Kent Shaw's Blog, page 7

“CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” by Daniela Naomi Molnar

While I try as much as I can to approach each book with an open reading, I also know there there are certain methods that consistently draws me into poems. The one in Daniela Naomi Molnar’s book, CHORUS, is familiar to me, but I’m not sure what to call it. “Breathless”? “Relentless”? “Insisitent”? It’s like a torrent of impressions, but beneath the chaos there is this intention steadying the poem amidst all this activity. Meaning I don’t feel confused reading it. I feel this intentional guide firmly pointing me in directions. Like the poem is full of this assured energy; it guides the poet and reader forward. It’s a poetry of the forceful lyric.

And that’s what Molnar has in this poem. It’s what she has with most of the poems in her collection, CHORUS. Forcefulness. Perspicacity. A world of impressions that she ties together. And in the poem, “CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” she introduces the reader to a location that serves as a kind of catalyst for her thinking. Or I consider this middle section a catalyst, because I see the first section of the book as a control, like the control portion of an experiment. Where the second section might be about how the landscape of Ojito Canyon helped the poet understand a transitional point in her life, the first section establishes the poet’s perspective on her own subjectivity amidst the world. She considers that paradox where looking too closely at the self, the self reveals how it can be intimately felt but also invisibly present (”this moment / between a deadness performing born-ness / & the knowledge of being prey / between being prey / & praying”). What exists between unconscious awareness and extreme self-consciousness? What are contradictions like this but further evidence of a self’s inherent complexity? What I appreciate in the book’s opening poems are moments where this fixed-point “self” is viewed so closely, then suddenly the poem realizes there is a world adjacent to that fixed point. In “CHORUS 4 / ELSEWISE,” the poet looks at her eyes, so “the rest” of her body can sense the “metronome beat of rain in drainpipe / creamy dogwood bracts pointing all four directions.” “Chorus” is an operative trope of the book, where each succeeding “CHORUS” poem assembles a chorus of self and adjacencies to self. What is the music of this chorus? The book leaves that an open question.

However, when the setting for the book moves to Ojito Canyon, I sense the poet taking me with her on a personal journey into the wilderness, so to speak. Accompanied by a chorus of the senses. A reading I would say the book encourages as many of the titles in this section are “CHORUS / OJITO CANYON / [some further title here],” as though the canyon itself had become a lens for the poet to understand where she is in her life.

Though maybe “understanding” is too strong a word. Because these poems register a lot of bewilderment. And uncertainty. Granted, the poems have a capacity to observe the fullness of the world even as the poet registers a humitility in the face of that world. These are spiritual poems in awe of and in obeisance to nature or circumstance. The poems still understand there’s so much they’ve yet to understand. In my goodreads review, I talk about how similar Molnar’s work is to Jorie Graham and James McCorkle. I would add Karla Kelsey. All three poets’ work makes me feel the momentum of their thinking. It feels like they think in a similarly torrential style. A downpour of thinking. And the poetic language like actual rain, immerses me in its thinking. And however varied the impressions that populate the poem might be, the poem’s thinking language makes it feel like all those impressions have been pointed in the same direction. Like in “CHORUS 9 / OJITO CANYON,” I feel the body evacuating this sense of self. “Slow conversion of self at zero and in that conversion advance.” As the poem states it in the opening line. But the gesture is more the poet diminishing herself so she can be enveloped even deeper into the natural world, the natural order. She would favor being the world over her body. And yet it’s her body making the poem. And the poem acknowledges this underlying contradiction, “Keep / the body Thinking is a truceless act.”

And I know what I crave in this poem is what I crave in those other poets’ work. It’s that culture of critical discourse Kimberly Quiogue Andrews uses to frame Wallace Stevens’s work. It marks a faith in the language to just be language, but also language as the most intimately familiar tool people have for relating with other people. There are many ways to use language. To create chaos or confusion. To summarize. The bring an argument to a fine point. Andrews sees Stevens’s language arguing how valuable the imaginative world is, and how it feels to Stevens to pursue that world in his life. It wouldn’t be so far a stretch to connect Jorie Graham to Wallace Stevens, and then to acknowledge the explicit connection Daniela Noami Molnar makes to Jorie Graham via epigraph in CHORUS. All these poets establish the utility of precision. Language with the capacity to be the right words in the right order, but maybe not. And it’s how the language might gesture to the possibility of precision, and the ensuing consolation in Molnar that maybe the best laid plans to be precise keep falling victim to the larger contradiction of a self among all these other members of the chorus.

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A Friday Shout-Out

Anais Duplan’s interviews in “The Moon’s Silent Modulation.” It’s exactly what I would like to read in an interview. Meaning, I’ve found myself a little impatient with the interview format where two writers engage in small talk at the opening. I understand this is part of the interview process. Everyone needs time to warm up. To find the moment that will organically direct both people into something more substantial. But my sense is this exchange feels and sounds much better when you’re in person. Or maybe they’re both writers, and I’m listening for the earnest voice I hear in their poems, and their “sitting down to an interview voice” doesn’t match up.

Anais Duplan’s essay, “The Moon’s Silent Modulation” is different. He offers an account of these conversations, like they inspired his own reflection on the subject. Like he’s not sure what he thinks about francine j. harris’s assembly of connotative imagery. Or he’s not sure what to do with Wendy Xu’s comments about fitting her poems into historical record. What do these things really mean? And how does your respect for these writers fit into your consideration of their dilemmas? I’ll admit, it helps that I’m familiar with the writers’ works, and I’m desperately interested in what their background thinking is. I appreciate Duplan providing space where I can hear these writers in their own words. But I’m especially grateful for his curation. His thinking is the frame for what I get to hear. And, via this curation, his concerns deepen what I’m hearing, because he has offered some personal context for why I’m hearing it. There is something so fair and perceptive about his use of the interview form.

Helpful LinkAnais Duplan’s home pageBlackspace (Black Ocean, 2020)

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The Hyperobjective

For many years, I’ve been interested in the scope of Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s poems. Their attention to limits. Their expansion beyond limits, but in this way where acknowledging how limits exist is the life of the poem. Both inside and outside of that limit. For instance, her book, Nest, is about the concept of nests. Or the concept of home if it were a nest. Or to merely observe the activity of nesting. Or to feel your home shaping itself around you. A nest like it was an idea of an idea occupying that idea, then stretching the idea, then reconfiguring it so you see it again. And the magic of Berssenbrugge? She always makes me see her idea at the center of the idea and the full context of an idea being at the center. Like if the word “again” were illuminated from inside.

Approaching a new book by Berssenbrugge, I’m always thinking, “So what’s the idea?” Which doesn’t mean a book of poems needs that central idea as a vehicle. Berssenbrugge’s long career is filled as much with its consistent inquiry into what it might mean to have an idea as it is to wonder what a poem thinking about ideas looks like. The difference between Empathy and its wily stanzas circling and cinching close the idea of empathy versus Nest or Four-Year-Old Girl and their consideration of the poetic line as assertion or half assertion waiting for what the next assertion might say. I would say A Treatise on Stars is interested in an idea. And in modes of intuitive thinking exercised through the poetic line. “What is the universe?” The book asks. How can someone understand the extent of an infinite concept like space if it has no discernible extent to it? What are the implications of living among an infinite universe? What spaces exist in outer space?

And while I would say, no matter the subject, Berssenbrugge always accomplishes a level of complexity that surprises me as a reader, I feel like the universe is already a complex subject. And so I’m surprised I would be surprised that poems about the universe heighten my sense about how complicated the universe is. Of course, it’s complicated. Of course, it’s already beyond my comprehension. But, like with Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects, I make the mistake of thinking I have a grasp on what the universe is. I shouldn’t delude myself. I can’t comprehend what is literally infinite.

Morton’s focal concept in Hyperobjects is the anthropocene, which addresses humans’ long-term fascination with nature, assigning a limitlessness to what nature is capable of, or how humans are always thinking nature will renew itself. But there’s been a shift into the anthropocene. Which means that along with hitting the limits of nature, humans aren’t facing the fact that all the ways they’ve interacted with nature have fundamentally changed what nature is. And even as I state that here and acknolwedge it as fact, Morton argues I can’t possibly comprehend the scope of the anthropocene. Let alone the damage it is causing and will cause the planet. That’s the hyperobject.

And that’s my position for reading Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars. The universe is a hyperobject. Which doesn’t seem all that revelatory. I could argue that in Berssenbrugge’s book, Empathy, she makes empathy into a hyperobject. It could be argued the process of poetic complication tends towards hyperobjects. Reading Carl Phillip’s The Tether expands my understanding of betrayal and love. Reading Kelly Schirmann’s book The New World expands my understanding of withdrawing from the modern world. The hyperobjects are everywhere for reading poems! But when I read A Treatise on Stars mindful of Morton’s hyperobject I find the poetry is working with a subject matter that doesn’t need poetic complication. Since when did the universe need poetry to be complicated? And why does my deluded view of the universe, based mainly on elementary school classes that pointed to outer space and identified it as the universe, feel confounded by Berssenbrugge articulating all the ways outer space exists, or starlight travels. And yet, reading her book, I can feel my understanding of the universe expand.

I can feel, in fact, what it’s like to know what a hyperobject is with some certainty. A Treatise looks first at the night sky as an enormity. And it’s how she fills in that enormity so that the poems have that expansiveness, like her other work, but the poems are also unequal to that expansiveness. How is anyone supposed to write a poem about outer space? Or starlight? There is so much that people don’t know, and yet there is so much that these physical objects or facts mean to people’s lives.

And so thinking of the universe as a hyperobject, and A Treatise on Stars a consideration of what it means to expand intuitively on a hyperobject’s inconceivability, where does this go? Where is the meaning? And, as I’ve already mentioned, I find this reach for meaning a normal mechanic to Berssenbrugge’s books. I read it as her ambition as much as it’s her style. Like her expansiveness is expressive of truth, even if it’s not going to lead to truth. Like how Paul de Man or Harold Bloom might boil poems down to their trope-ishness, with the ultimate culmination of those tropes being truth. But then both critics eventually admit that poems are always ready to resist that kind of determination. It’s like there’s so much circuitousness in reading good poems. And so much mobius stripping complicating the circuit.

I don’t know. I just take such pleasure in the feeling I get while reading Berssenbrugge. She’s taking me somewhere. She doesn’t know where. And we’re not even going to arrive there. When Paul de Man reads Baudelaire’s poem, “Correspondance,” in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric,” Baudelaire isn’t going to make an explicit statement of truth at the poem’s end. However, he keeps drawing comparisons of one thing to another, and, as de Man argues, these observations should signal to a reader Baudelaire’s intention to make a truth known. But the poem will not tell a truth. And it’s this disconnect between seeming intention to tell the truth and no truth actually told that makes a poem tantalizing to read. Think, then, of the long scientific investigation of the universe, and then of how audacious a book of poetry is to step in like it was going to reveal a truth that had eluded scientists. It’s the disconnect implicit to A Treatise on Stars!

It’s like defining “infinity.” By definition it’s larger than the largest thought I could have, but the definition provides a reasonable working knowledge of the concept. And maybe what Berssenbrugge’s book has done is point out the limits to my working knowledge of the universe. Or maybe I should recognize how inactive my working knowledge is, because I’m not often thinking about the universe. But then reading her poem “Scalar,” I visualize this very far-reaching space, or spaces where space exists, but I had only imagined “space” to exist in that blackness between planets.

Time also enfolds.

Your present state may not relate to what’s past, but to a more fundamental structure, like a pool of widening rings from a stone.

This moment cuts through the physical universe now and seems to hold all of space in itself.

What happens today may be altered by an event in the future, since space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.

Awareness creates the duration you experience.

from “Scalar”

For me, the moment in this poem that feels so revelatory is the “space consists of ambiguous, foggy regions, where a particle may pass on your last day.” Leading up to this moment in the book, Berssenbrugge has been expanding what people should consider as part of the universe. Starlight. Makes sense. Waves that condense into particles. Have no clue. Too science-y. Holding the hand of someone you love. Hadn’t thought of that. “Describing a bird you see, which I did not see, is part of collective consciousness.” Well, if this “universe” concept is going to be universal, I guess so. And that’s my concession. Meaning, when I read A Treatise on Stars, I find myself conceding to Berssenbrugge constantly. I concede to her logic. And her logic is reforming the universe. And then suddenly something is proposed that surprisingly resonates with me, like “foggy regions” that exist in “space,” and a paricle passing through that space. And all these concessions that I had allowed Berssenbrugge in her elaboration of what the universe is explode with validity.

And yet, I’ve read enough Berssenbrugge to know that validity, that sensation that she might be leading to truth, is going to be a book-length process of truth-accretion that will not land on truth. Especially when the book is about the universe, and she’s going to tie all my previous understandings of “universe” with impressions that range from the emotive to the mystical to the outrageously speculative to the geometry of starlight.

And this is my argument for the hyperobjective in Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s A Treatise on Stars. What I thought I knew or could at least pretend I knew about something so vast is expanded upon in her book, and I get to experience my expanding knowledge as a revelation connected to a series of impressionable reveals that were stated throughout the book. It’s like the first time I saw the moon through a telescope, and I could hardly believe there was so much texture to the moon’s geography, and I was seeing that texture in this lens, and why would I have thought there wasn’t texture if the moon is big enough that people could actually walk on the moon! That sweep of realization is what I feel with Berssenbrugge’s book. And it’s through my reading experience that I feel it. And, well, reading is different than looking through a telescope. It involves more time and a different kind of attention. And maybe the corollary argument here involves the activity of reading and how someone would most likely realize the extent of a hyperobject only via reading. And what kind of style or intent is necessary to accomplish that larger knowing that simultaneously confounds and reinforces knowledge as it multiplies out?

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“Fever,” by Kim Hyesoon

In the goodreads review I just posted about Hyesoon’s book, Poor Love Machine, I named a “humidity” to the surrealism. And, as I said there, “humidity” might not have been the best term, because it often indicates a heavy weight made heavier the longer someone stands in a humid environment.

I do think, however, that heaviness is something readers should feel while reading the book, especially as the imagery depicts the kind of oppression Korean women were experiencing at the time the poems were written. The imagery feels weighted down. For instance, the poem I’m considering for this post, “Fever,” uses images like, “My bones are etched to the floor of the room / like a fish fossil” or “The shadow that walks with its head down.” Both weight the poem tonally. Tie it to a darker side of feeling and thinking. Which is fitting to a poem titled, “Fever.”

But what I am consistently fascinated by with Hyesoon’s poems is the ease of movement. In “Fever” the shift from one image to the next is paced at the stanza break with shorter stanzas. By its middle, the poem has taught me to anticipate a new image as I read on to the next stanza. But the poem has also made clear I will be surprised by that image. I will feel the confounding logic of “The pavements you laid one by one” becoming “roads” that “explode” inside the poet’s body. This “Fever” is more than feverish.

It’s an isolation. Maybe even an abandonment of the poet’s body. Even while she’s inside her own home! As “The flowering branches fall out of / the flower wallpaper” along with “The silver spoon inside that dish bin” that remembers her lips.

And while there’s a lot I admire in the substance of the poem alone. There’s even more that I admire in the poet’s apparent confidence to know what she will say next will surprise, will be an explosive addition to the poem, will provide an energy that pushes out at the closed-in-ness of a “fever.” And, additionally, how this kind of confidence and energy will show itself throughout the book.

Helpful LinksKim Hyesoon’s Home PageDon Mee Choi’s Translations PageAction Books (Home to so many spectacular books in translation)

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“FOR THOSE ABT TO ROCK, WE SALUTE YOU,” by Cody-Rose Clevidence

Full disclosure, I am beholden to Cody-Rose Clevidence. Like when you hear a baby go “Gaga,” and you hear the grown-up close by say, “Gaga” back. I’m both those voices. I’m a recording of those voices you look at on your phone the year after they were saying “Gaga” to each other. Is this a weird devotional. I can’t help being devotional and exclamatory and bodily involved with reading Clevidence’s poems. Because it feels like their poems are inside my mind, or I’m sharing their mind with mine, or their poetry voice takes up all the space in my mind.

And this particular poem, which I found in We Want It All, the transpoetics anthology published by Nightboat Books, is mind and breath. Like the breathing when you’re beholden to nature. You feel the nature inside you, and your breathing changes. You’re enthralled. Your body’s rhythms are in every part of your body.

what is it that gathers
in th cool dusk
at yr face—yr hands, unbound,
open now, to let th cool air through, whole
night, each season, no rhyme, no nothing

from “FOR THOSE ABT TO ROCK, WE SALUTE YOU”

Piling on. From these lines in the poem on it’s this piling on of sensation and captivation and the again and again that happens in the mind as it absorbs everything. Sometimes even jumbling the sensations together, they’re coming so quick, like “th stillness of yr autumn th shallow waters / of th lake of yr heart full of frogs.” So the poem isn’t just the quickened sensations coursing through the poet, they are the poetic moment naturally conflating these moments, spontaneously poetic, as the case may be. It feels like Robert Duncan inhaling fairy tale and nursery rhyme and nature in his “The Structure of Rime” poems. The poems aren’t just vibrant with the poet’s fascination with nature, they are the brightest living moment implied when peopel use the word “vibrant.”

And yet, Clevidence gives even a little bit more with their humor. The call out in the title to AC/DC. The evocation of “the great rope which tethers earth 2 sky” in the opening line, and the hilarious possibility that this could be what the AC/DC song feels like. Or how this song could genuinely open the poet to this moving experience.

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“America Will Be,” by Joshua Bennett

I just finished writing a goodreads.com review for Bennett’s second book, Owed, and I wanted to call some attention to the book’s last poem, “America Will Be.” I have always been fascinated by the political poem. Not least because during the mid-2000s there were so many conversations about bringing politics into poetry. And those conversations felt especially awkward among white poets. Like they were desperate to be political in their poems, to make a difference with their poems, to be activists through their identity as a poet. Personally, I found those poems didn’t succeed in their politics. Their rhetoric was reaching for a connection between the personal and the political. Even trying to read them only as political speech wasn’t all that ineresting. They felt shallow and only mildly invested in their subject.

Political poems are so much better in the 2020s! They’re in-a-good-way weird. Or more direct. Or more resourceful. They are bewildered by our current politics and what might have led to them. If political poems in the 2000s were the juvenalia of 21st Century American political poems, then political poems in the 2020s are the sophisticated work of a middle-age poet.

Bennett’s “America Will Be” is political. And it’s personal. Its frame is an adult son talking with his father about growing up as a black man in America. “He was born in the throat / of Jim Crow Alabama.” And so what was the hardest thing about going to school back then? The son asks his father. And it’s how the poet communicates what he expects to hear versus what his father actually tells him that is where the magic in the poem starts for me.

His father remembers how lonely he was. He was taunted and isolated. And the poem is clear how surprised the poet is to think about America in that light. To see his father’s loneliness as a part of American history. “You say democracy / & I see the men holding documents that sent him off / to war a year later.” The politics of this poem are so clear. America has been shit for a long time. It was in Jim Crow Alabama. It was when it drafted men to serve in a war. And it was during out last President, “lauding a wall big enough to box out an entire world.” But amidst America’s shit, there is the poet’s father dancing in a basement with the woman he would eventually marry. America is shit. And it’s where we experience the miracles of life. It’s the poet’s avowed cynicism against “the quiet / power of Sam Cooke singing.” In the 2020s, it’s not surprising to think of the political outrage America inspires. And I suppose I like a political poem that elaborates on why outrage might be unavoidable and justified while also showing how our political life is not just a vent for sustained outrage.

Helpful Links

Joshua Bennett’s Home Page – Bennett write more than just poems! He’s a critic and a speculative fiction writer. OMG!

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Diana Khoi Nguyen on Wheaton Campus

It was my pleasure to welcome Diana Khoi Nguyen to Wheaton for a reading last week. And I just thought to include my introduction here. Thanks so much to Diana! The students were absolutely enthralled by her presentation.

I have always been fascinated by poems that account for the enormity of their subject matter. An enormity that is based on many different factors. The enormity of the experience. The enormity of idea or concept that informs someone’s understanding of that experience. The enormity of people who share this type of experience with the poet. Not in the same way, as each person lives with their experiences in a way that is unique and difficult to describe. However, there is something common connecting the poet’s consideration of their experience and how others have come to understand their own experience. And there can be something revelatory in this connection.

To me, the obvious example is the love poem. That enormous emotion that takes over a person. Sometimes I wonder if there would even be poetry if it weren’t for love poems. Love is so unfathomable, which means there is always more to be fathomed. And then the miracle of poem that can account for each person experiencing love differently. It accounts for the poet’s singular experience of love and also the multiple ways people love other people.

And maybe the love poem is a slant approach to Diana Khoi Nguyen’s book Ghost Of. But, for my reading, the book is infused with the poet’s love for her brother. Her grief that he killed himself. What it means to have lived through that experience. And, importantly, how that grief, and the love motivating that grief, forces her to reckon with that tragic event. Again and again she reckons with it. What was the shape of her family? What is the shape of her family since the event? How to express the various silences that existed and keep existing among her family? Does the past change when she keeps looking back at it? Does rethinking the past change the past? These are some of the unfathomable questions for Nguyen.

And remarkably the poems are at ease living without concrete answers. Though they actively reach for something that might resemble an answer. And where or how to find these answers is, for me, where Nguyen’s remarkable work with collage and photography is most moving. It’s almost as though language isn’t enough. Just like her brother’s decision to cut his image out of family photographs doesn’t say enough, even as it says so much. And for me this is tragedy, grief, and love in poetry. Something that will never say everything you want it to, but it’s saying something. And that is truly something.

Diana Khoi Nguyen is the author of Ghost Of, winner of the Kate Tufts Discovery Prize and a Finalist for the National Book Award in 2019. Her work has appeared in Poetry, American Poetry Review, and New England Review. She is a Kundiman fellow and a member of the Vietnamese diasporic artist collective, She Who Has No Master(s). And she teaches in the creative writing program at University of Pittsburgh.

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“Pilsen,” by Colleen Louise Barry

What is an “inarticulable feeling”? Like the one in Colleen Louise Barry’s poem “Pilsen.” Is it possible to relate this feeling to beauty? Which Barry seems interested in doing. Or maybe she doesn’t. Or maybe she’s going to propose a more smudgy relationship between beauty and this feeling. I guess partly because beauty is often descirbed as “inarticulable,” or at least out-of-reach to the poet, and in a circumstance like this, a poet will propose to take some time and find ways to articulate their feelings about beauty.

But Barry isn’t going to make clear whether her poem is one of those let-me-put-words-to-beauty kind of poems. The poem opens like it’s going to consider beauty. The first stanza of “Pilsen” claims there are people who “have beautiful things / to make any sentiment valid.” A fair statement. But it’s not clear the tone used to state it. If this is something “some people” do, what does thet poet think of those “some people”? It’s not clear. Just like it’s not clear whether the “inarticulable feeling” she has in line 3 is equivalent to a “beatiful thing” from line 1? Or should I read the “sentiment” from line 2 as the more sensible reference? The poem is very smudgy with its grammar and its phrasing. And I like that smudginess!

The other Barry poems in the selection published by A Dozen Nothing are like a poetics of smudginess, even! What is a line of a poem supposed to do? How do lines inflect upon one another from one line to the next? It’s fun to feel a little confused in Barry’s poems. And in “Pilsen” it’s even more fun, because the poem is leading to a very sweet conclusion using that familiar poetic device: the this-poem-is-not-saying-what-I-am-very-obviously-saying trope. Otherwise known as the My-mistress’-eyes trope. “Lovely person I admire, my particular feeling has nothing to do with you,” the poem says. And then winks. Because that “inarticulable feeling” Barry has is about the frame of a window, where she looks out and sees you.

And I guess I like Barry’s smudginess so much. And I like how it would seem to do a disservice to “Pilsen,” because this trope benefits from precision of statement to effect its reversal. It’s like Barry’s smudges are reckless considering where the poem concludes. And I like a poem that can be confident in its recklessness and still step in with such a precise conclusion.

Helpful LinksColleen Louise Barry’s home pageA Dozen Nothing

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Friday Shoutouts!

Three poets I want so badly to see first full-length books from.

Julianne Neely – I am so excited every time I come across new work by Neely. It’s something about how she burrows into voice, that hum of voice that moves with inflection, implication of statement, association leading from thought to thought, or thought that immediately recognizes the incomplete nature of voice to thought. On her web site, she indicates she indicates an interested in the gendered self. Which makes me think of Lynn Keller’s Thinking Poetry (University of Iowa Press, 2010). Keller’s observation in 2010 about poetry that “transgresses the limits of intelligibility.” And then thinking of how this line of poetry has continued to innovate over the last ten years.

Gabriel Dozal – What a delight to see Dozal’s book, The Border Simulator (One World, 2023), getting published at the new Random House imprint One World! In 2018 and 2019, I had been tracking the appearance of these “Border Simulator” poems. The absurdity. The sharp political critique. The surreality that settles in the mind like reality. I can’t enthuse enough over this book coming out.

Amy Marvin – She’s so boring! And dull! Her poems are like wrapping a perfectly unfolded piece of aluminum foil with exclamation marks. And someone’s in the kitchen with you being like, “That’s dumb.” Her bio note at Prolit says she’s interested in waiting in bus stations. I would advise you, DO NOT READ “Cyborg Manifesto.” I know. I’m being ridiculous with all this. But when I read a poet who really endeavors on the invention that might exist in the mundane, I get very excited. There’s this part of Valerie Hsiung’s new book To Love an Artist (Essay Press, 2022) that does that. Like Hsiung could be blogging about productivity and focus. There’s a poem by Emilie Menzel in the recent issue of Bennington Review reporting on a rabbit trying to get into a closet. Marvin’s doing this flattening, and she’s needling at the whole neoliberal insulated culture.

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“The Book of Eve,” by Nora Hikari

I had just come across this poem, “origin story,” by Ginny Threefoot this morning. Which in itself is a spectacular poem. And I’m going to try and make space for posting about it. But it reminded me of this poem I read by Nora Hikari back in the fall. “The Book of Eve” (from The Journal Vol 45.2) has such an ecstatic joy to it. An origin story for “girls” that’s so kind and tender about what it must mean being a girl, or feeling the girl inside you. I get emotional just thinking about this poem. It is absolutely ebullient with love.

I mean, the definition of girls is “love-when-it-becomes” or “a girl is a kind of relationship” or it’s “a thing that happens between celestial bodies.” In fact, the poem has such a catalogue for equivalents to “girl,” and every one of them makes this origin story for girls feel like a surprise. As in, SURPRISE! You didn’t even know this exists, but you did, because as soon as you hear it in the poem, it feels like you were supposed to know about this all along. Or that’s what it feels like for me having a daughter and watching her discover the world.

I also appreciate how Hikari pulls that Bible spirit into the poem. The whole “In the beginning” notes. The “I-AM-WITH-YOU” kind of God (where God at one point is even “shone across the face of the water,” just like Genesis!). The girl whose story is being told gets to name trees and fish. For me, Hikari’s poem isn’t just an embrace of “girl,” it’s the affirming warmth that accompanies that embrace!

Quite honestly, Hikari’s poem is one of the reasons I wanted to start this blog. To make space and breathe with spectacular poems. To give props to the editors out there doing the work to find these poems and see them to publicaiton.

Important LinksNora Hikari’s Home PageThe Journal 45.2, where the poem was published

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