Travis Sharp, Monoculture

 

in the distance, a man
            body flexing in labor
            standing so far from the combine
            he looks nearly of size with it

 

              they’re plants,they’re
              people, they’replanted

                                    potted one
                        dutifully pruned
                                    new growth cut back

                        “to be fucked
                        in the fruits
                        of some labor”
                                    and in deep

                                    debt to the sun

Theauthor of the full-length debut, Yes, I Am a Corpse Flower (Knife ForkBook, 2021) [see my review of such here], the poetry pamphlet Behind the Poet Reading Their Poem Is a Sign Saying Applause (Knife Fork Book, 2022)and the chapbooks Sinister Queer Agenda (above/ground press, 2018) and OnePlus One Is Two Ones (Recreational Resources, 2018), the second full-lengthcollection by American poet and editor Travis Sharp is Monoculture (Greensboro NC: Unicorn Press, 2024). Composed as a book-length lyric suite, I haveto admit that, even beyond my enthusiasms for Sharp’s work, I’m already partialto any collection that opens with a quote by Denver poet Julie Carr, a quartetof lines pulled from 100 Notes on Violence (Ahsahta Press, 2010;Omnidawn, 2023): “Under the immense pleasure of conformity, I find myself /delivering // flower boxes with body parts // Under the immense comforting planeof conformity— [.]”

Sharp’sMonoculture works a collage-effect, weaving the elegy across Americanhistories, including the interwoven histories of slavery and commerce, specificallythe cotton industry, “(and how it’s still felt,” he writes, “encroachment of /overwhelm, even to this / day, today, it’s all too / much, there is danger /there, danger, there, it / comes up, again, / danger, there, and, this /throat, cottoning up, in / the face, of— // still—) [.]” Set as a book-lengthlyric suite, the poems of Monoculture are tethered together across thelength and breadth of eighty pages, yet clustered into untitled groupings, eachpoem an untitled fragment that adds to an accumulation across (as the backcover offers) “the economic, social, racial, religious, and sexual dimensionsof currency in America. Travis Sharp begins with cotton crops in the South andfollows the tendrils of consequence wherever they lead: into the food we eat,the work we do, the prayers we pray—and into the hungers that are never sated,the work that is never done, the prayers that are never said.” The effect isaccumulative, allowing one to open the book at any point and see the linestretching out across both directions, from the ending all the way back to thebeginning, wrapping critical observation and archival material with the mostbeautiful music. “we live among the plants we love among the plants we grazeamong the plants we gaze / among the plants we thrive among the plants we diveamong the plants we strive among the / plants we plead among the plants weplease we please oh please among the plants [.]” Through the shape of this singlenarrative thread, this long, accumulative poem, Sharp questions and examinesthe implications of such supply chains, especially those underplayed, yetessential to both American development and growth, all the way back to thoseoriginal foundations. As Sharp asks, mid-way through the collection: “and whatdoes it mean to hold cotton / unformed by labor? and what does it mean / forthe cotton unformed by labor to be the / product of labor? and what does itmean / that father child labored in those fields for / his own father whounlabored for rich men / to bag that cotton? and what does it mean / that afterthe beatings he came to pick / faster and faster, his arms slashing/ throughthe fields?”