Leah Souffrant, Entanglements

 

Nothing I explain isoutside this writing, and as I explain it transforms in the telling. But thereare countless pieces entangled, unknown, taking shape and changing the work.The travel that might take place. The arrivals of passengers full of excitement.And passengers slow with exhaustion, bored with business. The man next to measks his interlocutor, “Have you been to the Austin airport?” Which terminal doyou see me in? How terminal could any terminal be, how otherwise than yours? Ihave not been to Austin, I think silently. Where have we never been? Where arewe not going, shaping the ideas?

I’mabsolutely delighting in the prose of Entanglements (Atlanta GA: UnboundEditions Press, 2023) by New York-based Leah Souffrant, the author of Plain Burned Things: A Poetics of the Unsayable (Presses Universitaires de Liège,2017), who “makes art, poetry, essays and criticism.” There are ways throughwhich her prose offers comparisons to similar works by Jenny Boully, Sarah Lang, Danielle Vogel [see my review of her latest here] or Lori Anderson Moseman [see my review of her latest here]; a way through which thinking andreading and composition itself are presented across a rich and extended proselyric. Through Souffrant, the very subject is the shape of the writing as itoccurs. “I need poetic form to convey the ways we come to know and create theworld we inhabit and experience,” she writes, early on, “both as experience andthrough experience. These ways are necessarily multiple, plural. Hungry fromthe fragrances.” As the cover blurb offers: “Nothing less than a journey behindthe scenes of her own creative process, Leah Souffrant’s Entanglementsembraces the contingency, incompletion, difficulty, and uncertainty of artisticpractice.”

Thecollection is woven, entangled, even through the description of sections—“Introduction:Entanglements: poetic epistemology,” “Thread: And keep me all this night,”“Thread: Attention to Loving,” “Thread: Riddle of Peace,” “Thread: The Book,”“Thread: Riddle of the Physical,” “On Entangling Threads” and “Thread: Weare always in ruins” to “Further Entanglements, Works Cited, End Notes.” Asthe collection opens, she offers the suggestion of being in a particular spaceand letting the notes fly in highly considered and formed prose, allowing that,even in flight, her thoughts are properly grounded. This is a remarkablecollection, one that rewards and even requires repeated readings through asimultaneous lyric density across ease. Further, as she offers:

Poetic knowing has longunderstood our limitations, the relativism of knowledge, the ways in whichattention to what happens – its repetition, its patterns, its disruptions – ishow we come to understand anything, perhaps everything. And this arrival comesthrough the senses: sound, body, living even as we think. Some poets aretrapped in history, poets seeking some humans and not others, loving only wheatmight have been before them as love-worthy. Language has oppressed, imprisoned,ruined. Loosening chains requires a heat, fine, burning. Yet even these poetsmight have seen nonetheless a world created in our perceptions. Even here, afragment of wisdom more capacious than law.