB: If you could take on motherhood for a moment and give someone we’ve lost a name like Durojaye to encourage them to stay, who would you re-name?

LF: If I could name anyone Dúrójayé, it would be Gabriel Fernandez and Giovanni Melton (the poem ‘Alexandrines on Grief’ is dedicated to them), because they died far too young, and had so much more life to live. For them I would take on motherhood.

EB: Poems like “Corpus Vile” call up Tyehimba Jess’s “double jointed” poems, where each column is a poem and reading across the spine is a
third. Is there a particular order you follow when you read this one? When you wrote it?

LF: Ah, yes, contrapuntals are one of my favorite forms! A hell of a challenge, too. Tyehimba Jess’ contrapuntals were the first I ever read, and I was utterly captivated. Other favorites are  Xandria Phillips’ ‘You and I’ and  Safia Elhillo’s ‘yasmeen.’ When I read ‘Corpus Vile’, I start with the left column, then the right, and then I read them across.

Writing it wasn’t that simple. I had practiced writing “second halves” to short poems I found, trying to synthesize second and third narratives from pieces that were already complete. There were lots of rewrites and frustration while I was drafting ‘Corpus Vile’. I didn’t figure it out until I started to work on both columns almost, but not quite, simultaneously.

EB: Mannequin’s speaker(s) believe “resurrection is a holier thing than rebirth.” Is this an idea that you bring to your writing process?

LF: This consideration was born from comparative examinations of the concepts of resurrection in Christianity, and rebirth in Buddhism. I was raised on the idea that rebirth was somehow evil, while resurrection was this miraculous and wonderful snapping back to life, which I think is a load of bullshit. This comes up because the book worries the question of death, and what it could mean to live again. To continue or to start over?

When this question is directed at the creative process, I find it even more curious. I don’t often revisit ideas that I feel have reached a dead end, but it does happen every now and then. But when I do bring an idea back to life, it’s not the same as it was before. So is this idea resurrected or reborn? I’m not sure, but I think they may have more to do with each other than we assume.

EB: If you could upload one text into the brains of your readers Matrix-style before they opened your book, what would it be?

LF: It would be Richard Siken’s Crush, mostly because that book was one of the first in which I felt seen. It’s a phenomenal work of poetry that everyone should read. My book would probably pale in comparison, but that’s okay

EB: Is there any word you wouldn’t put in a poem?

LF: I can’t think of any. I don’t have a least favorite word. I mean, I’m not interested in writing hateful words, but maybe someday I’ll be interested in reclaiming a slur in a poem (obviously, one with contextual proximity to my personal experiences). So you never know. In the end, the poems will decide what words they allow.

EB: What’s your short-term low-commitment hair color recommendation for spring? What color should we all wash in and pretend we’re someone else for a day?

LF: Powder blue, like Frank Ocean (I’ve never done this color, but I would love to!)

EB: Anything else you’d like to tell us? We love you, and we’re terrible at keeping secrets.

LF: Ha, I love you too! I can’t say too much about what I’m currently working on, but there is a strong Sappho influence, and the backbone is a long poem, which is the most challenging thing I’ve ever written, probably. In the meantime, I’ve been trying to get back into reading (more) fiction. My last read was Sigrid Nunez’s The Friend. I thought it was fascinating and quite excellent.

 

Mannequin in the Nude will be released at AWP and is available for presale at: https://pankmagazine.com/shop/mannequin-in-the-nude/

Logan February is a Nigerian poet. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Washington Square Review, The Adroit Journal, Vinyl, Paperbag, Tinderbox, Raleigh Review, and more. He is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, and his debut collection, Mannequin in the Nude (PANK Books, 2019) was a finalist for the Sillerman First Book Prize for African Poets. He is the author of two chapbooks, and the Associate Director of Winter Tangerine’s Dovesong Labs. You can find him at loganfebruary.com

[REVIEW] Ways of Looking at a Woman by Caroline Hagood

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(Hanging Loose Press, 2019)

REVIEW BY PATRICIA GRISAFI

—

In Ways of Looking at a Woman, Caroline Hagood wonders how motherhood has changed her as both a person and a writer: “When I feel overcome by my post-birth transformation, I imagine my body as a written form and try to guess its genre.” But after childbirth, a singular genre doesn’t seem to work anymore. So she turns to hybridization, which feels like a more authentic way to articulate the condition of being woman, object, mother, and writer. As a result, Ways of Looking at a Woman is a smart, honest, funny, and endearing lyric portrait of the artist as a fragmented and reconstituted entity.  

Hagood uses the hybrid text as a way to discover and create identity. And like identity, just when you feel you have a grasp on her narrative, it slips away and transforms into something else. This is part of the immense pleasure of the book—that it contains multitudes. Part film theory, part personal essay, part poetry, Ways of Looking at a Woman toys with our expectations of how each of these genres should operate. The themes that tie the text together—gazing and consuming, mothering and being mothered, creating and destroying, and confessing and withholding—are elucidated by quirky anecdotes. Here is the writer as watcher of junk TV and connoisseur of junk food, the writer as a woman who is exhausted by her children but still finds time to ponder postmodernism on the toilet. “Mostly I didn’t write a memoir because nobody wants to read something called The Subtle Art of Writing While Covertly Watching a Zombie Movie, Playing Make-believe with a Tantrumming Kid, and Eating Taquitos,” Hagood explains.

Like the title alludes, Hagood’s text feels like what might happen if Wallace Stevens and Laura Mulvey had a rambunctious child who delights in finger painting with food all over the study. There’s a loopy energy to Hagood’s prose that feels very much like motherhood manifested. Her book is serious but doesn’t take itself too seriously. You have to love a writer who is comfortable enough to invoke both Reality Bites and Derrida in a way that is not obnoxious — and put both of them on the same theoretical level. This happy marriage of high and low is an engaging feature of Hagood’s book. We all know the academic who can and will name-drop theorists into conversations about cat litter, but Hagood’s invocations don’t feel showy or performative. The meshing–actually, obliterating—of hierarchies is part of the goal here. Once we realize that hierarchies, much like genre and static designations, confine us, we can be liberated and create something explosive and new.  

Organized as a thesis (Hagood wrote the book while working on her doctoral dissertation), Ways of Looking at a Woman adopts an academic form while also poking fun at academia. Riffing on the cliche of women’s inherent mysteriousness, Hagood jokes in the “Methodology” section: “So I needed to study women, but I wasn’t good at statistics…Besides, I like women, and have found that to dissect them with numbers and figures was to forget that.” Sometimes, the analysis kills the joy or distracts us from the inherent pleasure of the text — and sometimes, Hagood writes, prevents us from fully inhabiting the work: “I started wanting to use ‘I’ in the dissertation where it didn’t belong. On every page, Caroline kept popping up—making lewd gestures behind a footnote, mooning me from behind a piece of particularly dry text.” Here, Caroline’s impertinent insistence is on not just making the text her own but actually becoming the text. This is not just a dissertation, a body of work–it’s a literal body. A woman’s body.  

Ways of Looking at a Woman is a feminist text. It’s a story of becoming, transmutation, trauma, and women’s work that often goes unseen or under appreciated: cleaning tiny nails, washing food off the walls, giving birth itself (the way Hagood describes birth is perfect: “this purple creature of tenderness suddenly came exploding out of me and I got to keep it). In one of the most stunning parts of the book, Hagood crashes body horror into feminist theory, commenting on the inherent amalgamation of womanhood: “Women have felt this monstrousness since the beginning of time, but I just went the extra step and literally became a monster. One fateful day I became literature. It was beautiful, astounding even as my skin became fragile and see-through, became diaphanous pages. I transformed into the hybrid I had always been half-woman, half-writing.” In this book, Hagood becomes Frankenstein’s creation or even Dorian Gray—her body as art and experiment, containing difficult truths about humanity.

—

Patricia Grisafi, PhD, is a New York City based freelance writer and editor. Her work has been featured in Salon, The Guardian, Vice, Narratively, The Rumpus, Self, Bustle, Ravishly, and elsewhere. Her short fiction appears in Tragedy Queen: Stories Inspired By Lana Del Rey & Sylvia Plath.

[REVIEW] Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen

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(Omnidawn, 2018)

REVIEW BY ESTEBAN RODRIGUEZ

__

To quote a phrase from Terrance Hayes’s foreword, Ghost Of by Diana Khoi Nguyen is a collection of “exile and elegy.” The poem’s first line proclaims there “is no ecologically safe way to mourn,” and because there isn’t, at least not within the collection’s context of loss, the search for identity, and the acclimation to a culture of a new country, Nguyen so confidently writes in a style and voice that is as innovative as it is maturely aware of its subjects and themes.

Two pages in, and we are introduced to one of the collection’s most intriguing forms; “Triptych” (the title of five other poems in this collection) is composed of an altered, blurred photograph of a family (Nguyen’s own) with a piece missing (which Nguyen’s brother cut himself before his death), followed by a fragmented poem (taking the shape of that figure), and a prose poem that seeks to illuminate the meaning behind the photo and the previous poem. Although a form like this runs the risk of seeming forced, and can look to an experienced reader like something the poet learned in a workshop and was excited to put on the page (think of all the poorly constructed ghazals that randomly show up in a collection that doesn’t need them and that don’t fit with the poet’s overall style), Nguyen is able to use this form in a manner that is never superficial. The beauty of these poems lies in the seemingly chaotic nature they take as the collection progresses. By the fourth “Triptych,” the photograph is altered to the point of nausea, and the fragmented poem that follows singles out the speaker’s brother, Oliver, as a figure so far removed from anything that resembles that serene family in the photo before:

Re

mem

ber the

handsom

e boy pla

ying ball i

n the decay

ed city? Thin

k about him

how he’s pla

ying and pla

ying not as

king a singl

e question,

think abou

t that how

My replication here doesn’t do the justice to what the reader will experience firsthand with these poems, nor will any replication successfully capture the essence of the “Gyotaku” poems (Gyotaku is a Japanese form of printmaking that uses fish or other sea animals as printing plates). These poems are more vibrant and visually jarring as Nguyen prints her text onto the altered photographs. In one instance, the name “oliver” (shaped into a disembodied figure) is juxtaposed next to the cut portion of a family portrait and then splashed in various trail-like patterns across the next page, all in different shades of black and gray. Such a technique recreates the footprint the speaker’s brother left behind. The speaker, through these pieces, copes with these memories, and the page offers no better canvas to visually express the labyrinth of emotions still fresh after such a loss. Near the end of the collection (in the last “Gyotaku” poem), multiple lines of olivers (printed in light gray) occupy the whole page, while a poem in the shape of dark figure lingers the right hand corner, as though the ghost or spirit has nowhere to go, stuck in a two-dimensional limbo that prompts the speaker to ponder how it’s “not the body/but the self that is/a suffering form.”

In no way should anyone confuse these poems as a cheap substitute for the language Nguyen achieves in the book’s more “traditional” poems. In “I Keep Getting Things Wrong,” the speaker reflects on their parents’ exile from Vietnam to the United States. The speaker’s father is depicted with deity-like qualities, giving “his hand to his mother,/[while] all around them, a thousand hands reach up” for salvation. The father leaves Saigon unscathed, resettling in Southern California. But such happiness doesn’t last long, and the speaker’s brother’s death inserts itself in the present as much as it does the past. The speaker feels inclined to “eat the food/left out for [her] dead brother” and at one point, while sitting at a desk typing, remembers that she dreamed twice that she “fucked” him. The speaker cannot escape what so painfully plagues her, and though for some it might be exhausting to read, the subject is reformulated in ways that allow for greater understanding, empathy, and reflection.

In other poems, the speaker imagines herself as a house occupied with emptiness and guilt, or envisions a world where she pours pieces of herself into a dog (not that the dog has any particular significance other than being an entity in which the speaker’s desires can be projected and potentially take form). Nguyen’s poems also extend to lyric narratives. The poem “Ghost Of” recounts a family’s history, detailing what appears on the surface to be trivial matters (how parents came about naming their son, how a young daughter walks around pigeon-toed, how seat belts enumerate a mother’s failures), but that ultimately shed light on the complexity of this “story of refugees” (a subject that is all too relevant in today’s social and political landscape). Ghost Of carefully moves at a pace that is thoughtful, innovative, and elegiac, and never once shies away from speaking about death in a manner that is both personal and universal. After all, as Nguyen so aptly puts it, in times such as these, “there is no shortage of gain or loss.”

—

Esteban Rodriguez is a poet and teacher. He is the author of DUSK & DUST,  forthcoming from Hub City Press.