Physics + Imaginary Objects, Cold Water

The Physics of Imaginary Objects by Tina May Hall

 

I don't suppose I'm the only one with an old beloved hardcover of Renata Adler's Speedboat, or that I'm alone in being real interested in books which are contest winners judged by writers I admire. Regardless: whoever you are, you should be reading Tina May Hall's Drue Heinz Prize-winning book The Physics of Imaginary Objects, and here's why. First, this may be one of the prettiest, most satisfying books to actually hold and see that I've come across in some time–stuff as banal and pass-over-able as the pagination betrays how cared about and for this book has been in all stages.

But layout's never exclusively why we go to collections of stories. Here's why we go to stories:

 

We will know each other by the way our watches slip from our wrists, the bruises on our knees, our winged shoulder blades tenting silk dresses.

We eat; we eat. We eat like wild boars, like wolves, like cyclists in training. We love the bloody shreds that cling to the T. We suck the gob of marrow that floats to the top of the soup. We gnaw the chicken down to splinters.

Everything is bone, bone, bone.

 

That's the start to Tina May Hall's "The Skinny Girls' Constitution and Bylaws," and if you're more into combos, the right hook to go with the left jab of that story is "All the Day's Sad Events," the book-finishing novella which features mundane banality crossed with a casual bewitching that's all the more creepy for being somehow both threatening but not malicious. Here's the truth: this book's worth getting exclusively for "All the Day's Sad Events," though with stories like "Skinny Girls'" and other dazzlers like "By the Gleam of Her Teeth, She Will Light the Path Before Her" and "This Is a Love Story, Too," you'd maybe be hard pressed (or silly) to try to narrow a list of reasons for getting this book. There's a great hunger at large wolfing through The Physics of Imaginary Objects, and I'll say this, as somebody who occasionally gets pissed off or let down or both by contest-winning things: this one absolutely, absolutely deserves the Drue Heinz Prize, and it absolutely deserves readers.

 

By Cold Water by Chris Dombrowski

 

The world is more than you believe it is. Here's one reason: sometimes you can get really excited about a certain book, and talk a bunch about it, and, later, someone else will come and see what you've written, and that someone will have written something else, and he'll maybe send you a copy of what he's written.

Here's another reason:

 

Old dog October arrives

half blind and wheezing,

limping its track

through ruts along the road.

 

I want to be worthy

of this waking dream:

my mother, before my birth,

kneads clouds at the counter.

Floured, rain-scent thick

as balm, they rise

in the far room and feed

no one. My father

walks the markey, buys

hollow loaves, calls them

little worlds, little nothings.

 

These are the first two stanzas of "October Suite" by Chris Dombrowski, from his By Cold Water, which is just a brick to the head of a gorgeous collection of poetry, though that's hardly fair. It's not that By Cold Water's beautiful, though it very much is, page after page. No, what the book's doing, in ways I find miraculous, is working at the root level of both the natural world around us and the wonders that our heads are full-time stuffed with. Meaning what? Meaning here's another swath of "October": "What if we learned to treat / each other as if a music / were barely playing?" Here's further evidence, the end of "Woodkate, Hackmatack":

 

While the creek takes its time, meandering

out of sight the way a dialect disappears from language,

privy or not to its own distinction. So that anymore

to say woodkate or hackmatack is to hold

a former way of life in the mouth,

which is to hold what was in the body—

breath,

snow, glipse of light between the larches, drum

of unseen beak on wood. Brief undulating

flight of what is and is gone.

 

Look, much like humor, often the quickest and most lethal way to deflate whatever joy a piece of art's offering is to run it through rough analysis, noting its tendons and meat. The magic and awe of Dombrowski's work is evident in every poem in the collection, and the brief bits excerpted here should light up the mental pinball display of close readers. I'd like to make this abundantly clear, though: Dombrowski's work is that rarest sort (or it seems rare, or getting more rare, as poetry fights with larger-toothed and -voiced communication animals), his poetry's delicate. I don't mean fragile and I don't mean fey or wimply or anything like that. His stuff's light: he sets a thing down on a page, drags elemental bits into light, sets another thing down, drags more elemental bits from that, and then, in the conjunction of these two (or more) things, he lets the reader get light and fuse-blown by the gorgeousness. If you think this isn't a big deal, read more contemporary poetry. If you know how big a deal this is, get yr hands post-haste on By Cold Water.