Soham Patel, all one in the end—/water
That September when I firstsaw Lake Michigan, I wanted it to be the sea. Inhales and I would pretend I couldtaste salt from the air in my nose.
In the many monthshundreds of articles twenty pounds three books all the injury and essaysmouthfuls and loves and songs there were births and murders and deathsdisasters storms and protests—and some semblance of home now every day when I seethis lake.
Like that cocooningsettle downhill into Manitou Springs in Colorado—closer to Pikes Peak’s whitecap of snow and closer to my apartment, another threshold, so far away from themegachurch and from the military bases where I worked—or Bloomfield intoFriendship neighborhood in Pittsburgh where the red house brick red house linethe avenue to school. (“ON LAKE MICHIGAN”)
I’vebeen eager to see further work from Soham Patel, rewarded this past weekthrough the publication of her third full-length collection all one in the end—/water (Fort Collins CO: Delete Press, 2023) [see my review of her first two full-length collections here]. one in the end—/water is a collectionthat is, in part, set as an intimate and book-length response via lyric to an array of poetsworking a blend of lyric, deep attention and ecological concern, including Lorine Niedecker, Brenda Iijima, Matthew Olzmann, Maggie Nelson, Dawn Lundy Martin andRonaldo V. Wilson. The title of the collection, for example, is directly borrowedfrom Niedecker’s poem “Paean to Place.” Blending lyric, line-breaks and prosepoems, Patel’s is a lyric attending the very consideration of being, and beingpresent, and the variety of perspectives and observations provide multipledirections upon the same sense of attending those moments. “Debris leftstanding is dead and so won’t be cut down for the humans’ safety so the powercompany says accordingly a fear I now hate but have conditions towards eachtree from the middle to the end of our easement where I warranty me to learnall we can about this here rooted lands we’ve just moved in.” (“EXACTNESS COMESWITH WIND GUSTS”).Patelwrites colours and waves and lights across the ether. Writing on place names andancestors, rain and what it uncovers, these are poems around a singular senseof geography that just as much explore how writing is thought and composed. Aspart of the poem “ON LAKE MICHIGAN,” she writes: “Matthew’s poems about shipwrecksin the great lakes lists fish and it all makes me so thirsty.” This is clearly abook composed in conversation, and in response, and there is something startlingin this approach centred in a poetics of Niedecker and Iijima (the book is dedicatedto Iijima), of space and rock and ecological concerns. Something startling, I suppose,in how clear-minded the poems read, amid, or even through, such polyvocabulary.It is interesting to think, as well, of this collection, as Patel offers in anote at the end of the collection, as “reassemblages from the previouslypublished chapbooks,” blending previously-published material into an entirelycoherent book-length form. There is such deep, abiding care through herattention. “Once I found a shiny layered rock on // Brighton Beach in the sand,”she writes, as part of “LISTEN IT’S MY DAY OFF,” “All over the darkness is realthough // And oil fueled the plane not a boat [.]”
LIKE SNOW IN THE SUN IWANT TO S(T)AY. Opaque and at arm’s length with screens and the satellites,how this new word we learned, beautiful, is so. We are a dangerous thing,candles uttering against trees. We are dismantling from within under&uncommonand yet here to illuminate or else we’ll correct or uncover. Our light awaitswarm and burn. It means renewal.
