Kevin Holden, Pink Noise

 

mica

that would a
creek drank
or certainly through
& objects contracting
vertices of xs
a hardwood to shower
his
rippling
& tender that wouldbe
& go up the cliff
lone pine atop  it
that would be a lilacbush
him running past you
turning into lilacs

Andso opens Pink Noise (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024), the latestfull-length poetry collection by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based poet and translator Kevin Holden. Following a half-dozen books and chapbooks including Alpine(White Queen, 2007), Glinting (Zeta Function, 2008), Identity (CannibalBooks, 2009), Sublimation (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Birch(Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Solar (Fence Books, 2016), Pink Noiseis composed as a cluster of accumulated long poems and suites with openingsalvo, “mica,” followed by the expansive “riot,” “grit,” “tunnel,” twenty poemcluster “polytopes,” “parhelion,” “grid,” “tunnel” and “glinting.” Holden has agift for attending to the lyric document, providing articulation and commentaryon events from the inside, as they occur, and allowing the reader into theexperience. Writing a queer lyric from a queer body (as suggests Brian Teare’sback cover quote), Holden writes of seeking and searching out love in anenvironment too often hostile, writing the conflicting elements of violence andintimacy, comfort and so much noise. “the gauge is high / we might climb up,”the opening section offers, “and over endless mesh and identities / strung indeep sound or hope / and/or / long talk at empire’s close [.]”

“thestreets at night,” opens the accumulative “riot,” “& is a circle or queersapphire ringing plastic / o young man fabulous muscles star & it / is adark shadow flowing over pines / a store nearby showering grey sparks / I foundyou in a club circling in air [.]” Centred around the mantra “so cold today” asa kind of echo, or tether, the poem moves ever outward, returning back to thatpoint, while detailing police brutality, and resistance, wrapped as a kind ofunfolding, unfurling and swirling sequence of fragments and short bursts thatcohere into something spectacular.

that then caused queerflowering in pink
lattices shouldering up abunch of them fighting to the street holding
an intersection
tear gas cascading inrainbows across their bleary eyes

 

you want to fight a city
zigzagging heap lightyearin a dark function and any kind of rhythm,
damn you, we wanted tobust them open talking about money and they
clear cut the whole thing