Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides

by Jessica Laser

Poetry. "Finally an oracle with a gorgeous sense of humor. Jessica Laser's vision is singular, her voice at once formidable and intimate. Its impeccable wit imparts a bracing metaphysics. 'I said to myself as a child do not / Mistake the ghost you fear for / The ghost you are.' Here intellect sings. Everywhere agile, coruscating syntax proves music isn't only a form of beauty, it's also a mode of inquiry. Rhyme tracks relations inaccessible to reason. Repetition conducts its tests of the present, its shadow appraisals of the past's part in the future. The visceral pleasure one experiences reading these poems corresponds to the depth of their ambition: to fathom human feeling--its contradictions, its infinite shifts--and 'see how full of changes change is.'"--Margaret Ross

Genres: Poetry

127 pages, Paperback

Published March 15, 2019

Reviews

[Forrest Gander]

Such a wonderfully original, strange, and compelling book. Laser draws on a kind of 19th century literary style-- a lexicon that includes "suitors," "love," "soul," "thee," addresses to the "reader," apostrophes of "Lord," etc., plus capitalized left margin words, antique phrasings, "delayed rhymes," a kind of cat's cradle syntax that contracts and expands tensely, and a penchant for logically presented constructions that are insistently paradoxical: "I could let you/ Teach me how/ If I could let you." This sort of sensibility meets a very contemporary colloquial interrupted narrative poetics, a sort of 3rd generation NY School, that mixes proper names (including exfoliating characters named Sergei), dialogue, bedtalk, and (in section IV) place-specific references to Greenpoint in Brooklyn. The last section of the book is entirely constructed of juxtaposed quotations and somehow manages to bring together many of the themes in the earlier sections. No one else-- with the exception, maybe, of Kit Schluter whose work is nevertheless quite distinct-- writes like this. It's vastly rewarding, constantly surprising, and it gets its emotional/psychological hooks in you in no time. See if you don't quickly feel INVOLVED in the poems. Here are a few lines from section 2 to pull you in:

Doom is a planet, the views, the overhanging
vines and I live in a time of fruition
obsessed with fun, feeling myself part of it,
a relic, a ruined thing.

[Carla Seravalli]

wow i really need to read war and peace