Orient

by Nicholas Gulig

With the ethical reach of George Oppen or Etel Adnan, but with a scope and feel all his own—and now, because he gave it to us, ours too—Nicholas Gulig takes stock of our world of war and forced migration, our world of wanderers we only know of and feel nonetheless. “So what to do about it?” he asks. “It’s beginning to feel a lot like I’m at fault for something far away.” Yes. It’s been feeling that way since we first woke up and found ourselves no longer children, because the war began, or the towers fell, or because we speak a language and are an empire. How, then, to find our way into and remain in love with those who are near and those who are not, and remain there, unflinching, awake? Poetry is a way, poetry like this—quiet and sudden and forgiving and strong. Read not for solace, but for love.

—Julie Carr

In Orient, we are immersed, immediately, in the way these poems both quietly astound and articulate the “vital emptiness” of what disturbs and is absorbed in hint and hue through transcription, collage, and other practices of memory’s recollection and erasure, admiring along the way the speaker’s effort to illustrate how a field between polarities “begins to open outward.” In doing so, Nicholas Gulig delves into the ways we must consistently try and fail to orient ourselves to the junctures between the ancient and the present conditions of our time—and all that fails our speech and yet endures in language and our listening attentively to its noises. Throughout the work, we have poems that are both a reckoning and a recording, which, as Gulig writes, are also forms of “wandering.” Ultimately, Orient arrives at its poignant “narrative and nationality, a state of pure emergency,” made possible by Gulig’s singular sense of presence, of speaking directly to what signals “empire” for the poet who lives within it. This is an astounding collection.

—Prageeta Sharma

Nicholas Gulig’s riveting new collection Orient considers what it means to be a global citizen in the information age. These urgent, exciting poems ask us how we mediate the distance between the person at a computer watching the war on the news and the person who is in a war zone. How do we mediate language when one is writing about war that happens elsewhere but is intimately felt? The muscular sound and syntax of these poems jostle and pull us uneasily into its fragmented, tension-filled world. “Language is a residue. / I cling,” states the speaker, and the words “residue” and “cling” are at once tender, hopeful, and tenuous. Orient is challenging, breathless, innovative, and stunning. This is a necessary work in a difficult time.

—Hadara Bar-Nadav

Genres: Poetry

130 pages, Paperback

Published April 1, 2018

Reviews

[Anne · Rating 5 out of 5]

This. This. This. This. This. I’ve been searching for poetry like this. It’s poetry of witness centered on war from the perspective not of someone physically in it, but of someone grappling emotionally with its reality and our collective complacency and/or guilt: it showcases both the terror of our capacity for cruelty and apathy as well as the depths of our imaginative positions of empathy. It’s so good!

[Abbigayle Mathis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! I’ve had this book for years and only just picked it up. Heady, meditation on noise in more ways than I ever thought noise could be thought about. It’s an intricate weaving of three parallel stories set in different times of the speakers life. Normally I get lost and bogged down in poetry that is this highly philosophical, but I found this book utterly captivating and moving. Buried under recollections of the speaker’s relation to 9/11 are beautiful explorations of the relationships we all have to each other and the world we exist in, how the elements around and outside of us combine and expand in tandem.

“In a valley far away the alphabet became a desert and I crossed it. I found no water there but that which welled in others.”

“Language is a residue. I cling.”

“The first time I ever read a poem that worked I got distracted. The words came in from nowhere and I agreed.”

[Stephanie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very vivid writing, I often felt disoriented which I believed matched the intention of the writer who reflected this feeling in the work. Really rich poems and clean layout which gave the words the space they needed to present themselves. I was a big fan of the images throughout as well. At the end of the book I read the author dedicated the book to a woman and daughter once interviewed on television about the war. I was wondering how much of this was personal emotion and how much was fabricated, the difference wouldn’t really matter. The gravity of the work still holds strength and complexity which I’m sill unraveling.

[Anatoly Molotkov · Rating 5 out of 5]

"One begins to recognize the shape and form of other faces, a sea of voices crossing states and sand and nations, becoming politics, the boundaries of self and other, bewildered past the singular, the sound of it, of making" A conscientious, empathetic collection concerned with our diminished humanity.

[Kent]

A list of warring. A list of being at war, and the sense of war. It's senseless. It's happening. Occurring is a verb and a noun in this book. The occurring of war. Being at war. Literally, war. But also a person warring with the idea of war. What are people when they are at war. What is senseless as a noise, a language, an internal rhythm. A family is together when one war starts. There is language forming them. It's doing family things. Family is personal and intimate. It is ongoing. What does war mean when it's on television. What is war in a desert. How does the desert feel like a landscape that would seemingly contradict war? How does civilization exist on this landscape. But it does. It has. Civilization has been families and histories. History has been people and groups of people. And something very personal, too. History is more established on a desert than in most other places on earth. And yet, history continues. Gulig is part of history, even as he sees how unforgiving history is for the single person. It's noise. It's vague imagery. It's a family that may be imagined or real as it exists within the language Gulig uses to depict them.

[Ryan Bollenbach]

I read this volume in two quick sittings. I felt like this way of digesting the material worked well for it. In this, Gulig reads the distance between America and our many sites of unrelenting war. The vocabulary was distanced, using critical lenses and jargon somewhat like the language poets (Julianna Spahr's "The Connection of Everyone With Lungs" came to mind for me) while being more direct at moments, and reacting to the visceral photographs that the internet offers, only getting more visceral as modes of video recording/picture taking get more avanced. The directness of address in some sections of this poem reminded me of Jennifer S. Cheng's recent book "A House" (not a bad thing at all). I'm already interested in re-reading, so that definitely says something for it as well.