Supply Chain

by Pimone Triplett

With their extravagant musicality, Triplett’s poems explore the thinning lines between responsibility and complicity, the tangled “supply chain” that unnervingly connects the domestic to the political, personal memory to social practice, and age-old familial discords to our new place in the anthropocentric world. Equal parts celebration and lament for the mechanisms we shape and are shaped by, these poetic acts reveal the poet as an entangled mediator among registers of public and private, intimate and historical, voicings. Here we traffic in the blessings and burdens of the human will to shape a world. What’s more, as we follow these linked enchainings of the deeply en-worlded citizen, we reawaken to the central paradox of our time, the need to refuse easy answers, to stay open, trilling, between these necessary notes of critique and of compassion. 

Genres: Poetry

68 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2017

Reviews

[Joseph Spuckler]

Supply Chain by Pimone Triplett is a collection of modern poetry from Kuhl House Poets of the University of Iowa Press. Other poets in this group include Vanessa Roveto, Sarah V. Schweig, and Randall Potts. Triplett is the author of The Price of Light (Four Way Books, 2005) and Ruining the Picture (Triquarterly / Northwestern, 1998). She holds an MFA from the University of Iowa. Currently, she teaches at the University of Washington and the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers.

Supply Chain is an interesting collection of modern or non-traditional poetry. Most of the poems are short rapid fire phrases and thoughts when the line are read as natural stops. Perhaps this may be the links in the supply "chain."

The opening poem "Round Earth's Corner":

Take operation’s shimmy all the way back
to the spot where my hand on the fridge handle
unhands whole networks: PG&E pumping

Tracing the fridge handle back to its basic raw materials.  The mining of the coal.  The supply chain that allows you to reach for leftovers inside your refrigerator.  

Triplett sets together poems of connection and contrast. "On the Nutshells of Unexplained Death and Other Miniatures." was another favorite of mine made even better after reading the notes on the poem. It was inspired by the forensic work of Frances Glessner Lee, who created detailed dioramas of crime scenes. Words take meaning in shades some subtle like, "Dreaming, our genie, en-gendering ingenious edens on set" and others quite are obvious like the play on Laika in "I Dream of Jeannie: Parabolic Lens". "To All the Houseplants I Have Killed" is a wonderful collection of words, meanings, and images.

Triplett writes poetry that appeals to a deeper and thoughtful reading for its full enjoyment.  One must watch the words and feel their meanings.  A complex but rewarding collection.  

[Nathaniel Darkish · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall a decent collection of poetry. There were some gems (I especially loved the poem about becoming the things you kill after you die) and some images definitely stuck with me. On the flipside, there were some poems with language so academic and distant that I had trouble connecting with them (and I'm saying this as a voracious reader with an English degree). So, as with most collections of just about anything, it ended up being a mixed bag.

[João Pinho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dictating in a cadence of contrasts the modus operandi of her poetic writing Triplett is able to create chords and rhymes without dismiss the common language. "Stay back. Stay confusion, I thought sinking inside pound and pianoforte, the heard, some treble and bass that, muddling, made us." The sound is even more powerful when shared: "the annals of our affections and their opposite? The mews you built can be seen from space, doubles down on shadows, painterly as some far off pagoda." The recess of the tongue, or a twisting hybrid that is splendidly achieved in some of the poems. "What eco of echoes that hollows this hearing is: arrest me, item, or keep your place. "Languid, cohesive, expressive, a diaphanous manifestation of rituals of desire and rejection, the story of the cat and the rat.