MARTEN CLIBBENS, MATTHEW HALL, PAIGE MELIN, PATRICK
RIEDY and TINA DARRAGH Review
Engine Light by Kate Colby
(PressBoard
Press, 2015)
The
Under Arc by Lynne Dreyer
(Primary Writing Books, 2015)
distance decay by Cathy Eisenhower
(Ugly Duckling Presse,
2015)
Prynne Poems by Nava Fader
(PressBoardPress,
2015)
yes & what happens by Hailey
Higdon
(dusie
kollectiv/what to us (press), 2015)
Deep City by Megan Kaminski
(Noemi Press, 2015)
Apology of a Girl Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell by Devon
Moore
(Mayapple
Press, 2015)
Servant Drone by
bruno neiva and Paul Hawkins
(Knives Forks And
Spoons, 2016)
Hélène by Deborah Poe
(Furniture
Press Books, 2012)
Commentary (A Tale) by Marcelle
Sauvageot, trans. Christine Schwartz Hartley & Anna Moschovakis
(Ugly
Duckling Presse, 2013)
Prima Vera by Jill Tomasetti
(Drop Leaf Press, 2015)
A Liquid Bird Inside The Night by Alexandra
van de Kamp
(Red Glass
Books, 2015)
i know that this ritual by Brad
Vogler
(Stockport
Flats, 2015)
[Previously
published in Yellow Field #11, April 2016, curated by Edric Mesmer]
Engine Light
Kate Colby
PressBoardPress
2015
This small book achieves big things,
as the large contracts to the little, what is here suggests what is elsewhere,
near can seem to be far, and a “cross-hatched penumbra” becomes a “stripe of
light.” “Everything is one of a pair / except collectively” one poem proposes,
and the book becomes a careful, detailed and sustained inspection of
distinctions and opposites which at times blur or join, and which depend on one
another for their own definition and identity. The poems inhabit a distance
between a branch and its shadow, between a mouth and an eye, between the
perception of a thing and the saying of a thing, examining with great precision
a dialectical relation, an interstice, a knowledge aware of its limits, a
certainty which can very quickly pass into uncertainty, and these sudden shifts
of attention are managed with a great economy of means.
“The only light is / all around.” The
enjambment here leads the reader into expecting “the only light” to be something
small or fitful, a candle, a flashlight, but then, like a miracle, the line
turns and the light is “all around” and the sense of size and dimension has
altered, from the hint of tiny to the promise of everywhere. The light has gone
from a flicker to a brightness in the air. It is a subtle poetry which can
enact such changes in spatial focus with an absence of fuss and a simple
language: similarly, it is a discriminating poetry which is able to suggest
fractures in time and self just with the breaking of a line—“I’m not all /
there yet,” for example, brilliantly contends that while some of her may be
“there” some of her remains elusive and elsewhere.
“A wracked strand / of egg-sac
entrails // cochlear shells / I hold to my ear.” Colby’s delicate intricacies
of repeated sounds, and the flexibility of her syntax, are able to provide an
abiding sense of a poem locating its meaning and its structure, simultaneously,
as it comes into being, and that becoming is often the subject of the poem; “so
to speak / to what I don’t know.” The poem is a finding out, a “falling on
thresholds,” a discovery of “light / at the fringes of vision,” and a discovery
also of “what / the heart holds / out.”
The beauty of these poems, and the
care taken in their making, have found their equal in the care taken, once
again, by PressBoardPress, who are to be congratulated on another elegant
chapbook.
Marten Clibbens
The
Under Arc
Lynne Dreyer
Primary Writing Books
2015
“How do you get your words?” Lynne Dreyer
asks us at the beginning of her new book, The
Under Arc. The “story arc”—so much a part of our culture—dictates what is
possible, our “…verbs chained with a past, mangled into an artificial heart.”
Dreyer sees the “power of language” as “you and your pronoun whirl about…” to
where “[e]verything was without writing…[m]usic came into the body; the sun was
not a figment.” Under the arc, we experience “…the cycle of breath following
the cycle of desire, and then suspended softly the two pauses there.” Dreyer
gives us a way to experience language as a “…room on a diagonal to reveal the
world…[e]ach to its own square. This meant not to write.” Instead of words
spinning us, we whirl with words under the arc into joy, into life.
Tina
Darragh
distance decay
Cathy Eisenhower
Ugly Duckling Presse
2015
At a poetry reading a few weeks ago,
two women read work about being raped. Their poems were acts of triumph over
the horrific acts, and they made it clear that they were moving on. I wished I
had copies of Cathy Eisenhower’s distance
decay to give to them for when the memories of their assaults came back
stronger than ever. Eisenhower knows that acts of violence such as rape are
all-consuming narratives—“a vast face”—that never truly leaves. In distance decay, she addresses her assault by broadening the frame
to include cultural and historical factors and then reconfiguring her memories
to include the world—“candling,
a public alone/pulling off the little part.”
Eisenhower does not claim a victory
over the experience of being raped. Instead, she demonstrates how one continues
to move through fragmented experience—and endure: “as I sit and breathe grow mode rat e
as I sit and breathe keep co ming/ back and sayin g that /and to uching gen tly
the sayi ng of it back.” Ultimately, distance
decay addresses the long-term consequences of any violent act, and provides
comfort and support to those who have experienced violence in their lives.
Tina
Darragh
Prynne Poems
Nava Fader
PressBoardPress
2015
Each of Nava Fader’s poems, in this
recent gathering, begins with a line of J.H. Prynne’s, and so proposes a
poetics of reading, a poetry as collaborative act, and the themes of violence
which pertain to Prynne’s work are here examined in sometimes disturbing
detail, yet Fader’s style and prosody are all her own, by turn beautiful and
frightening. The “feedstuff for ruin” of Prynne’s line, for example, is
transformed into a broken female body; “all parts / of yourself in hedgerows
parceled / and packed flash / frozen” as if the body had become a commodity at
the mercy of the laws of the market, in which “your food / stamp purchase
time,” as another poem memorably puts it, is itself a commodity.
These poems remind us, albeit quietly,
that an early volume of Prynne’s was Kitchen
Poems, and here Fader’s images of eating and cooking—“fiddleheads / a
marvel in their butter”—can abruptly shift to “mouthfuls jab uppercut” and the
domestic realm has become a dangerous, contested or desolate space, from which
“the water the fire has gone.” The kitchen is constantly threatened in these
poems, and “fox / calls to the chickens this way / to heaven.” It is remarkable
that Fader can find images of desire rewarded, of beauty’s calm, in such an
environment, and that a lyrical grace can restore hope against the odds:
“sustenance your face corona,” one poem has it, a return to the body, this time
not broken but glowing.
This book is a response to Prynne,
then, but interpretation is here the act of a radical and creative will, as
vision slips into hallucination, and one thing becomes another at the turn of a
line. Fader’s writing possesses the power to astonish and to shock; one line
does not necessarily predict the next—a jolly rancher suddenly becomes a
marionette, for example, or a “pandemic generosity” abruptly turns into a
“leering residue,” and our reading of these poems becomes a journey from
surprise to amazement, and from amazement back to surprise.
Nava Fader is developing a notable
oeuvre, to which this handsome, hand-stitched and glittering PressBoardPress chapbook
is a beautiful addition.
Marten Clibbens
yes & what happens
Hailey
Higdon
dusie
kollectiv/what to us (press)
2015
“I believe we come back” – back home,
back to ourselves, to each other, back to our solitude, back to rivers and seas
and cities, “back when we were / without compression.” Hailey Higdon’s yes & what happens constantly draws
us back, asking us to re-examine ourselves, our relations, and our intimate
spaces in the process. In its dream-like merging of cityscpaes and riverbends,
of lonely drug stores and shared dinners, yes
& what happens questions boundaries, acknowledging their presence only
to surge through them. These fluid, dreamy transitions bring the disparate into
proximity – “trees across trampolines” – and in doing so urge readers to
re-examine our own boundaries, to consider “the colonization of our cognitive
processes,” the imposition of borders. And what happens, Higdon asks – what
happens when we come back, when we say yes to dissolution and merging, when we
permit ourselves “[t]o believe in process, in moment to moment, to let / to be
as queer as you are without boundaries?” yes
& what happens is itself a dream of amalgamation and connection, “a
dream of melting into other people” – and its words will linger long after
you’ve dreamt it.
Paige
Melin
Deep City
Megan Kaminski
Noemi Press
2015
Megan Kaminski’s Deep City opens with the speaker
confessing:
dear
city I want to crawl inside your chest
ply
rib by rib by rib and slip soft
extol
your innerworks colder sounds
Kaminski’s
project reads as if the speaker were Eros walking the streets of his polis
composing poems of warmth that emanate from the “colder sounds” of city life.
Her ability to stack perception, music, and desire atop one another builds a
monument to our hopeful inner-lives. These poems reveal how the meta and
physical structures we have erected to protect ourselves from the daily
onslaught of the world have tragically separated us from expressing our base
longing for another. It becomes evident that desire has moved underground, such
as is shown in “Before the steel bridge east,” whose 2nd section
partially reads:
left
legs move into a fondu après an attitude
effacèe
where
were you yesterday morning when the fog resisted
and my knees buckled
As
the reader moves through the book, she traverses the changing landscape of
poetic forms as the trans-temporal place of the city is mapped onto the page.
Closing with a set of intricate poems under the title “Collection,” blank space
separates as if a median of consciousness divides them. Witness the depth of
our divisions:
grayed
asphalt To say the
trees green the sky blue bricks red
stadium
lighting letter spill point to
further destinations the body
cellular
tower shop on 45th
across from white office buildings
Patrick Riedy
Apology of a Girl Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell
Devon Moore
Mayapple
Press
2015
Devon Moore’s collection of poems
names itself as an apology, and it reads largely as such. Often the speaker
seems to be floundering, wanting to be sure of herself but reaching out to grab
onto lovers, dead fathers, and broken mothers as she slowly falls into the
unknown of herself. Her slippage is rooted in a shame or discomfort in
embodiment – the speaker draws attention to the freak-show quality of being a
woman constantly under scrutiny from herself and others, equating it with being
a “creature mov[ing] / as I move forward in the perpetual tunnel before a
parade of eyes.” And this shame in embodiment is learned: the speaker asks us
to consider the hypersexualitzation of
the (young) female body: “Think about your own / body. How it ripened before
you were ready. How there are never enough / layers to cover you up.” Despite
the slippage, Moore reminds us that in one thing we are constant: “we’re always
changing.” And so at rare moments, the speaker shines through the changes as a
confident self, as in the poem “This Is Your Warning:”
I saw
in your eyes that I had hurt you,
but it
wasn’t enough,
so I
took off my shirt and then my bra.
You
said “milky” and “white,” I said “don’t touch,”
and I
fastened my heart rate monitor’s strap
beneath
my breasts, licking each electrode
moist.
“This is your warning,” I said
as I
handed you the digital watch, “77?” you read.
“Yes,”
I nodded, “It’s barely beating for you.”
At times strong and unapologetic, at
others timid and remorseful, Apology of a
Girl Who Is Told She Is Going to Hell takes its reader on a raw and
unfiltered journey through embodiment, grief, self-questioning, and, ultimately,
self-discovery.
Paige Melin
Servant Drone
bruno neiva and Paul
Hawkins
Knives Forks And
Spoons
2016
bruno neiva and Paul
Hawkin’s Servant Drone plays on a linguistic register alongside of Ian
Heames’ Gloss to Carriers and a number of other recent,
predominantly-British, collections which critique the devastation of drones
strikes on foreign targets. neiva and Hawkins’ collection engages the polysemy
between military reportage and the colloquial utterance of the urban everyday.
The poems play on the chaos and clanship of metropolitan margins, markings of
passage and the communality of exchange, driven by a characteristically charged
bifurcation of meaning in which the interconnectedness of global militarisation
determines the flourishing excess of civilian lives. Servant Drone
collapses regimes of authorship and ownership, as the poets collaborate with a
lexis mediated in exchange surplus and post-consumption ephemera.
The collection presents a number of engaging facets that require considerable
attention. The graphically-enabled semiotics of neiva’s poem #6 or Hawkins’ #25
function in a semi-coded reality of broken electronic communication,
highlighting linguistic barriers and typographic dissonance. The collection’s
early exchange focus on image-complexes of surveillance with radical
juxtapositions of ‘café wives’, meta-commentary highlighting the control and
contortion of the poem’s frames. These poems give way to sloganeering turns of
phrase, critiquing the aimless chatter of marketing and salability. Hawkins’
#10 highlights the compressed boundaries of a post-capital life, the blitzkrieg
of reportage and chem-life while synthesising sardonic glimpses of the
“shimmy-shimmer” of pastoral skies. Irony typifies the collection: neiva’s #14,
which is characterised by a run-on of post-purchase refuse, is heartily
juxtaposed by the minimalist strings of Hawkins’ #13. KFS once again delivers a
serious, hard-hitting collection and a signifier of the plenitude of post-Avant
poetry today.
Matthew Hall
Hélène
Deborah Poe
Furniture
Press Books
2012
Exploring
various forms of imprisonment, whether living under surveillance at a
factory-convent or the complications that arise from intimate relationships
with fellow worker M— and M— ’s brother, Deborah Poe’s Hélène examines the strive for inner beauty amongst constant
exploitation. Our heroine, Hélène, relates the experience of claustrophobic
conditions within a 19th century French silk factory from the onset
of the project:
To
eliminate succession of movements is to linger in lament. Feel but tell no one
a way of being. Insects on the
interior. The cocoon makes something beautiful in shelter, before the breaking
out.
By
the book’s end, we are forced to grapple with subtlety of Hélène’s “breaking
out.” Rather than loiter in the messiness of narrative, Poe shows us “What life
would be like after your own revolution.” Deliberately understated, the
revolution “is your dream now—and in it you hold my loneliness.” As Hélène sits
amidst continual captivity, she is remarkably deft at making “something
beautiful”:
I crush my chest and pull out a string of songs
bone inscriptions, notes on a score—in the right hands
something becomes
music—these are the notes which code a becoming
phenomena maneuverings otherwise left unscribed.
Finishing as more of a philosophical
tract and less as a self-enclosed narrative as to the question of why beauty is
valued, the final section ends the sentence of loneliness as previously
described. We are left to muse while Hélène proposes, “You are the thing
meaning might depend on.”
Patrick Riedy
Commentary (A Tale)
Marcelle Sauvageot
trans.
Christine Schwartz Hartley & Anna Moschovakis
Ugly
Duckling Presse
2013
“You take this as a proof of love,
don’t you?” Marcelle Sauvageot opens her memoir with a quote from a letter from
her then-lover, “Baby.” His dwindling affection is evident in the letters he
writes her from Paris as she journeys to a sanatorium where she will spend her
last days dying of tuberculosis. But Sauvageot’s memoir, though it centers
around her relationship with Baby, resists becoming a proof of love itself.
Rather, her memoir unreservedly examines their relationship as though through a
microscope, turning the (traditionally heteronormative male) gaze away from
herself and onto Baby. She analyzes his writing as she analyzes him, reading
almost scathingly between the lines of his letters while reflecting on moments
in their relationship. And this honest and critical analysis is a feminist
undertaking in revenge; she knows that the male subject does not want to be
seen so clearly: “But if you notice two eyes watching you, then smiling, you
revolt. You feel that you have been ‘seen’ and you don't want to be seen: you
want only ‘to be.’” Yet it is also a feminist assertion of self-sufficiency;
though her emotions of love, loss, and hurt are clearly and descriptively
articulated, the narrative abstains from falling into cliché or becoming the
trope of a woman pining over her lost man - she is passionate without being effusive,
analytical without being removed, self-reflective and romantic all at once.
This lost feminist classic is the story of a woman who feels deeply and
believes in herself strongly, whose resolution to carry on is stronger than her
need to hold on to the past: “You are gone, but I am finding myself again ... I
have come back to myself, and with myself, I will fight to carry on.”
Paige Melin
Prima Vera
Jill Tomasetti
Drop Leaf Press
2015
In
the Orphic tradition, there is a strong belief that human and nature were once
and will be again one and the same, that each being in the universe is a part
of a whole, that, in the words of Kaja Silverman, “everything derives from the
same flesh.” This interconnectedness is central in Jill Tomasetti’s PRIMA
VERA, a collection which focuses on the chasm between the human and the
natural world and our primal longing to mend it, our “trying to get past
ourselves and into it.” The speaker’s own desire to be in closer commune with
nature is manifest throughout. She asks of a plant shoot, “give me words /
teach me your language,” and, later, she regrets the lack of that language: “i
don’t know what to say / i bought these seeds from the store / i can’t make
even one of you.” The desire for interconnectedness is met with the frustration
of separation, as well as the constant human impulse to impose and the
capitalist drive to produce; the speaker recognizes her own medium of
conveyance as a form of obstruction:
submerge this
dissolve
the smooth paper
so the twilight
sounds are left
to talk to each other
Yet
even as human language and forms (the book-object) act in themselves as
barriers to the natural world, poetry, the speaker recognizes, also has the
potential to breach the chasm: “we burrow / into the theme / biting juicy bulbs
of / new language.” And though the speaker manipulates nature to make a point,
her willingness to abandon herself to “unknowing,” to a negative capability,
keeps her from imposing on the natural world and instead puts her in a sort of
tandem with it. PRIMA VERA is an evocative collection, filled with
yearning, quiet contemplation, defeat, and hope.
Paige Melin
A Liquid Bird Inside The Night
Alexandra
van de Kamp
Red Glass
Books
2015
Alexandra
van de Kamp’s A Liquid Bird Inside The
Night offers “a rain of hums” (“Nightgowns”) amidst “an ocean of sound”
(“How to Survive Yourself in Nine Steps”). In these poems, words as stillicide
fall into a vast sea of dreams and movie scenes. Music propels the reader
through van de Kamp’s dream-like world. In the poem “Sleep: An Update”, van de
Kamp writes, “Teeth dream their way / through the language they are forced to
chew.” Echoing Berryman’s Dream Songs,
van de Kamp’s utilizes the logic of dreams as a means of carrying back clarity
from the other world of sleep. As the poem “The Swill of Sleep” announces, van
de Kamp believes:
When
we sleep, we tip over
the
jar of our dreams and end up
backstroking
through the muck of ourselves
Having
practiced her backstroke, these poems shine through their wisdom. In the poem
“How to Build a Summer Vacation” the speaker states, “Clarity is just a matter
of distance mixed with a massive / dollop of patience.” However, no reader
should discount how difficult this lucidity was achieved. As the last poem
comes to conclusion the questions culminate:
At
45, what stream am I rowing down? What coordinates
do I
possess? Maps suggest you can criss-cross
from
one continent to the next, with no cost to yourself
Yet she knows the maps, like dreams,
are lovely false images because “Every distance I’ve meandered / resides in
me.”
Patrick Riedy
i know that this ritual
Brad Vogler
Stockport
Flats
2015
Brad Vogler’s beautifully designed and
quiet assemblage of words titled i know
that this ritual culls a way to return to place which “is not static” in
order to re-perceive an aura of the everyday. Vogler’s book reflects upon how
the “shore is not still”, finding comfort in the changing certainty of
circumstance. Addressing the largest questions on an intimate scale, its
publication is restricted to 50 copies as part of the LUTE & CLEAT limited
edition series. Vogler’s poems embrace, rather than reject, this ephemeral
existence and flux. The book begins with an act of collection, evident in the
poem “note: a remembering”:
belly
of artifacts
memory
: lake : yard
twined
here some pieces
here
a holding of unearthed bits here fragments shored by the lake
Reassured by visiting the question of
personal and philosophical place, Vogler’s fragments construct a common ground
partially through a series of handwritten letters between sender and receiver.
The copyright page notes that Vogler assembled these handwritten words from
letters his mother sent him, and the weight these pieces unearth carry the
project’s aura. One such piece, titled “note: ritual”, ends:
still
a
procession
that
sings to me
[…]
house|home
the
lake
it
always comes back
I
think of you writing
-watching warm day changed gone
spinning
between worry and poetry
away and here
(
)2 and ( )3
try-
ing
re-
try- ing
I
know that this ritual comforts some people
know that someone is listening
Patrick Riedy
*****
Marten Clibbens, a British-born poet, is author of Veterans Day (Buffalo Ochre Papers, 2010) and Sequence (Lost Pages Press, 2006).
Matthew Hall is editor of Cordite Scholarly and recently published On Violence in the Work of J.H. Prynne (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2015).
Paige Melin is the author of two recent publications: the chapbook Puddles of an Open (BlazeVOX [books], 2016) and the chapette MTL/BFL//ÉTÉ/QUINZE (Buffalo Ochre Papers, 2016); she recently completed a MFA at the University of Maine, Orono.
Patrick Riedy is the editor of PressBoardPress and author of the chapbook Five Points (Buffalo Ochre Papers, 2016); he is currently pursuing a MFA at Brown University.
Tina Darragh lives in DC and earns her keep as a librarian at Georgetown University. Her recent works Deep eco pré—a collaboration with poet Marcella Durand available from Little Red Leaves—and opposable dumbs (Object 001, zimZalla Avant Objects) are freely available online.
