Saturnalia Books Archives

$15.00, 80 pages

About that metric America: I mean it.[1]

Here we are, laid out in inches. Our literature and our grammar, our wars and our reasons. Our bodies and their intimacies. The spaces between our bodies measured too: sometimes dangerous, sometimes fraught. No Object, the poet Natalie Shapero’s first collection, breaks down this quantified world, one which the speaker must not merely inhabit, but also size, in order to make sense of it. Shapero, currently teaching as a Kenyon Review Fellow at Kenyon University, crafts a collection whose lyric poems leap image-driven from one yardstick to another, against which her speakers measure memory, sex, interpersonal conflict. These poems demand careful attention (I read many several times, slowly, and again, slowly), and unfold more with each read. They deserve the focused assessment they require: they grow, and we must grow with them, as we read.

The speakers of No Object confront death and grieving, and their consideration of this force and its reasons—death caused by nations or people, writ large or small—maintains one of the main tensions of the collection. “Our War” tells of a speaker’s upbringing in a Quaker town, “a peaceful town. / Show us a war, we’d say, and we’ll show you / dust on the beakers. Dust on the hazard suits.” Though peace-loving, this town knows from war, and in wondering about its consequences (“What if our two towns fought each other? Who / would win?”) human nature shows that even the peace-giving know the ends of this game: “In truth, we’d strew their fingers everywhere. / We would take their boys for infantry. / We would take their girls for making more.” Continue reading →

Saturnalia Books

80 pgs/ $15

Wind from the water on my legs, my white skirt smeared with dirt, the wine, and the / lime leaf caught in your beard- we had decided to travel.

Sarah Vap’s Arco Iris (Spanish, meaning “rainbow”) is a collection that allows Vap psychic space to interrogate her months-long trip through South America with a beloved. Though Vap does include several pieces illustrating wonder, as well as vignettes of what they see, this is predominantly (and thus far more interestingly) a book considering the “ghosts” that haunt the couple and the anxieties of globalization. One of Vap’s epigraphs is from Artaud- “Everything that acts is cruelty,” underscoring the impossibility of avoiding the act of harming. This angst around injuring is driven by the feeling of recklessness such traveling engages in, as illustrated in the poem “As if we are two hemispheres folding onto each other”:

We are two
people who have never wanted to do wrong or to think anything wrong

or to say anything wrong and now all we do is smash continents and bodies together to see what will remain.

In another poem, “We are feeling good. We aren’t hurting anyone/Everywhere we go, our minds think, we aren’t hurting anyone.” These both attempt to comprehend the couple’s arguably uncritical view of their travels, but also the narrator’s intertwining with the beloved through travel. Vap describes the latter most beautifully and effectively in”Train, Cuzo-Puno,” which I wish I could quote in full:

I wanted to expose myself to everything while it exposes itself to me.

…I wanted all other bodies in mine I wanted all the substance opened I did this

by way of you on a train and while I did I pounded my head

my head against yours. Continue reading →

Saturnalia Books

[REVIEW] No Object, by Natalie Shapero

Arco Iris, by Sarah Vap (A Review by Diana Arterian)