Gregory Pardlo’s first book, Totem, is a masterpiece of subjectivity, all qualia and stunning epithets, big feelings shaded with doubts, regrets, hesitations and guilt. It is a book with its headphones on, narrating the most amazing music, almost never letting you hear it. Where objectivist poetry vaporizes its big feelings in people-free landscapes, Pardlo’s subjectivist poetry feels all its feelings right up to the border of the interpersonal, and no further.

Those defenses protect a linguistic kingdom boasting remarkable natural resources. From the first poem, “Landscape with Intervention,” Pardlo displays a lexical density approaching Hart Crane’s:

In the clearing below the access
road, flags pop like Ps in a microphone and no one else in sight
sees the dishwasher toking in the car out back of the caterer’s,
dishrag on his shoulder like a dingy epaulette, his windshield gone
white with mist. For years he must have taken these Pennsylvania
roads with paranoiac care, rubber-necking at the yoga of chassis
beneath wrinkled sheets
of metal, fiberglass chafed and chipped, quarter panels warped
like vinyl records in the sun.

This passage offers many kinds of pleasure – heightened sense experiences (the sights, sounds, even the ordinary out-of-the-ordinary towel on the shoulder evokes a physical feeling in the reader), statistically improbable phrases (“dingy epaulette,” “rubber-necking at the yoga of chassis”), and most important to Pardlo and least important to this reader, whodunit complexity regarding the speaker’s situation and the affect it motivates. It won’t spoil the poem’s ending or the book’s to say that the situations don’t always add up to the guilt that comes through.

If guilt is in the driver’s seat of “Landscape with Intervention,” shame is asked to step outside the car in “Volume Control.” The speaker segues from recollections of blissed-out headphone days, “The dial counter-clocking notches / Only as authority’s warrant turned / The knob on my bedroom door,” to standing “cuffed / Roadside of Route 287, the tide of traffic / Rising above my head,” a humiliation he endures by imagining back to the scene of safety, “a pair / Of headphones, a microphone / In my fists.” Both earlier and later, Pardlo casts this turn to subjective experience as a retreat, the “umbilicus of headphones” something his mother (!) warns him against. She’s got a point, and Pardlo ignores it, even as he frames it with a snap: “Compromise / Is a word that follows Missouri.” For the speaker of these poems, music and the exaltation it promises are the goal, not a danger. The succinctest phrasing of this mission statement comes as a quote from Denise Levertov’s introduction to a book by Jimmy Santiago Baca: “Next time you see such a figure, / remember it is very possible he is living an inner life / at least as vivid as your own.”

That quote comes toward the end of “Soundtrack.” At ten pages, it’s the longest poem in the book. It’s also an explicit argument for Pardlo’s poetics, not to mention a little wiggy:

But Harvey, nothing changes when you’re in the car.
True that, you say, but nobody’s in the car there is no car.
Perspective drawing caused a revolution by arresting
the viewer at an unnatural point in reference to some
horizon, you say, but what happens when the horizon swells?
What if the surface was fluid like a river and you was
in it and the experience had no way of reflecting on itself?
Do fish notice tides change? I would think so, Harvey,
my ears pop in midtown elevators.
My neighborhood once felt immense
as a foreign language. Now familiar, it is brief
as a song. Soundtrack, you’ve said, is utter interiority, air
bubble in a field of attention otherwise
tied to the rails of memory and presentiment.

Pardlo has a number of contemporaries who can set this many thoughts in motion and still hold the poem together — Ange Mlinko, Daisy Fried, Drew Gardner, Brian Kim Stefans and Major Jackson come to mind, and coincidentally they all share a NJ/Phila upbringing — so maybe it’s a period quality that he exemplies. It’s more likely that he is out on his own peninsula.

Harvey is not James Stewart’s pooka, by the way. He is dorkier, and therefore cooler, than the speaker. He provides insight into Spike Lee’s camera techniques, he comments on the history of soundtracks, and most importantly, he provides comic relief from the speaker’s intensity. After Pardlo starts riffing on Legos, Joseph Cornell, Germanic grammar and Ezra Pound, Harvey speaks up:

Money, aint shit about you dramatic.

Germanic.

Money, ain’t shit about you germanic.

It’s a terrific moment, and it points to a quantum leap Pardlo’s work might take: dialogue. In “Winter After the Strike,” Pardlo remembers going to work one day with his father, an air traffic controller fired by President Reagan in the 1981 strike: “You’d push the microphone in front of me, nod, and let me give the word. / I called all my stars home, trajectories bent on the weight of my voice.” Every time Pardlo addresses someone besides himself, feeling after lovely feeling comes through. If he gets to moving people around the scenes of his poems, and better yet, lets them speak for themselves, it will be as good as the movies. If he lets his characters sing, he might even outdo the soundtracks.

*

It might help to point out the four or five ways he currently makes his poems reliably dizzy, as well as to mention a few cheap shots he does not take.

Narrative, address. Pardlo always evokes a scene, and there is usually a narrative to piece together, generally addressed either to a sympathetic world, or himself. There are exceptions (see above).

Synecdoche. Pardlo gives and takes the part for the whole again and again. For example, in the (eventually) heartbreaking mother-elegy, “Vanitas, Mother’s Day,” the family piano’s “the Baldwin,” light doesn’t fall but rather “each / photon ripens.” These switcheroos function as resistors in the circuitry of the poem, every sentence requiring the reader to make some cognitive effort. Sometimes there’s too much resistance: looking at the already too-too-special dust in French air in his Van Gogh ode “Vincent’s Shoes” he sees “the lilted tint lambent / and diffuse.” Sometimes it’s kind of hot: in the teen fantasy “Suburban Passional,” he makes a routine paperboy collection call to a widowed neighbor who “crossed the room in Sergio Valentes.” This is significantly better than if she had walked to the door in blue jeans.

Metonymy. His thesaurus imagination often makes the paths he takes more interesting than they appear. In “Atlantic City Sunday Morning,” he notices cameras inside and out, and comments that “Surveillance here is catholic.” From his perch in security, he lets the power-synonym catholic give iconographic shading to the low-res video, seeing haloes and angels, “bishops of risk” (mating sparrows), “a junkyard of churchbells, a reliquary of Sundays” (a postcard image of the state capital at Trenton).

I’m not the critic to defend Pardlo’s dependence on allusion and art-hero stories, nice as his tender moment at the Cedar between Creeley and Pollock may be. If there really are people who need poems with cameos by Orpheus, I wish them the best.

Even in his off-moments, though, Pardlo never lets his poems go as mere words. The experience is always satisfyingly complete, if limited. The end product of these razzle-dazzling meditations and memories is a beautiful portrait — of the author. In this kind of poetry, you’re in it alone.

Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy, the umbrella term for that collection of psychotherapeutic techniques designed to diminish undesirable feelings by consciously modifying the idea from which those feelings derive, is both the title and the modus operandi of Tao Lin’s second book of poetry. Lin does a good job of describing the principles of CBT in his characteristically blunt prose sentences:

we have our undesirable situations whether we are upset about them 

            or not

if we are upset about our problems we have two problems: the problem

and our being upset about it; with thoughts as the cause of emotions

rather than the out come the causal order is reversed

the benefit of this is that we can change our thoughts

to feel or act differently regardless of the situation

i need to win a major prize to shove in people’s faces

note the similarities with buddhism

As those last two lines suggest, Lin’s genuine commitment to b-mod ethics also leaves plenty of room for his sense of the ridiculous. More to the point, his sense of the ridiculous is consonant with his ethical intuitions and the disjunction in scale between what he knows (for he’s seen that the world is a vast machine designed in its every element to produce evil and folly) and what he can do (steal from Whole Foods) and what he feels (sad). So what we have here is the logical inversion of concept art; what we can call concept life. If Lin’s ideas are not enacted, they lose ethical traction, to the cost of both the world and his emotional wellbeing. Enacting them, however, makes no discernible difference in the suffering of others, and thus embodies a kind of narcissism, a narcissism Lin has already identified as elemental to the machinery of the world that he finds so ethically objectionable and personally dispiriting. Not quite a paradox, but mighty close.

The structure of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy reflects this tail-swallowing impossibility. In terms of subject, Lin constantly references objects, moods and end-points that have no independent justification for his focus upon them other than the degree to which their randomness documents the relatively ineffectual nature of the poet’s efforts to seize control of his own mind. Taco Bell, headbutts, the shit of the world, Richard Yates, a small army of other things: Lin returns to them across the whole of the book, creating a kind of thematic mega-villanelle, in which every circuit brings a new perspective, the novelty of which suffers as a result of the poet’s – and the reader’s – conviction that new perspectives will not and cannot alter the ingredients themselves. This books reminds of nothing so much as the efforts of Number Six to escape The Village in Patrick McGoohan’s The Prisoner, except instead of a big white semi-sentient gelatinous blob, Lin keeps falling into the gap between what he knows and what he can do.

Regardless of his final ability to escape, Lin cannot be faulted for lack of effort. Although they don’t perfectly match the sections of the book, Lin organizes the poem/poems into a sequence that shifts from relatively straightforward (if cloistered) self-reportage to a long sequence in which the poet and all his social interlocutors are, suddenly and without logical preamble, hamsters. This works better than you think it might:

it had stacks of stolen books. the hamster had organic green tea extract that was stolen.

 the hamster’s toothpaste was stolen and it used stolen flaxseed lemon soap on its hair, which it cut itself. the hamster had an eleven-dollar toothbrush.

*    *    * 

one night the hamster read a book that said HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS. The hamster told three other hamsters that HIV probably wasn’t the cause of AIDS and two of the hamsters got angry at it.

The advantages of transposing one’s experiences onto those of a proxy-hamster are clear. The gesture first comes at the moment when self-analysis begins to become self-regard; it clears the contemplative space of the narcissism that doesn’t dare admit its own name. But it’s also ridiculous, and funny, and an effective means by which to admit the absurdity of the individual without forcing applause for making such a recognition. Lin follows the first hamster interlude with another sequence of principled claims and episodes of reportage, many of which cite the hamster-episodes:

it was cruel

to leave the homeless man

‘there’s no such thing,’

i mumbled

‘as good or bad’; something about being

in the center of my philosophy

i walked through someone’s vision

and it was a vegan walking through someone’s vision

something about the way I felt kind of abstract

These interludes give the impression that the narrator may be using the capital accrued via the hamster-poems to purchase a larger or more resolute set of observations, but a few pages later, the hamster are back, only this time in Florida and with greater emphasis on email (I don’t think any poet has ever written so poignantly and un-self consciously about the emotional utility of his blog. A watershed moment.) The hamster redux poems lead in turn to my favorite sequence in the book, the ugly fish poems, in which an ugly fishes commits a kind of Song of Solomon Whitmanesque O’Hara-inflected aqua-flaneur jubilate:

from afar i have appreciated the manatee for its round body

 

from within i have appreciated the manatee for its veganism

 

my favorite poets include mary oliver and alice notley

 

i am a playful companion, a tactful friend

 

and compassionate lover; i have seen a mutant sturgeon sniff a seahorse

 

with a nose located on its stomach

 

i have lain alone on the ocean floor

 

at night on my birthday

The last section of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy takes an epistolary turn, and the poem reveals itself as one long justification, or preparation for, an intimate confession, one at which Lin hints in the title of the very first poem in the collection, “I will learn how to love a person and then I will teach you and then we will know”. And I amazed at how persuasive and frankly moving a case Lin makes here, for all the focus on Bruce Lee and the hamster antics.

Much hay has made in many of our more fantastically fey periodicals about the significance of Tao Lin’s age, which is not very much age at all: to the best of my ability to determine, he was 23 at the time of C-B T’s composition. My impulse is thus to dismiss his age as a genuine factor in considering his work, but I cannot quite bring myself to do so, because I’m so impressed with the way Lin articulates an enormous problem at just the moment in life when it is possible to recognize all the wrongness in which one is complicit without having to account for the consequence of a lifetime’s complicity. For all the simplicity of Lin’s objection, say, to publicly traded companies, there’s nothing logically or ethically flawed in his criticism. He’s right. And so the only way to resist the implication of his correctness – which we must reject, lest we all agree that we are indeed the human shit Lin berates himself for naming and judging – is to fault him for imagining that being right is of any relevance or importance whatsoever. That, we could sigh, is a young person’s error.

Well, it’s a young person’s privilege. And as such, it is usually exercise with bathos, malice, hyperbolic vanity or romantic melodrama. I like Tao Lin because he is weird and sad and a little cranky, but I admire Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy because it finds a tone that perfectly accommodates the experience of an untenable moral position, one in which knowledge of one’s power necessitates a powerlessness. If it’s a difficult way to live, it’s an immeasurably more difficult thing to describe. I’m curious as to whether Lin’s powers of description will persist as he continues in that state, but I’m committed to checking in on how things look to him. He continually writes I’ll be right back; like a hamster on a wheel, he has to be right back because he isn’t really going anywhere. I’m impressed with how he’s made the paradox of his situation as compelling to read as he is compelled to live it.

“Blanks” utilizes something of a Mad-Libs structure. As usual, we took turns adding to the work, in this case by reaching into each other’s entries: each addition included three blanks in its text; the respondent had to fill in the blanks and then provide additional text. The piece acquired its own haphazard logic.

That it did. Here’s a brief excerpt:

Sleepily, like some ancient oilfather watching a fern frond unwind,
the scribe sketches nerve bifurcations. But in what context
Is this picture a picture, and on what map is it a name for a mountainous
terrain? “The” becomes accusatory
When a prosecutor presents evidence of any precision or a doctor holds up
a baby. But in Louis Zukofsky’s “Poem Beginning ‘The,’” “The” is
not a magazine at all.
Can you picture God reading Newsweek?

A lot of the enjoyment of pieces like lies in trying to guess what the details of the process were like: where were the blanks, which poet wrote what part? And too, it induces a generative eagerness, a desire to try one’s own hand at the form–or better yet, to come up with something of one’s own in the same vein. Thus the same inspirational charge that passed between the two authors is transmitted to the reader.

Sometimes there’s a ludic orneriness to the work, as in “Wicker,” a two-columned piece where the form requires that the left column contain “quotations from famous, unknown, or purely imaginary, people”; and, of the actual people, some of the quotes are correctly attributed and others not. In many cases it’s clear which are real and which are phony. For example, I’m pretty sure Emily Dickinson didn’t write “Sunlight / contains a buzz / Softness is as softness / does.” But did Stan Brakhage say “Imagine a baby / in a field of grass…”? He might have. I hope he did. The not knowing, at any rate, inspires a slight feeling of guardedness in the reader, as though these two colluders might be trying to make a fool of him or her. But it’s pleasing after all, like being teased by big brother and sister.

There are acrostics, plays, prose pieces, freeform improvisations, fractured pantoums. It’s a veritable carnival of procedural follies, but one never feels that it’s an exercise in gimmickry, or an indulgence in de rigeur avant-garde aleatorics; the mutual hum of engagement between Collom and Hejinian is always in the foreground, keeping a high-voltage emotional current running through each page, even when things are played for laughs. The laughs, in turn, always feel like spontaneous bursts of delirium rather than planned pratfalls, as they are interspersed with passages of beauty, obscurity, difficulty, reflection, polemic. Delirium, that is, is indistinguishable here from ecstatic vision. In “Paddle,” the compositional principle is the accumulation of non-sequitur sentences:

A very pretty maiden stood up and said, “Me look-look plenty quick goddamn big pirate Mistah Peter Burling me plenty baby!”; the Governor coughed discretely. Tumblers the watch lets: their love of unstable equilibrium is demonstrated in their riding. Lapsed banshee of sail several through though tough a oops into unto and two.

Readily car, hurriedly dog, of butter of what of bump to our doom. But once again. “Milton produced Paradise Lost as a silkworm produces silk, as the activation of his own nature.”

What we read in passages like these is less the referential content of the phrases (when referential content is even discernible) than the play of connection and disconnection between two poetic sensibilities. Collom and Hejinian have, at times, very different styles, and they don’t make the mistake of trying constantly to adapt their instincts to each other’s. Just as often as there is harmony and tonal unison, there is a sense of gleeful undermining, almost as though one poet were deliberately trying to throw the other off, or bend the other to his or her aesthetic will in ways that could obviously never succeed. Rather than disrupting some ideal unity of the work, this tension keeps it alive, infused with comically angular moments of unassimilability.

The dominant mode of Situations, Sings, is comic, but comic in a sense that encompasses a much broader range of effects–and affect–than a great deal of other writing out there that appears under that heading, or for that matter, under other headings. It is comic in its positing of limitless possibilities for form, expression, communication. To imagine a field that various and wide is always to court absurdity, especially when one shuttles from space to space within the field so rapidly and restlessly. From “Questionably,” the first piece in the collection:

Say a woman calls a man “Fuck Face”–aren’t there scenarios in which this comes off as neither angry nor enticing but as calming–neutralizing?
So why not be horrified all the time?
Anode odna o agfuoantoa hv noqa roebn?
I see somebody in your eye. Who is it?

In between the isolated speculations and goofings around and strings of scrambled code, moments of confusion become indistinguishable from moments of clarity. One no longer recognizes oneself in another’s eye, and in that instant, one is borne aloft, beyond mere selfhood, into the current of a collaborative en-musement. We write each other, as they say, and the others that we write into being write us into being in return.

The condor shoots straight up against the harsh air streams
slowly circles, then rapidly descends
and looks down distantly at the boiling water
Maybe someone has hidden a helicopter in the forest
From faraway the sound of the trees boiling
The thousands of electrical wires are pinned to the body’s interior
begin to emit electricity to the inside, inside
this is not just a feeling but an ultrasound, a hydro-current
my inside can get electrocuted when I place my hand in it
this time I begin to boil like an electric pot
this isn’t love but an electricity detector, a missile

If there is one theme that recurs even more insistently than rats in this book, it is the inside of the body. This interior turns inside out, is illuminated by various light sources, is figured as a mechanism of desire, pain, fertility, nourishment, expulsion. In “Seoul’s Dinner,” the city itself is an expression of this monstrous reversibility:

Seoul eats and shits through the same door. My body curls up like a worm. It seems that every few days a big hand descends from the sky to roll out cloud-like toilet paper and wipe the opening of Seoul, which is simultaneously a mouth and an anus.

The air of detachment with which Kim describes abomination and suffering is like an extenuated version of the detachment with which one realizes that one has suffered a terrible wound, when one registers the facts of trauma just before pain removes the capacity for such reflection. In a suspended holding pattern, the mind dreams and strays and analyzes relationships with others, as in “The Rat Race”:

Wherever I meet you, you are always on the run
from Scorpio to Libra
from Libra to Taurus
Not here, not here
From the potato sack to the rice sack
from the soap dish to the bottom of the desk
from Lukács to Deleuze
from the basement to the attic
from the wastewater plant to the cemetery
I hate all things that are shiny and black
You are always on the run
from the deep to the surface

Where are you really?
Am I the dream you dreamt inside my body?
Am I the dream you pulled up with chopsticks from the 39 degree Celsius fever?
Did we meet as we gnawed on a corpse and rolled around inside the grave?
Where, where was that place?
Not here, not here
This is the inside of somebody’s skull–
you can’t see out without the two black holes

As Choi explains in the Translator’s Introduction, Kim is one of the most radical innovators in Korean women’s poetry in recent decades, breaking as she does with a limited and limiting tradition in which poetry by women is “characterized by a language of passivity and contemplation” as “predefined by the literary establishment.” One can perhaps see sardonic nods to that language in the way that Kim’s traversing of predictably domestic images (potato sack, rice sack, soap dish) is disrupted by the mention of Lukács, Deleuze, and “the wastewater plant”: the familiar confines of home life and kitchen duty cannot keep out continental theory and industrial sanitation. Similarly, the discourse of erotic address (as defined by an interlinked “I” and “you” faced with a problem of distance and separation) gives way to a discourse of sickness, entombment, and necrophagy. And once again the inside of the body is an obsessive touchpoint, here given special emphasis as a place within which consciousness transpires–though in a defamiliarized context, “inside my body” rather than “inside my mind”–and from which vision emerges–though only paradoxically, from the “two black holes” of the skull rather than the eyes that should fill those holes.

Throughout the poems in Mommy Must Be a Fountain of Feathers, intimacy (physical and emotional) is alternately reaffirmed and transgressed. In “Face,” the dynamics of “I” and “you” are subjected to further destabilizing, but in a way that suggests those categories are indispensable even as they are claustrophobic:

The you inside you is so strong that the I inside me is about to get dragged into your inside

Now you are drinking a glass of red wine, holding a piece of cheese in your hand

The I inside me thinks about the fact that the cheese is made of milk then worries about which cow inside the cow has spurted out the milk

Even if you are far away, another you inside you is here I can’t return or avoid the you inside you

Maybe I am the hostage of an absent being

I will certainly stay alive while the I inside me clutches onto me; furthermore, I want to deliver the cheese made of me inside me to your table every morning

I have no way of knowing how Choi’s translations compare to Kim’s originals, since I don’t know Korean. There is a sense of precision and intensity in these Englished poems, however, that makes me think Kim’s response to someone who asked how she felt about the translations was genuine and reliable: “It is like meeting someone like myself” (again, from the Translator’s Introduction). And in fact, much of the power of this work lies precisely in the eerie convincingness with which it appears to deliver to us a perfectly realized, specific self, even as that self is threatened, stretched, and torn by monolithic forces of alienation.

Anne Pierson Wiese’s Floating City includes a sonnet mourning the loss of coffee shop culture, “The Hungarian Pastry Shop and Café” which enjambs from the title:

is the only place I know in the city
where you can still see people with pen
and paper. Legal pads, spiral bound,
plain or college-ruled loose leaf, well-thumbed sheaves
of paper at every crumb-strewn table.

It’s an elegy written after denial but before acceptance, so nevermind that she omits the social aspect — bumping into a friend who’d also read the lost masterpiece you’d just paid three dollars for, and with the signature on the flyleaf of, not the author, but another writer, a so-far secret great reader who’d hocked the book you held, for rent, or food, or speed, or (most likely) another book.

While we’re at it, nevermind the crackheads and smack addicts, the homeless, the broken things stretched out on blankets for sale at 1 a.m., the shootings and smoke and fire, and the horrible local pink paper’s columnists working as hard as traveling salesmen to transmute garbage into… garbage. Nevermind all that. New York was a monument to the book, and therefore to time, and its vast and trunkless pillars would stand forever, and the way to be a writer was to look at it, and wait for the best most exemplary moments to reveal themselves, and catch them.

Wiese won the 2006 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets for Floating City, a collection of more or less exemplary moments of New York over the last thirty years. Her work approaches the omniscient abdicated quality of Edwin Denby’s sonnets: “Narrow streets where people wrestle rash and unseen / angels; inside, the coolness of a glen and the wait staff / in their pale blue collars offering ice water.”

It would not do, though, to lump her in with the so-called ecole that bears the city’s name. She favors small settings and plays for the sublime, eschewing razzle dazzle and grandiose quasi-philosophizing, preferring to objectify anonymous strangers and inanimate objects (including, I am sorry to report, dead animals). Historically this tendency has gone by the name objectivism; the individual writer in isolation follows attention around the landscape reporting on evidence. As a practice it has attracted both doctors and lawyers. Objective work is often dismissed as cold and clinical — alexithymic, even — but its defenders find strong feeling even in its miniatures of wheelbarrows and plums. Just as there’s no rule that says painters have to master the figure, there’s no prerequisite for poets to relay close moments between humans, and Wiese’s canny specificity often makes up the difference:

All over the city the signs peer
from beneath modern facades, fade in the sun and rain
high up on sides of buildings: BEST QUALITY TWINE. Ghosts
on brick, cockeyed atop demolition dumpsters, tin
worn delicate as paper, pale lettered—mint,
red, black: ELEVATOR APARTMENTS AVAILABLE:
INQUIRE ON PREMISES. If you stare at them words
are faces; everyone who ever spelled them out,
ever debated whether to buy twine or rent
an apartment fades up into view wearing shadowy
Homburgs, black veils, parcels in their arms, the winter
air freshening for snow.

(“In the Beginning”)

Here, straying into Ben Katchor’s territory, she pleasantly restores meaning to words thought killed by hamburgers and air fresheners. Pleasantness is intermittent in her work, however; disappointment and a general sense of being slightly off-center are her main themes. An unconvinced reader – and in its life as a freebie to all Academy members at the $55-and-up level, this book ought to have encountered more than its fair share – would be at a loss at the number of chagrined sonnets that fill out the book. Wiese gestures toward art heroes from Plath (one poem ends “more rock—more rock—more rock”) to Arbus, in “Early Bird,” a vignette culminating in the indelible image of an old man clinging to a fence:

I’m doing my exercise, too. I used
to keep three parakeets, see, and this is what
they did: climbed up the side of their cage and held
tight. See? It’s easy—you just hang on and breathe.

She ventures rhyme and gets away with it as often as not. I wish she’d gone for it more, actually. In “Leaving Brooklyn Heights” she finds sonic parallels to a roller skating anecdote:

[Two] surfaces made separate sounds beneath
my roller skates, one rough, one smooth
to ply the chalk along; thirty years later brief
in my mind’s ear, the streaming horses soothed
Easy! as stone obliterated mud—all griefs
lost and washed in the gleaming cataract of youth.

A little too often she signs off on a prosy slack quality that, along with her dutiful refusal to digress from her appointed subjects, holds her back. She tends to hedge, preferring simile to metaphor, treating the closing couplet as an unqualified return to the opening statement. When she gets away from her insistence on drabness (two poems treat the miscellaneous contents of pockets!), or rather, when she takes the ordinary as a launchpad for the ambition to be beautiful, she achieves something aspiring and unlike anything else her contemporaries perceive. In “How We Memorize,” easily one of the best poems I read in 2006 or 7, she depicts a young violinst on the subway, violin case “upright on the floor between her legs, / looking like the most expensive thing / about her”:

A music score, encased in plastic, is open
on her lap. She glances down, her eyes taking
in one passage at a time, then closing—shell
pink eyelids trembling as though gently disturbed
by the outermost edge of an incoming tide.

James Buchan remarked that in its all-too-legible history of development and abandonment, its fossil-architectural record, New York more than most living places reveals the high and low water marks of money. New York still has authors and publishers; there are still a few used booksellers who haven’t been knocked down by the rising overhead the swan-diving dollar made. If you are reading this having visited New York lately, go have a look at Paris and Venice when you get the chance; the goal is to create an ahistoric wonderland: eternal youth, permanent fashion. These places too are reminders that money finds reasons to do something else. In her closing sonnet, “The Distance,” Wiese declares her “conviction that poetry / was the highest object of humanity.” There’s something to that, and enough in Floating City to suggest that Wiese will be serving that object for some time to come. As for the city that produced her and its regard for poetry, the outlook is bleaker.

1. Psychology
2. What passes for “the domestic” in the contemporary imagination
3. Gerunds and participles
4. The word “it”

The first instance of distaste leads neatly into the second, of course, since one of the signature crimes of psychology (at least in its dumbest, and therefore most common, applications) is to reduce experience to a series shared dynamics that explain meaning with all the subtlety of placing pegs into their geometrically appropriate slots. Thus, if you are “sad” or “anxious” you should look to your “relationship” with your parents to interpret how you express “love” or what have you.

Admittedly, I’ve made a crude reduction here, but not much more crude than the reductionism of psychology itself. And the problem is that I’m not even talking about psychology proper, but the lowest denominator of our misuse of the field. Nevertheless, we can’t dismiss the fact that psychologically-determined rhetoric does refer to a host of legitimate concerns, objects and occasions. It’s the thoughtless indeterminacy of generalist categories that kills me, not the actual things of which the categories are made. It’s as perverse to avoid this stuff as it is to represent it in terms that fold, spindle and mutilate its complexity.

If all poetry offers inevitable if not explicit commentary on the culture that produces it, then it’s worth evaluating the means by which poets do or do not manage the ways in which their work participates in this process. For instance, let’s say you have a commonly recognizable (and thus vulnerable to psychological attention) subject: marriage. Your options here are sadly limited. You likely know the other received frames of reference (theoretical, artifactual, historical) by which readers could consider your “subject”: likewise, you know that for as much as you might like to dismiss any concern for or presumed fidelity to your readers, you cannot really do that, because you are yourself of the same population to which your readers belong. Duh.

So here’s the problem: since you can escape neither the influence of these frames of reference nor your consciousness of their particulars, what do you do? If you make your beef with them known in the poems themselves, then that engagement pulls focus from whatever you may have intended the poem to consider; if you pretend they don’t exist, then you hermeticize the work to such a degree that you risk ostentatious world-building, a curse whereby the thing you seek to replace is necessarily more complex than the thing with which you replace it. Why? Because the context has room for you, but you – artificer! – have no room for it.

Of course, not all poets face this problem. But some do, and I’m particularly interested in those who neither ignore nor collapse under the baggage that accompanies their subject. And of these poets, Laura Kasischke is among the most accomplished and the most perpetually fascinating. In her most recent collection, Lilies Without, she takes subjects (motherhood, daughter-hood, childhood, death, memory, guilt) and strategies (dream narrative, confessional report, surrealist interjection) that, because of their very familiarity, present the greatest risks of misuse, and she makes of them something unique and lovely that nevertheless preserves their generalist appeal. It’s difficult to identify exactly how she does it, but I’ve come to the conclusion that however she achieves her poetic ends, it has something to do with her courage, which she proves repeatedly to be the very opposite of fearlessness.

So Lilies Without is a brave book, but brave mainly in the poet’s resolute discomfiture. We’re dealing here with a tremendous confidence, but one the subject of which is often uncertainty itself. Consider these lines from “Miss Congeniality,” one of several poems in the book about various Miss-es:

They praised my feet, the shoes
on my feet, my feet
on the floor, the floor –
and then

the sense of despair
I evoked with my smile, the song

I sang. the speech

I gave

about peace, in praise of the war. O,

they could not grant me the title I wanted

so they gave me the title I bore,

and stubbornly refused
to believe I was dead
long after my bloody mattress
had washed up on the shore.

What, to put the question pointedly, is the attitude here? It isn’t bitter or resentful, those the circumstances of the poem certainly would allow these. It isn’t ironic, despite the dark comedy of the conceit. And the kind of comedy Kasischke builds towards culminates in the perpetual delay and return of the rhyme ( floor, war, bore, shore) which suggests that even the speaker is astonished by the position in which she finds herself. Astonishment, without ever being struck dumb: this, is think, is one of the ways Kasischke manages uncertainty, and the effect allows her to enter the most treacherous territory and emerge with something new.

For instance, the first poem in the collection, “New Dress,” clearly manipulates smart but fairly obvious observations about the perils of femininity in all its paradoxical constructions, but it also does something truly bold with the word it, which is to call it out for the deranged rhetorical placeholder it is:

The feminine

maelstrom
of it, I wore. (How

quiet, at the edge of it, the riot. How

tiny, the police. The Sturm

und Drang of it. The crypt
and mystery. The knife
in fog of it. The haunted
city of my enemy.
(And as always
the green, floating, open
book of the sea.) That

dress, like

an era of deafness and imminent error, ending
even as I wore it, even as I dragged the damp

hem of it
everywhere
I wore it.

I love this last line, which I do not think it would have occurred to any other poet to append. The conventionally satisfying option would have been to conclude with the speaker dragging the damp hem of the dress everywhere: good summary gesture, nice intimation of the infinite. But by adding the phrase “I wore it” Kasischke shifts the poem into a far more uncomfortable zone, by reminding the reader of two easily-neglected points. The first, of course, is to repeatedly note the persistent thingness of the dress, and then to ask us, once again, to figure out what is the it to which the poet refers. The dress, yes, and the dress, no. This goes far beyond use of symbol, metaphor or conceit; as the speaker’s enumerations account, the object has properties that cannot be contained or perfectly articulated.

Now, as I’ve stated, I normally hate it, for the way in which we shove all those things we cannot be bothered to specify into its dimensionally transcendental clown car. But Kasischke makes me adore it, not by making a pristine list of all the things she wants it to stand for, but rather pointing to the impulse itself, and asking what kind of a thing is that it? That there’s no answer to this question is of far less importance than the effect of asking it at all, which is to open the poems not to mysteries themselves, but to the consequences of living with them. It’s this quality of indeterminacy, one that understands that to be uncertain is not to be confused, that I so admire in Kasischke’s work, for the idea finds its way into her most intimate uses of syntax and grammar. And thus I sympathize with her completely when she writes

Enough of industry, enough
of goals and troubles, looking ahead, grooming, and dreaming
and anything that ended
in i-n-g in this
life ever again

But I also understand that i-n-g is a vice that that poet knows we cannot but help but indulge. Much like it, i-n-g gives us a chance to be many things simultaneously; once again, Kasishcke takes this impulse and wrests from it a genuine ethic. The i-n-g creeps into a few of the very many versions of the word scream that appear in Lilies Without:

“the wet ashes of some loved one’s screams”

“cargo full of screamers”

“gulls screamed over those gold afternoons”

“without needing to scream, or eat, or breathe”

“a branch of involuntary, perennial, screaming light”

“the debt birds screaming over the gravestone”

“I was trying, simply, to take the garbage out, but screamed when I saw it and slammed the cupboard shut”

“Sex: Kiss me screaming. Death completely forgot about me.”

“your coat to blaze screaming through the vast north”

“and when I screamed she walked away”

“all those years, all that peace, you could barely repress this scream”

Can you think of a more dangerous word to use in a poem, in that the word must invite implications of excess and non-specificity and, yes, hysteria? Can you imagine how keenly you must be focused on the base, brutal and true use of the act, to not only use it but to make it one of the default actions of the text? By the time I finished the book, I knew that Kasischke had done the impossible, and not only “gotten away” with it (a phrase I hate) but snatched the word from the jaws of infinite misuse. For while some of the screams here are literal and contextual, their cumulative effect mirrors exactly the prior question: what is the it to which you refer? What is the scream, if not the mechanism of speech (which chooses, which discriminates, which thus suggests mastery and which therefore lies) subject to a pressure greater than speech can accommodate?

All those systems shoehorned into psychological determinants, all those descriptors squeezed into it, all those vacillations between past, present and future compressed into the i-n-g: they’re all here, set free by Kasischke’s skittish, inexhaustible courage. The results only resemble chaos if you’re the type of person who finds that the bars of a cage nicely set off the stripes of a tiger. Elsewhere in “Miss Congeniality,” the poet refers to her

heart (which was a Boy Scout

lost for years in a forest.) And my

soul (although the judges said
it weighed almost nothing
for goodness had devoured it.)

Loose, maybe, but not lost. Even though she’s wise enough never to believe she knows where she may next be going, I think Kasischke knows, with the kind of baffled precision available to the bravest among us, exactly where she is.

The generator shed made strange noises. My father warned us to stay away from it. The kennel room where my father operated on animals was also out-of-bounds, and so were the top and bottom drawers of my parents’ dresser. It all made complete sense. I knew exactly where to go to shut down the electricity, to make an incision, to get a gun, and to take money.

She’s seven, maybe.

She has a gift for the laconic: “Reindeer have incredibly large nostrils.” This gift may or may not be connected to a difficulty expressing emotion that puts her so far over on the show end of the spectrum she comes back to tell. The constant violence she witnesses on the boundary between the human and animal worlds may also have something to do with this quiet tone she commands.

The cat screamed in the air. My sister and I had never seen a cat in air. It was all claws and eyes. “Watch!” Pam said, shoving up her jacket sleeves. The cat sank between concentric circles and emerged after a long time somewhere else. It was trying to get over the place where water met air, but it was not swimming. It was as if the cat were constantly stepping onto a table that was not there.

The awe she feels for her vet father she transfers to his dogs: “In the wilderness they could make you feel important just by walking beside you. I had seen them chase bears away and form themselves into a ring.”

The word once at the start of a sentence exerts power: “Once we were invited over after school.” “Once, on a particularly warm day, we saw the lake was thick and black when we arrived. It had been thickened with tadpoles. Linda and I went in anyway with our inner tubes, but it wasn’t water so we got out.” “Once we were out shooting targets with .22s” (still seven or so). “Once my sister Linda decided she wanted to drive. The pickup started with a push button. She ended up in the river. My father had to get another truck to pull her out. Other things about the river frightened my parents. Once our youngest sister disappeared.” “Once my mother had given us gum from town.”

Even the dependent clauses open on unexpected extremity (and a little prolepsis): “Once, while I was collecting leeches off my boots, I saw a bullfrog on a rock open his mouth and pull a mosquito in with a stone-white tongue.” It does not end well for the frog.

The cuisines of some cultures use everything available out of curiosity; most places people cook what they find to survive. Nearly every word Barnes introduces comes back within a paragraph or two, like a character: oars, orange, grizzly. Her lyrical asides are as durable as any American’s since Sarah Orne Jewett: “My father attracted wounded animals.” “In the distance I could hear the invisible women, held inside the glacier, singing their high soprano songs.” “It wasn’t going to get dark tonight, and I lost track of time.” “After they healed, we could tell them apart by the sounds of their various limps at night on the linoleum floors.”

You might expect a book based on near-wordless communication to stall, but Barnes’s magnetic attention, her native compression, and the steady stream of revelation all propel the narrative, which shifts to Massachusetts with the parents’ inevitable divorce. If not actually more social than Alaska, Massachusetts at least offers Barnes more traces of a human world to observe and reject:

It would seem you could stand on a porch and with only a slightly raised voice have a conversation with a neighbor to the left, the right, or across the street. Not so. Every time I went to the porch with the excuse to feed Chipper, my grandmother’s squirrel, who was kept in an earwig-infested cage out there, no one else was around…. [I]t seemed peculiar not to wave if I spied another person there. Miss Mooney, who wore a bun and worked for an oil company, lived on one side. On the other was Mrs. Libby, whose overweight miniature collie ended up biting my grandmother’s leg. They eventually began to wave back. “But,” my grandmother told me, “it makes no difference.” We could not go exploring their front yards and backyards, and we had to be invited to see the insides of their houses.

It does, for a change, end well for Chipper. Other changes come, eventually; a stepmother, a chimpanzee, an afterschool job at an ice cream plant. The older sister brings literature into the mix: “She read to me parts of Portnoy’s Complaint and Candy to disgust me, then she gave me D.H. Lawrence and J.D. Salinger to cheer me up.” If the writing grows (slightly) more diffuse as the narrator ages, it has more to do with the awkward fit of her solitary habits and her haphazard development much more than any literary nonsense. Besides, two or three of the names listed above can only have had a positive influence on Barnes. And Roth at least published a few short books.

They may be out of Alaska but Alaska is hardly out of them, and before long they live in the country again: “The family who had lived there before us took off because they were in some kind of trouble, and my father found guns all over.” Motherless, the narrator scouts the boundaries of public and private property, policy and everyday life, indifference and affection. In pitch meetings I’m told they call this the fish-out-of-water approach; in poetryland we subsume it under the category of enstrangement, an anglicization of Shklovsky’s term for making the familiar world new. He was talking about Tolstoy. It applies here, too, in stark contrasts. Compare Barnes’s notes on a coastline shrine and the Museum of Fine Arts:

There was such a big difference between where the water was when the tide was out and where it was when it was in, that the shrine, built on the edge of the sea, was underwater half the time. So when we made our way over the slippery stones of the spiral staircase, we found Jesus, hanging on a cross covered with starfish, which made him look surprised.

*

We were then asked to hold up a thumb so it obscured the face. By doing this, the deep space around the sitter changed to paint. Flat, airless, impenetrable. It was just various shades of brushed-on black.

Earthquake makes every word count. Less a story than a narrative poem in stone, this book gets better with each rereading. If your bookstore doesn’t appear to have it, check the poetry section; not every book will be worth going back to, but the ones that are often end up there.

Richard Garcia makes poems where there’s no hiding from the fact that, in the words of Johnny Carson, if you buy the premise you buy the bit. The third poem in The Persistence of Objects begins “In my Moby Dick Captain Ahab is Hitler.” (Yes, this book is brought to you by the publishers of W.D. Snodgrass’s Fuhrer Bunker.) Sometimes the title tells you what you need to know, as in “Self-Portrait as Goya,” and sometimes it takes a stanza:

The demons of night were about to clamp
their star-capped teeth upon him but fortunately
he had recovered his Captain Midnight Decoder Ring
(”Nick of Time”)

Garcia’s poems are enjoyable, and they usually pay off, with nostalgia for the unfamiliar on the low end. The music of his lines is okay, and his tone is neither morbid nor ingratiating. Many readers will remain safely untempted to buy Garcia’s bits, which is a shame, since the sillier ones turn out to be merely a way to pass the time between what Winston Churchill referred to as “events, my boy, events”:

In Jerusalem the sky slammed shut like an enormous book.
I ran out to the balcony. A cloud, mushroom-shaped, over the marketplace.
Alice, my classmate, who had been running toward the market,
twisted her ankle, fell. She heard it too, but louder.
(”Explosions”)

Garcia has a reassuring ice-in-the-veins manner about death, relaying the testimony of a friend in Beirut:

It’s the eighties, there are many explosions and she’s trying to take their picture.
Not the smoke, she tells me, but the way the air shimmers.
One night she calls during an artillery barrage — Listen, just before the blast,
the air chimes like frozen leaves in a breeze.

Not only is the business of the aesthetics of violence generally heartless, it tends to add next to nil to the minority shareholder’s value. But “the air chimes like frozen leaves in a breeze”? That’s news the market has yet to price in. A few poems later, Garcia has further information:

Just when all lovemaking possibilities
seemed exhausted, they heard the thud
of a distant explosion, which was enough
to nudge her off the tip of the precipice
she had scaled so luxuriously up the huge bed,
as if she had toppled down a water-slide…
(”If Only”)

Well-known are the aphrodisiac properties of danger, but Garcia is careful to balance his excitements with longer-term satisfactions: “Fortunately his lover was his wife and could be, / at times, whoever he wanted her to be.” Where other unnamed-here randy elders neglect to mention the less appealing side effects of this particular poetic attitude toward life, Garcia makes a clean breast of it: “That’s when a young woman / I accidentally ogle / looks at me in disgust” (”Tecali”).

You can rely on Garcia to go straight into the minefields — he hazards all three of the dreaded contemporary anti-forms, the pantoum, the ghazal, and the sestina — and reach the other side with his self-respect intact. Yours may suffer minor lacerations; if you thought the Hitler/Ahab poem was dubious, it should probably be mentioned that elsewhere he resurrects John Coltrane as a pool shark: “How do I look, boys… Dead or alive?” The thing is, and that’s a likeable line if you like movies, the farther off his taste goes in one poem, the more likely he is to come up with fresh unexpected experience in the next. (The one after the Coltrane poem is a prose fantasia about Pete Best. Oh well.) Also? His noir act is plausible:

Diane Tremayne. She’d come toward you looking up with those eyes so innocent, in her pink bathrobe with the shoulder pads and tiny waist cinched tight, and next thing you know you’re bent over her while she’s arched backward above her husband’s semiconscious body in the back of your ambulance.
(”Angel Face”)

These examples are only lines and images, and while Garcia can both gnomic-utterance Benjamin Peret under the table (”He considered waves staircases to the underworld”), and keep up the profane pace of a Judd Apatow character (”I ask her / to kiss the mirror when I’m taking her from behind, / she says, Honey, I just don’t love myself that much”), Garcia offers over and above the quotable what the Notre Dame Review, Pool and Blackbird want just as much as Hollywood does: shapely narratives with an arc, a change in dynamics, a turn.

Of course the quotable, if good enough, is plenty. It is, as Americans are due to be reminded every waking minute between now and November 4, 2008, the extremely compressed space in which our imaginary political lives take place. Surrealism proper, hard surrealism, the chance meeting of a sewing machine and a shot in the street, though, was originally an attempt to shock the reader into fresh perception, action, horror. Garcia’s ambition for his poems is much more compromising, American: he wants the secrets of excitement and survival and desire fulfilled. On that small stage he does fine.

I’ve always wanted to make a transparent book, and after I had finished composing the 33 poems gathered here, I knew the time had come to make this book of poetry filled with “written noise”… Then I put it in an aquarium and a swimming pool and left it in the rain for days… This is a book that knows no limits and thus knows not to go too far.

The comma and the ellipses are the signature gesture of this annunciatory yet barely legible statement. The first sentence proceeds apace, conventionally encommaed and not ‘noisy’ at all, explaining the book’s provenance in light of the “I”-poet’s supposed intention and design. The first ellipses then begins warp this account. Does it represent a leap in chronology, omitting all the steps between ‘knowing’ a time has come to make a plastic book and the time at which the finished, waterproof book is “put in an aquarium” etc? Or is it merely a pause in the performance of this utterance, does it suggest that the next step after ‘knowing’ is ‘to put it,’ the transparent, perhaps non-existent book, through its various wet trials? The paradoxical final statement has already been enacted by the temporal paradoxes of the previous sentences.That a whole swath of Chinese text is printed on the back (or front, or reverse) side of this band is utterly beside, and thus contingent upon, the point.The band must be slid off to clamber further into this space. The matte plastic sleeve is blank on one side; the other holds the ISBN (that’s 978-957-41-4521-8, if you want to try and find a copy of this dispersed and sold-out book) and barcode, two more visual manifestations of coded identity which only computer and light beam can read. On this level, the Anglophone reader must wade in among the Chinese characters to sift out, in toothpastey, toothpick-thin writing, an English description of the book’s content: “A gathering of words, sheer swarms of them rise out of depths of light–the primal crime scene of a linguistic serial murder…” This swarming, sheerness, and rising-out-of-depths speaks of the murky experience of reading the multilingual and visually accumulative work, while the queer figuration of the serial murder anticipates the fata morgana aspect of the book, in which repetition and reiteration results in now accumulated, now emptied coffers of experience, so that the serial activity must begin again. Oddly it is again the punctuation, the ellipses and the dash, that pegs the English tentatively to the Chinese, inviting us to dream of the equivalencies that might fall in between them.But before we can make our way into the interior, we get one final hefty chunk of prose. This provides yet another version of the book’s inception–a technical account of collecting English “from the Net or from links I found in spam,” and then feeding them multiple times through a software called “Sherlock” to create Chinese and new English texts: “I lineated them both to look like poetry, placing the English and Chinese face-to-face in the semblance of a bilingual volume of translation.”The obvious instability being proposed here among various versions of the text–if selection and translation are at the incipience of this text, then what and where is the ‘original’? Can two separately generated texts have parallel ‘faces,’ and pretend to exhibit a family resemblance?–deranges conventional hierarchies of reading we normally apply to texts. The various accounts of the text’s conception (as recounted on the band) and inception (as recounted on the sleeve) also refuse to be anything but multiple, clinging to us as we wade into the text’s crystalline murkiness. But the canny sleeve anticipates this, imagining a “machine poet”– presumably the Sherlock software?–responsible for the text that follows:

[…]like a lethal lover, it tells you from the start that it is not to be trusted. […] Still, I’ve always felt it understood poetry’s clandestine mission […]I’m anxious to consummate this romance, to bring it to the pink of perfection before these machine poets evolve into an all-too-prosaic fluency.

In the above quotes, all bracketed ellipses are mine. The sleeve (who else is talking? Can a literally marginal fabric ’speak’?) works from two separate philosophies about poetry, one that it is the combination of symbols from a field of possibilities exterior to human consciousness, the other that it has an interiority, a ‘clandestine mission’, a “pink” inside which is the “pink of perfection” and derives from the insideness of human consciousness.  To “consummate this romance” with the ‘Romantic’ notion of an interiority from which poetry’s “clandestine mission” derives produces the book’s anxiousness, its urgency not directed toward a particular urge. But what act could such a consummation entail?In this erotic-intellectual uncertainty, this pink noise, we reach the end of what the packaging can provide; for more, we must enter the slick space of the book. Inside, the text piles up and confuses; black writing overlays with pink, we move into the black, we move into the pink, it clots and separates, and at intervals only a hand thrust between the pages will make any given text come into focus. Then one’s own hand seems so clear, stuck between plastics as if on a laboratory slide, one’s own hand not figuratively an author but just another specimen in this catalog of what might be specimen language. The overall effect of these poems is that of loneliness, the self being a continually lonely site to which language recurs and occurs. Viz. “17 Will you dare to be bare?“:I slowly opened one eye and then the otherBut that’s a story for another timeDo the words “beach season” fill you with excitement?Or dread at the thought of baring it all?This summerDaily indulgence:Easy treats, delightful ideasDid you bring protection? […]The resolutely transparent yet stiff, hard nature of the pages in <i>Pink Noise</i> evoke screens and hypertext; one may pass through them in all ways except bodily. That dynamic seems replicated in the poems, in which the enjambed lines both follow and detach from each other. One ‘clicks through’ one line to get to the next, with the capital letter at each line’s left margin enacting this separateness. Isolation is the theme of nearly every poem, as well as its currency; it’s there in the line and stanza breaks, there in the ephemerality of the consumerist abstractions, there as the thin layer which is the only effective ‘protection,’ and yet a fraught and flexible one. The radical materials, design, and conception of Pink Noise as an object, then, introduces a new way of reading the textual lyric, as ever-deepening layers and levels more akin to hyperspace than to a dramatic performance of a succession of singular temporal instances. It should be remarked that the only terminal punctuation in this book seems to be the ellipses or the question mark–uncertain, evasive terminals at best. Moreover, the thematic and tonal consistency of Pink Noise. when taken along with the paradoxical uncertainty and multiplicity of the text as a site, revises the lyric itself, stressing not its desire to communicate and be persuasive but its status as an entrant in a capacious, multivocal record of lonelinesses. Just so the poems in this book, clotted and massed together, a global field of inseparable solitudes.

So a love affair (only partially the real title of Jenny Boully’s latest: the asterisk refers to A million wallowing anemones, a thousand eyes peeping through, a thousand spies shivering, unmovable endless flowerings, countless empty bottles, twelve flowers, eleven trees, eight fruits, four vegetables, two enemas, two kidnappings, one accident, one suicide, one soothsayer, one drowning, one night club called Juicy) isn’t something you can participate it so much as observe and comment upon; in fact, the observation and commentary constitute the affair itself. The exchange of narratives and reciprocal consciousness is something Boully identifies almost immediately as elemental to the project of love:

She remembers the story he told her, about taking a walk with his former lover during one of the first days of spring, a spring which soured then ripened then soured then ripened before beginning again, a spring which kept swelling out of winter in a way that Chaucer’s spring would never do. During this walk which her present lover took with his former lover, her present lover reached up into a tree and broke off a flowering branch, of which he did not know the name, but which the former lover accepted as the grandest of all romantic gestures. She asked her present lover to describe the flowering branch that he had plucked for his former lover.

This initial passage alone establishes the importance of recollection as invention of the thing recollected, an idea essential to Boully’s argument. Likewise, her emphasis here on gesture, an act that gains significance only in relation to previously-established meanings, tells us something about her attitude regarding the affair, of the story to which she is superficially committed. What it tells us is that even the second-person speaker is aware (perhaps at the moment detailed itself, but certainly in its recollection) of the entire enterprise as characterized by a set of baffles. There are two ways to regard these baffles: the proxy-narrator can view them as obstructions, meta-afflictions brought on by the uncontrolled referential impulse that telescopes the relationship between the narrator and the feeling or the action, or she can regard them as constitutive of the feeling itself. If the latter, then the baffles don’t exist between anything; the baffles are the thing.It is this conviction that Boully uses [one love affair]*to explore. For those readers familiar with her first book, The Body, this should come as no surprise. Boully famously constructed that book from a set of footnotes to a non-existent text, so her inclination to attend to reference without regard to referent is already established. Obviously, and beyond its formal affinities, this is a highly literary attitude to take, but its concern isn’t wholly academic. It’s true that Boully still uses books as her generative source; her observation that her spring deviates from Chaucer’s originates in Boully’s familiarity with Roberto Belano’s By Night in Chile, from which she plucks his observation that clouds in Chilean skies scatter as, he imagines, Baudelaire’s clouds would never do. And so begat, forever and ever, amen.

But just because she sticks to literary (in?)(re?)spiration doesn’t mean that the dynamic she describes is limited to literature. For all her reliance of the ordination of texts, the patterns Boully describes persist in every form of endeavor or expression. The book is replete with all the usual and familiar associations with a love affair more traditionally understood: travel, domestic torpor, sexual betrayal, caretaking, reconciliation, love tokens, madness (in this case, clinical madness: as a partner speaks of the relationship, “It was called You Fucking Suck or Perhaps It Was, After All, Because You Are Schizophrenic.” ) but Boully pays no greater attention to her clinical descriptions of the affair than she does to her more “heart-wrenching” or “naked” admissions. All are equal, in that each is merely a datum in the recursive cascade. The action obtains whether the details are theoretical or material. grand or pedestrian. In “He Wrote in Code,” the second of the three linked essay-poems in [one love affair]*, the speaker identifies a moment during which

The waiter, confused by our choices—2 Sprites, 2 Cokes, 2 coffees, 2 waters, and 2 beers—was even more perplexed by how he might place all the beverages, along with the pizza, on the table-for-two.

and this tic, pages later, reappears asTwo sangrias, two coffees, two Sprites, two waters, something to set us to rights again.

How is this couple’s reliance upon such rituals, which become deliberate as soon as they are utilized as authentic, fundamentally different from Boully’s reliance on literature to mimic and predict the particulars of her experience? Her experience, his experience, theirs: possession here is beside the point, since the forces in operation are organic, inevitable, impersonal. But even though your feelings and experiences fundamentally have nothing to do with you, that doesn’t make your experience of them any less intimate. As Boully notes, “… there is something quite frightening when the body, against its knowing, begins to slither, begins its slide against a greater anemone in the sky” — to which I would only add the mind of knowing offers no greater resistance or effective intelligence than does the body itself.

Aside from the value of her incidental observations and asides, which are as sharp and well-made here as they are in The Body, the greatest virtue of [one love affair]* is Boully’s willingness to admit the personal and the narrative in such a way that doesn’t reinforce those very errors that make heartbreak in actual (if there is such a thing) love affairs inevitable. Some might avoid these topics altogether, as if there were an alternative set of subjects which might be exempt from the forces Boully describes here. Whether subject to literarily-determined templates or those drawn from more free-form ideologies, we perpetually mistake our capacity for description and comprehension for the kind of tool that might make intervention possible. But commentary is not mastery, and we are subordinate to the medium that moves us. Physics, witless, always wins.