Readers familiar with Quarantine (Ahsahta Press, 2006) and Stripping Point (Counterpath, 2007)—Brian Henry’s most recent books until Wings Without Birds came out from Salt—will immediately see this book as a departure. First, Quarantine and Stripping Point both strongly hinge on inviting us to think of the speakers of the books as personae. Quarantine’s speaker is dying of the plague and he comes to us as though through 17th century London; the speaker of “More Dangerous Than Dying,” Stripping Point’s long first poem, speaks to us from a 20th century corporate paper mill. These speakers feel intentionally fictive and Henry builds his personae in a way that invites the questioning of such a device: Quarantine is punctuated with contemporary details and the paper mill of Stripping Point reads more as metaphysical setting than as actual setting. Both books engage taboo scenarios: the plague-stricken speaker of Quarantine is shockingly cold towards his wife and son’s deaths, slips down to the river to meet his male lover. The speaker in Stripping Point is having an affair.

In contrast, the speaker of Wings Without Birds does not feel fictive in the least and readers will likely think themselves ridiculously indoctrinated into New Critical workshop etiquette if they call the entity voicing the poems “the speaker” rather than “the poet himself” speaking as the poet himself. The book, dedicated to Henry’s family, moodily circles around domesticity and domicile, directly addressing family members as in: “Daughter who tells me the hills are a moon” (“In the Neighborhood of Horses”). In these poems Henry names, by proper name, his wife “Tara, sleep-nursing” (“Wings Without Birds”) and dispenses with pretense, bringing to the surface the fact that the writer of these poems is writing poems. Henry directly addresses the reader at times, and also directly addresses other poets such as Tomaž Šalamun, a poet who Henry, Šalamun’s translator, obviously knows. We may, of course, remember that all written I’s are precisely that, written, and therefore naturally papery-versions of ourselves with all the fictive qualities this entails. But this book overtly challenges the eye-diverting decorum we develop when we talk “speaker” instead of “poet,” inviting us to read this poetry as work that puts the stuff of nonfiction at stake. For example, the following passage comes in the middle of “Where We Stand Now,” the 16-page poem that centers the book:

The Royal smashed beyond fixing
during the move, I set to it
with a screwdriver to remove as much
of it from itself as I can. Arrive.
I arrange the screws to spell “pain”
and photograph the word with the type-
writer’s husk surrounded
by pieces of its former self then
throw it all into a box and drive
to the Clarke County landfill.
The car has new tires, new belt,
its floor covered with raisins
Cheerios barrettes pretzels
paper and if I were a crying man
I would cry I swear I would.

The second primary departure is one of form and structure. Both Quarantine and Stripping Point perform marvelous structural feats and cannot be properly read without taking into account the relationship between structure and content. Quarantine comes to us in two sections, “Quarantine” and “Contagion,” and “Contagion” literally rewrites “Quarantine” backwards, reversing the order of the poems and the order of their lines. Stripping Point, also a two-part book, deploys a similar tactic in its second section, “Stripping Point.” Here we begin with 13 6-line poems. As the section moves on lines are recombined and stripped away, moving us through 12 5-line poems, 11 4-line poems, 10 3-line poems, and 9 2-line poems. After the first set of poems are established new language is not added; rather, the poems advance by diminishing. In each of these projects Henry helps the reader move through these structural permutations by establishing and then maintaining a fairly simple form of line and stanza across each book. It is impossible to read either book without confronting its structure, thinking through the way in which form/structure and content manifest a whole and culminate in a complete poetic project.

Wings Without Birds, to the contrary, is light on structure and deploys a variety of free verse forms. Poems range from eight lines long&#8212″Bad Gardener” reads in its entirety:

Butterfly bush
ravaged by inept hands
—inept hands with sheers—

so deformed
even the bees
stay clear

&#8212to the 16-page long “Where We Stand Now” which has a narrative, peripatetic movement and works its way through a single, unbroken stanza. And, while the book has a pleasing symmetrical structure, it does not employ any rewriting or recombinatory techniques. This architecture is much simpler: the book both begins and ends with two-page fragmented lyrics. In between span three sections of nearly equal length: the first section is 16 pages long and is comprised of more-or-less stand alone poems, the second section is the continuous long poem “Where We Stand Now” and the third section again moves back to more-or-less stand alone poems and spans 17 pages. Not only does this simple structure create solid containers for the varying poetic forms, but it also argues for the primacy of the poem-moment, rather than the poem-project. For a book so seeped in the rhythms and details of the everyday, this organization gives the work a feeling of authenticity that would be undercut by a more intricate structure.

I frame this discussion of the book in terms of Quarantine and Stripping Point not because Wings Without Birds cannot stand on its own, but because the work that it does can be more clearly seen in contrast to the other projects. First, it still feels rare to find a poet who is comfortable with making such departures: if Quarantine and Stripping Point have set up a trajectory of project and personae, Henry is unafraid to waylay this movement with lyrics of the everyday, with himself as speaker. Second, despite my insistence on framing Wings Without Birds as a book that does not operate via persona and project, but focuses in on an authentic everyday, it is interesting to take the opposite point of view and look at this work as an extension of what Quarantine and Stripping Point do. For example, if we look at the packaging of Quarantine we will see that Henry was careful to remove as many references to himself as author as possible: we have no author photo, no blurbs, no bio. Wings Without Birds, in contrast, not only has such paratexts, but the author photo is by Tara herself. What if the book were to be read as a performance of authorial subjectivity? And, last, while the everyday subject matter and simple structure of Wings might at first seem unadventurous to fans of Quarantine and Stripping Point, I hope that the following thoughts on the poetry of everyday life show Henry’s approach to the quotidian, with all of his moody flourishes, to be, in fact, quite extraordinary in our particular moment.

**

Our culture’s continued and ever-entrenched fascination with everyday life hardly asks for remark, for status updates and tweets create an everyday that constantly comments upon itself. As such, writing has become integral to the digestive practice of everyday life. As pre-factory farming cows once stood in their fields grazing on grass to digest, re-digest, and digest yet again only to shit out fertilizer for more grazing, more digesting, many of us suffer the everyday kindly only insofar as it provides fodder for texting, tweeting, facebooking. Which in turn informs our cooking, eating, walking, talking, reading writing (etcetera) habits, fingers twitching for keyboard and keys. Given this obsession with articulating the everyday, it is no surprise that the best-selling genre is non-fiction, and documentary modes of entertainment have superseded the overtly fictional.

As such, it should not be a surprise that much of what is attended to in contemporary poetry responds to this interest in the everyday. The everyday and its attendant mixture of detritus and significance hovers behind the following much-remarked upon modes of contemporary poetry. First, we have the following project-oriented manifestations: