Poetry in Prose

There’s no getting around the fact that Ben Lerner, author of the novel Leaving the Atocha Station, is primarily a poet, having published three collections before this foray into fiction. It’s not, in itself, a criticism. Beautifully written and keenly observed, the novel is more than passable as a sustained piece of fiction, coherent and effective at characterization, and with a number of compelling scenes.  But in his narrator’s concern with issues of translation, his asides on the function of poetry and the aesthetics of verse quoted in prose, and his pointed choice of words and phrases like “insufflation,” “hemic,” “the law of excluded middle,” to carry his meaning, Lerner imports the economy of language and density of thought more commonly associated with poetry.

Leaving the Atocha Station documents the stay in Madrid of Adam Gordon, a young poet on a fellowship in early 2004, tracing his development as a poet over that period. Gordon’s project, as described to the fellowship committee, is to produce a long, research-driven poem on the lingering effects of the Spanish Civil War on present-day Spaniards. The actual project Gordon has undertaken is more nebulous—a mystery even to himself—and not explicitly concerned with poetry. He avoids the other fellows and foundation staff and spends most days alone, reading Tolstoy and visiting a local art museum. Eventually he makes friends with locals, and is drawn into Madrid’s arts culture.

The first phase of my research involved waking up weekday mornings in a barely furnished attic apartment . . . then putting on the rusty stovetop espresso machine and rolling a spliff while I waited for the coffee. When the coffee was ready I would open the skylight . . . and drink my espresso and smoke on the roof overlooking the plaza where tourists congregated with their guidebooks on the metal tables and the accordion player plied his trade. In the distance: the palace and long lines of cloud.

This early passage encapsulates Gordon’s approach to his time in Spain as well as Lerner’s direct, borderline laconic, prose style. Gordon is forever modulating his state via spliffs, tranquilizers, alcohol, and “white pills” (probably antidepressants) that he self-administers in varying doses according to whim. Lerner documents moments like these in a straightforward, clipped style, alternating them with the rambling yet incisive intellectual meditations of Gordon’s internal monologue.

Lerner’s evocation of place is one of the novel’s great strengths. His use of Madrid as a backdrop is nearly as inspired as his choice to place Gordon there in 2004. Asked by his girlfriend, Isabel, why he is studying Spain and Franco now, instead of America under George W. Bush, Gordon can only make pretentious replies even he finds unsatisfying: “‘The language of poetry is the exact opposite of the language of mass media,’ I said, meaninglessly.”  When Isabel further challenges him, he greets her anger, “with silence, so as to allow her to imagine an array of responses I was in fact incapable of producing,” in his rudimentary Spanish. His clumsiness with the Spanish language parallels the inherent difficulty of his relations with other people—Isabel doesn’t remain his girlfriend for long—which in turn evokes the myriad difficulties Gordon has with poetry.  Even when he stumbles into a historic moment for Spain, it serves to rouse him only briefly: as all of Madrid masses for street demonstrations, Gordon pursues Teresa, a translator whose polite disinterest in Gordon as anything more than a fellow poet and friend is maddeningly clear.

Gordon is daft, arrogant, and petulant, while also being thrillingly sharp in his internal monologue. Lerner integrates a number of engrossing mini-treatises into the text in the guise of Gordon’s stream of consciousness. Reading the work of John Ashbery on a long train ride, Gordon notes that although Ashbery’s poetry uses “language that implied narrative development—‘then,’ ‘next,’ ‘later’—such  terms were merely propulsive.”  It’s a credit to Lerner’s facility sustaining the world of Gordon’s heightened, drug-addled intellect that such an observation feels not only unforced but fresh and engaging.

That observation also suggests a way of reading Leaving the Atocha Station. Time passes, and occasionally one of Gordon’s actions leads to something, but mostly the framework suggesting narrative development is, indeed, “merely propulsive.”  The novel is full of fascinating ideas, often displaying beautifully repeating patterns and surprising connections, but it falls short when it comes to plot. Lerner derives some narrative excitement from the historic moment mentioned above, and a bit more from Gordon’s pursuit of Teresa, and a tiny bit from his dilemma over whether to remain in Spain at the end of his fellowship. But by and large the novel’s events, such as they are, feel desultory, a string of occasions about which Gordon can pontificate. Combined with Lerner’s somewhat cool tone, the result is often a sluggish read.

But it seems fair to conclude that crafting a white-knuckle thrill ride was not Ben Lerner’s intent in taking on the novel.  As much as the novel is about anything, it is about Gordon fighting his way to an uneasy peace with poetry.  Where he begins the novel somewhat cynically, assembling meaningless poems by taking random phrases and then translating and mistranslating them, by novel’s end Gordon has reached a place of greater comfort in his relationship to poetry.  He arrives there by way of an almost-mystical process of gaining experience and confidence. It’s the same slow artistic growth encountered by any artist, and here it is rendered carefully, in invisible increments, by Lerner.  Poets, poetry readers, and especially fans of Lerner’s work will likely be excited, and rightfully so, to explore the author’s fascinating meditations in this new and fertile form.

Adam Reger is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh’s MFA program in fiction. He is the author of U.S. Navy Pirate Combat Skills.

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On the Rollercoaster

Open any of Bob Hicok’s collections, and I suspect you’ll be dazzled by poems plumbing the depths of the self as they skim the fascinating, frustrating surface of contemporary American life. Using a neo-surrealist net to capture heart, humor, and the sublime in one cast, Hicok’s best poems do not merely entertain—they teach my mind to function in patterns I can only call Hicok-esque for at least an hour or so after I’ve put them down. In an intimate, chatty tone, I find myself prone to narrating my thoughts to myself, often surprised by whip-smart connections between the observed world and my mind’s internal workings that I suspect Hicok’s poems have trained me to make. Pun, sarcasm, retort, leaps of logic that at times assume mystical proportions meet the absurdities of a morning’s passage through a subway station or a trip to the market. As the effect fades, I know I’ve experienced the full power of what Elizabeth Bishop termed the “mind in motion.” I know it’s what I expect out of poetry.

Winner of the 2008 Bobbitt Prize, This Clumsy Living (2007) stands out among Hicok’s books. Balancing craft at the level of both the individual poem and the book is a hard-won achievement for any poet, but it is particularly gratifying to see a poet of prodigious strength one-up himself. Where Hicok’s earlier books were less adept at organizing his bountiful energies into a coherent emotional arc, This Clumsy Living succeeds beautifully—perhaps, in part, by beginning with an admission of clumsiness.

A quick read down the Table of Contents shows the oscillation of Hicok’s energies: “The busy days of my nights” abuts “A poem with a poem in its belly” and “Waiting for my foot to ring” with “War story,” all in the mysteriously-titled first section “Twenty-three windows.” Real-world narrative flashes chronicle the speaker’s wrestling with political and social events in everyday life, a drive that springs from the Whitmanian well of “full report,” even as the speaker soothes himself by engineering temporary escape via surreal leaps in time and space that always manage to lead him back to the indelible fact of “this clumsy living.” “If we could solve that equation, we’d be happy,” Hicok poignantly suggests.

Yet, what are the chances of solving such an equation, Hicok’s book seems to ask. In “The New Math,” math is a rhetorical structure Hicok recognizes not only as “strange,” but imperfect. We cannot rest easy with a single solution any more than we can disown our drive to try to reduce our problems. Poetry’s algebra may be a fraught construct, the poem whispers to us, but its process just may deliver a bit of happiness along the tortuous path.

Hicok would probably be the last to say we shouldn’t have fun with either the world, our psychological attempts to diminish loss, or poetry. This Clumsy Living keeps an emotional balance by swinging between extremes of existential terror and a lively absurdist humor. “Her my body,” about the inability of poetic thought to soothe a speaker imagining cancer striking his beloved (“If you are comforted / by this thought you are welcome / to keep it”), is followed by the zany, zippy “The busy days of my nights,” where our speaker meditates on zombie films (“writers struggling with the inbred / mutant Appalachian cannibal dialogue”), and the aforementioned Elizabeth Bishop (“remembered the ladybug / walking across ‘At the Fishhouses’ open on my desk”).

The shifts in tone that occur from poem to poem are well-matched in a greater variety of forms than appear in previous books. Hicok experiments with the lengthy stanza shape typical of his earlier work, a narrative flow eschewing visual pacing (stanza breaks, etc.) in favor of compact density. While individually such an effect is excellent, in a book full of such poems I find myself experiencing the pleasant exhaustion that comes from preparing for the same rollercoaster ride over and over again. Not, per Jerry Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that—Hicok’s earlier work conveyed a sense and vision of his American moment, most notably in terms of the dissolution of the working class in his home state of Michigan and American foreign policy. (May we hope for Hicok’s response to the labor protests earlier this year?)

Hicok also avoids the over-writing afflicting his earlier books, whether as a result of an inability to kill his proverbial darlings or an understandable desire to perform for his usually-rapt audience. Most markedly, the word “which” appears much less frequently. (I say this as one also afflicted by the curse my seventh grade English teacher referred to as “whichery and thattery.”) Ultimately, how could I not be filled with admiration for a poet who manages to write a lovely lyric stanza about shit-eating dogs, thanking deer for their scat at the same time as he is able to turn a discussion of his mother’s morbid obesity into a loving paean to mothering in “Documenting a Decision”?

A fat body resembles a pregnant body, resembles hope, start. ( . . . ) This is more the way of the mother than the father. ( . . . ) This is my prayer: Lord, make me round.

Reading poetry is not only about the pleasure we take in the artifact of a finished poem—it is also about the journey of the poet. This Clumsy Living witnesses a gifted poet taking a leap. Hicok’s neo-surrealist impulse pushes his earnest lyric narrative mode just off-balance, keeping conversational tones from feeling either tired or disingenuous. The poems’ speaker is aware he navigates an imperfect world with imperfect tools, but also sees no other way to go about it—the very essence, perhaps, of Beckett’s “I can’t go on, I’ll go on.” If reading This Clumsy Living feels at times like being on a rollercoaster—emotionally and visually, tonally and metaphorically—through Hicok’s mental countryside, we do well to remember he warned us, and then sit back and enjoy the ride.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review.

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Shifty Positions

Anna Moschovakis’ second book, You and Three Others Are Approaching a Lake tackles a great tangle of cultural systems with the probing wit and intellectual sensitivity announced in her first book, I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone (Turtle Point Press, 2006). Bookended by two shorter poems, four long poems comprise the meat of You and Three Others, taking their titles (as she notes in the Acknowledgements) from books she stumbled upon by chance.

Moschovakis hammers her found materials, chosen for a “bold stand toward their topics and the twentieth-century world they inhabit,” into various poetic shapes: lists, epistles, journal entries, theatrical dialogue, and even social networking posts. Yet the lyric mode provides a bass line for the collection, giving a heartbeat to her poems’ modal riffing.

The opening poem titled simply “[prologue]” announces:

The problem is I don’t care whether I convince you or not
In a perfect world I would be able to convince you of this

Everybody should always have a position on everything
We take our positions with us, like folding stools to the beach
The stools, when we abandon them, fade to the same color

Characteristic of Moschovakis’ earlier work, “[prologue]” launches a grammatical argument, shuttling through verb tenses as a means of exploring different angles of her concern about the speaker’s “position” (a sticky allusive term calling to mind a slew of possible applications) to her reader, and vice-versa. Moving by line from the indicative to the conditional to the more personal and unstable modal tense of “should” then back again, verb tense takes on a concrete symbolic function, much as our “positions” become “folding stools” we take with us, then “abandon.”

The book’s first long poem, “A Tragedy of Waste,” takes this movement between “positions,” or formal code-switching, a step further by weaving text from a Labor Bureau publication into lyric. “At the beginning of 1917 there were housewives / children, old people, sick people / fields, factories, stores, offices” sets an academic, factoid-y tone, which the lyric speaker’s (or positioner’s) voice interrupts with pronouncements such as: “This taxes the imagination. Too many studies have begun / and ended in the middle.” Breaking prose “facts” into lines of “poetry” highlights intrinsic tensions between what is said and what is buried in what is said, but it is the lyric moment that raises the emotional ante, turning text into poetry:

Human wants:

First the necklace of bone
then the shift of leather

tea, tobacco, and gambling

in other words

ten men could live on the corn
where only one can live on the beef [.]

In seven terse lines, the “study” above reaches a political and economic conclusion we can presume previously taxed the speaker’s imagination. If “[f]rom these definitions, one must pick / and choose,” lyric meditation (among poetry’s other tools) offers us a better path to the heart (both literally and figuratively) of our world’s contradictory “positions.”

Moschovakis’ concerns are not purely extra-literary, however. In “Death as a Way of Life,” a modal fist-fight pitches purplish prose against philosophical observation with interesting results:

Man dies, that is nothing

but
      when a woman sits on the edge of her bed, in front of a window, and lets down her red silken hair, threading it through her delicate fingers as it cascades in waves down her porcelain back, which reflects the moon’s silvery mood, so that any man privileged enough to catch a glimpse of her falls directly to his knees, blind, lost, panting for breath [ . . . ] still he has no regrets, and he welcomes death, invites it, knowing as he’s never known anything before that his life wants for nothing [ . . .]

Shifts in line, syntax and diction pull us from a creepy, faux-logical world where “[w]ith seven bullets, you could shoot a woman / in both breasts, both ovaries, her vagina and clitoris / with one bullet left for a target of choice” to a veritable cauldron of overwrought Romance. There is a Joycean sensitivity to rhetoric at work in these poems, as well as great humor. Though the idea of using bullets to target a woman’s sexual organs is not funny, the drastic code-switching that occurs in the two pages between it and the longer excerpt above collapses rhetorical forms so quickly that a reader might guffaw as much out of surprise as out of amusement at Moschovakis’ deftness of hand. Indeed, her control of and sensitivity to language’s ends and means saves her poems from falling into the trap of elliptical faux-irony plaguing many of her contemporaries.

What is at stake in You and Three Others is perhaps the messiest of modes, the human sensibility—that which does not dare lay claim to a systematic organizing principle, and which certainly feels itself weakest in the race for Progress. Both in the multiple sense of the global community as well as in the prime sense of the individual, You and Three Others bears witness to the web of forces burying the human cost of some of our “greatest” achievements—the establishment of the United States on the backs of its native peoples and ecology, the rise of capitalism at a similar expense, and, of course, the Internet’s uncertain terrain. As Annabot (the “chatbot” in “The Human Machine”) says to the machine when it declares “The Brain, the brain—that is the seat of trouble”: “My brain, whose brain? Those who feel, feel.”

HUMAN MACHINE: I ought to reflect, again and again, and yet again, that all others deserve from me as much sympathy as I give to myself. I place my hand over my heart.

ANNABOT: I cannot feel your hand.

HUMAN MACHINE: I cannot feel your heart.

If the book has any weaknesses, they are perhaps most evident in “The Human Machine,” where some of the lyrics risk self-referential obliquity. However, even the few off-key moments remind the reader that a particularly human consciousness accompanies us for the duration of the book’s journey—”Anna is a Capricorn. Her eyes are blue. Her favorite color is blue[.]“—whether in the form of the “you” co-opted in “A Tragedy of Waste,” or the cyborg Annabot and her foil Anna of the Five Towns (both a gloss of the author’s first name). That reminder comforts the reader even as it challenges her to consider her own position within the systems confronted by Mochovakis’ verse.

You and Three Others never loses focus of its concern with selves, and demonstrates a rare ability to speak convincingly about said selves through a complex web of modes that maintains a lyric voice while simultaneously critiquing the means that voice chooses. That Moschovakis is able to keep the emotional energy alive even as her poems remain unapologetically entranced with the ostensible anti-poetry of the systems she investigates is a contradiction that is as impressive as it is satisfying.

Mandy Malloy is a writer and graphic designer currently living in Brooklyn, New York. A graduate of Hunter College’s MFA program and a 2011 Norman Mailer Colony Fellow, her poems have appeared most recently in The Portland Review and Blood Orange Review.

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Thank you to the poet for “If You’re Lucky, Honey.” I was startled and moved by the perfect quiet, by the speaker’s voice, which barely–just barely–dares to disturb the surface before sliding back into resignation.  I admire the light hand (”and this is a comfortable hope / like groceries…”) and am haunted by the slightness of it.

Congratulations, Vanessa!

—

If You’re Lucky, Honey
by Vanessa Gennarelli

You’ll grow old handsome, a darling
farmhand gone urbane

logical lip of a wing-tip &

gait like you’re out to fetch the mail
everywhere you go

even in front of a crowd

your cropped hair
a cresting wave of iron

and this is a comfortable hope
like groceries or perfect biscuit joints

easier than mapping the cracks
in some coral lipstick somewhere
or smacking tired skin into place

pity since the lines win anyway

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When I first opened my copy and started paging through, getting a feel for the book, I’ll be honest—I was a little intimidated by Sherman Alexie’s War Dances. It’s a collection of 23 pieces: not only poetry and short fiction (an already ambitious combination), but also a handful of question-answer sequences sprinkled throughout. Alexie even mixes forms within pieces: prose pieces include lettered lists and numbered sections, numbered sections sometimes consist of a mixture of prose and poetry, and many poems include large blocks of prose.

But as soon as I started to read, I began to feel more at home in Alexie territory. Long known for his literary contributions to the Native American culture, Alexie’s experiences navigating between two worlds inspire much of his work, which often focuses on issues of race and cultural mores, especially those of Native American culture within the mainstream American culture. In War Dances, Alexie continues to navigate these familiar subjects, while also moving beyond them into newer territory. Once I was ready to abandon conventional literary form and to embrace Alexie’s “mix tape” of words and sentences—to glide between paragraph and verse without hesitation—I was ready to take in the fluidity of humor and heartache and longing that Sherman Alexie writes so well.

War Dances is not a book to be afraid of. Alexie’s poetry is prosaic and conversational, his prose intimate and honest. His characters are flawed and believable, even sometimes entirely loathable. In this collection, Alexie’s first publication including prose since 2007, he moves (ever so slightly) away from his usually lovably flawed characters to some who are more fatally so: An adulterous husband, a killer, a gay basher. But much like Alexie challenges his reader with his unique use of form, he also challenges his readers with these difficult characters.

One of the more difficult pieces for me to read, “The Senator’s Son,” is told from the point of view of a young white Republican—a politician’s son—and begins just as the main character is committing a violent hate crime against two homosexual men. For a staunch liberal and ardent advocate for gay rights, I found myself wondering how I’d make it through the piece without wanting to throw the book against the wall.

But Alexie, as I have grown to trust, didn’t let me down. He embraces his complex characters: the socially responsible but ethically questionable senator, the detached and self-absorbed senator’s son, and the former best friend—a homosexual and firm and loyal supporter of the Republican party, who in the end, makes one hell of a case for gay rights:

Hey… I don’t expect to be judged negatively for my fuck buddies. But I don’t want to be judged positively either. It’s just sex. It’s not like it’s some specialized skill or something. Hell, right now, in this house, one hundred thousand bugs are fucking away. In this city, millions of bugs are fucking at this moment. And, hey, probably ten thousand humans—and registered voters—are fucking somewhere in this city. Four or five of them might not even be married…Anybody who thinks that sex somehow relates to the national debt or terrorism or poverty or crime or moral values or any kind of politics is just an idiot.

Some may find Alexie’s political persistence comes on too strong; in a slow beginning to the book, the story “Breaking and Entering” tells about the ensuing racial politics following a burglary in which a young African American boy is killed; and the poem “Go, Ghost, Go” mocks humorless individuals who are “addicted to the indigenous.” Until the fourth piece of the book, one might get the feeling that Alexie is hostile or pretentious. But have faith, because what follows is not only new and challenging, but also heartwarming and brave, addressing issues of race, culture, interconnectivity, and personal crisis with intelligence and humor.

Nichole Held is a MA candidate at St. Cloud State University, working on a fictional piece about Alzheimer’s Disease.

No matter how many classes I take, no matter how many literary journals I read, poetry still makes me nervous. The distinction between brilliant and appalling sometimes seems to be made based on how much sleep you got the night before, and it’s just so scary to look at that line and realize that everyone else around you picked the opposite side.

It needn’t be that difficult, right?

All I ask of poetry is that it sends me off with strings of words that run themselves through my thoughts with the tenacity of a Top 40 hit.  I want to hear and see with the weird intensity that comes after leaving a movie theater.  I want to snuggle into images as I do my favorite memories.  This might be a childish way to read poetry, but so be it.  Because under those guidelines, Nicole Walker’s debut collection, This Noisy Egg, does all the right things.

Walker’s thirty-nine poems (nineteen of which have been previously published) meditate on conception of all kinds – birth, rebirth, beliefs. So much in these poems feels lost or unfulfilled for the many speakers though there are lighter moments as well.  “A Number of Things Are Scarily Lacking” – a list not unlike a Whitman poem or a Cole Porter song – counts on both the humorous (“9. A hotdog. No condiments.” “18. Telling your boyfriend that he looks like Alan Alda.”) as well as the crushing (“6. Your loud voice, no whispers, only walls acoustic.” “30. Turning. 30. No able-bodied Superman to spin the world backward—make up for lost time.”).

The physicality of being often emerges through the emotionality. “She doubled in size & split into you, your mother’s personal geometry. / One noisy seed caused a sea of regret & repainted walls,” says the narrator of “Bivalves.” And in “The Coroner Senses a Blackbird” – “My body told a story my mouth could / not hide.”

As might be expected, the collection wavers a bit in the middle. “What Is Wanted from the Suicides” is probably the weakest piece, not really adding anything to the thick stack of suicide poetry already in existence. I wouldn’t not recommend the book as a result of it, though. Especially by the time we get to my favorite lines in the collection, which are in the middle of “Where P is P & not P”: “You will / find the compass / which will / tell you what lines you must read.”  (Note: sometimes you stumble across exactly what you need to hear.)

While most of the poems fall into a standard page-or-so length, the penultimate poem, “The Unlikely Origin of the Species,” stretches for almost twelve full pages.  It is here where the changing rules of childhood parallel the just as random rules for which animals become pets while others are left to the wild.  It’s actually the narrator of “Canister and Turkey Vulture” that explains the themes most aptly: “everything that stands between the oh so obvious / and the almost can’t imagine.” (Almost can’t imagine – Darwin and St. Francis of Assisi in a tryst.)

The broken sections of the poem are marked with Greek symbols and headline-esque words. To that end, Walker’s note to the poem adds much to “Unlikely” as well as the collection as a whole: “But doesn’t it nearly make you cry when you realize the alphabet doesn’t have to begin with the letter A?”

Amy Whipple is an MFA candidate in nonfiction at the University of Pittsburgh. Readers can also find her at <http://www.amywhipple.com/>.

John Berryman made the famous observation “Life, friends, is boring” and many poets today seem to agree. A great deal of modern work seems to be concerned with mining through layers of the mundane to access some nugget of meaning. We often conflate the everyday and the possible.

Birdwatching in Wartime suggests that the problem may be geographical. Most of us simply don’t live where it’s dangerous. We no longer feel overwhelmed by physicality— hunger, pain, and wild beauty. Jeffrey Thomson brings us back to this world.

Thomson’s poems wind through the Amazon, detailing the fantastical creatures that seem to emerge from every direction. The poems are at times overwhelming, but leave me with a terror and fascination unmatched in any other poetry I’ve read. Much of the effect comes from Thomson’s lyrical dexterity:

…a pity not to have seen

the spattered sun

scribbled down to nothing more than matchlight on army ants

engraving leaf litter,

the cuneiform of tapir prints in the mud of that flat-banked stream,

not to have seen

the wattled jacana scrawl across water lilies with her vast, forked feet

a pity

never to have taken piranha from the river and watched them slap

their gibberish

across the bottom of the boat.

But unlike many lyrical poets, I get the sense that Thomson’s language is lagging behind the reality of the experiences, not dominating them. I picture him running through the jungle, breathlessly jotting down what is happening around him without enough time to focus on any particular wonder.

There is an almost inconceivable breadth and strangeness in Thomson’s landscapes. In “Landscape with Flooded Forest,” Thomson shows us a world where “the horizon rises up around the shoulders of trees/ and fish fly through branches in flocks of scale…a wire-tailed manakin flames/ through the middle-story treetops and pink dolphins/ slalom through the sunken trunks.” The impossibility of these images and their apparent reality challenge the imagination. But there is a darker side to these worlds; a constant danger:

when those wasps

stapled my back and sides and face

…

…when the splotches flushed across my back

my neck, my sweat-licked face,

when the diaspora of venom wrote a question across my back

in hot letters that left me

cold and shaking

The less personal but no less fierce violence of the “Tarantulas that hunt fish” or “piranha, red-bellied as rage…that dissembled a swimming sloth” also stalks through the poems. Thomson’s cocktail of fear and wonder is potent. It keeps the poems engaging even when the density of creatures and events threatens to overwhelm them.

Though Thomson’s Amazon poems are the vanguard of Birdwatching in Wartime, they are not the totality of the army he has deployed. He also experiments with two long multi-part poems.  The first, the “Celestial Emporeum of Benevolent Knowledge,” plays with the idea of cataloguing experience into a handful of categories. Thomson’s fresh use of language is an asset here and the poem sparkles with clever metaphorical gems. Though it’s length and wit are impressive, the poem seems to buckle under the freedom afforded by its scope. The second long poem, “Blind Desire,” is largely successful, with a coherent series of three-tercet sections interlocking through a sequence of overlapping images.

Other directions abound in Birdwatching, including commentary on religion, imperialism, and desire, a poem entwined in the philosophy and desperation of Jack Gilbert, and a poem comprised solely of footnotes. But it is really the Amazon poems and their “Landscape” form, which re-appears throughout, that give this book its thrust. “Beauty is a theatre of risk” writes Thomson, and in terms of form and content, this book goes all in.

Dmitry Berenson is pursuing a PhD in Robotics at Carnegie Mellon
University. He is an avid reader and writer of poetry.

Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s second book of poems, Apocalyptic Swing, resonates with a quiet intensity. Issues of the body, love and sex, of fighting and falling and yet rising again because there is no choice flow through this collection involving a boxer who is caught up in the fight and world that exists around it in a small American town.

One time you hit a guy so hard

even he looked impressed before he fell
to the mat and started to seize.
She didn’t let you touch her for days

after that.

Calvocoressi works from within the ring, as poems become the victor, loser, referee, someone shouting from the crowd.  Small town concerns take precedence, become all that matter.  These poems are the lights, the sweat shining on the floor after, evidence of what’s left. Apocalyptic Swing holds a sense of struggle, fight and courage and power, combined with a profound feeling of loneliness that plays part, even as an entire community’s inhabitants become a single entity of pride, anticipating something better.

These poems draw on people who are struggling to survive, whether in the ring or in their everyday lives.  The boxer is any one of them, and he becomes the whole town, which could be any town, and they are all fighting, deserving to win, but usually walking away broken, beaten.

A sad history of short-lived triumph shifts through, coupled with hope.  This time will be better:

It will feel better than any floor
that’s risen up to meet you.  It will rise

like Easter bread, golden and familiar
in your grandmother’s hands.  She’ll come back,

heaven having been too far from home
to hold her.  O it will be beautiful.

Calvocoressi’s language is controlled with a confident, relaxed tone of honesty that quietly tells of a town and its people, one story, one memory at a time.  Her poems take the hit, get back up, train for the next fight, keep going.  Family and community encircle, push the importance of effort and love into the face, wrap it up between the knuckles, prepare for the punches.  Small wars, small fires move from mouth to mouth, family to friend, keeping everyone warm, and relying on the chain to prevail, to stay lit, to stay alive.  There is the fight and what’s worth fighting for—there cannot be one without the other.

Amanda Brant is a current MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh.  She is originally from Indiana but now lives in Pittsburgh’s Southside with her dog, Maddie.  Her work has recently appeared in Invisible City.

Ariana Reines notes in her brief preface that Charles Baudelaire began producing text for My Heart Laid Bare sometime around 1859 and composed notes for this work perhaps until his death in 1867. The intended result—an autobiographical work in which to “cram all [his] rage” —was never realized. In its place we encounter a collection of fragments, notes toward prospective essays, and personal musings. Baudelaire never intended to publish these fragments, and the sections progress rapidly through moments of unmitigated candor, oblique shorthand for future investigations, and autobiographical concerns over his debts, his health, his method, and his “greatness.”

My understanding of Reines’s translation is couched in a fair degree of ignorance; I do not speak or read French, and I have never seen the André Guyaux edition from which she draws. One scarcely needs to be a Francophile, however, to appreciate the vivid brevity that Reines brings to her endeavor. Norman Cameron’s previous translation (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1950), for example, presents the opening passage of the fifth section:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy. That is why she should be regarded with disgust.
Woman is hungry, and she wants to eat; thirsty, and she wants to drink.
She feels randy, and she wants to be ——— .
Fine characteristics!
Woman is “natural” — that is to say, abominable.
Moreover, she is always vulgar—that is to say, the opposite of the Dandy.

Reines’s interpretation reads:

Woman is the opposite of the Dandy.
Therefore she is horrifying.
Woman is hungry and wants to eat. Thirsty, she wants to drink.
She is in heat and wants to be fucked.
Deserves it!
Woman is natural, which is to say abominable.
Also she is always vulgar, which is to say the opposite of the Dandy.

The success of Reines’s translation relies partly upon her willingness to displace a certain “etiquette”—which substitutes a long dash for “fucked” yet finds little fault in a description of women as “always vulgar”—in an act of fidelity to Baudelaire’s title. Reines’s rendering allows us to witness the corporeal fixation that suffuses Baudelaire’s text without the protective qualifications that attend a high register. I have no idea whose translation is more “accurate,” but Reines’s translation of “Deserves it!” where Cameron arrived at “Fine characteristics!” perhaps foregrounds the sensibility that each translator brings to the source text.

As an object (much like the press’s simultaneously released GLORY HOLE/THE HOT TUB by Dan Hoy and Jon Leon), this edition exemplifies Mal-O-Mar’s intelligent regard for formal novelty. (If there is a spoiler alert to be made, this is it.) Reines’s My Heart Laid Bare is printed on nine pages of full-sized newsprint, and the title is printed in a font size large enough to be read easily from the other side of the street. The decision to deliver the poem in this medium is endlessly intriguing: Baudelaire characterizes newspapers as “a tissue of horrors” in section 80, yet we encounter that opinion as readers in the present age, immersed in digitization and anxiety over the possibly imminent demise of proper newspapers. Of course, we must make the necessary distinction between newsprint and newspapers, and it may be that Baudelaire is granted a small victory here: the occupation of a form he vehemently despised. Edgar Allen Poe, cited in Reines’s translator’s note, elucidates both the text and its formal delivery:

If any ambitious man have a fancy to revolutionize, at one effort, the universal world of human thought, human opinion, and human sentiment, the opportunity is his own—the road to immortal renown lies straight, open, and unencumbered before him. All that he has to do is to write and publish a very little book. Its title should be simple—a few plain words—”My Heart Laid Bare.” But—this little book must be true to its title.

Mal-O-Mar’s edition resides at the perimeter of the definition of a “book,” but it does manage to depart from previous English translations that bury My Heart Laid Bare within collections of Baudelaire’s works. As a discrete, self-contained object, however, we might still argue whether it manages to be “very little.” We can easily describe it as slim. Yet its physical presence is imposing enough to resist becoming the “disgusting aperitif” with which “the civilized man accompanies his morning meal.” Readers need no prerequisite reverence for literary objects to understand that Baudelaire’s text must be laid flat and opened wide.

Chad Vogler received his B.A. in English from UC Berkeley and currently attends the MFA program at the University of Pittsburgh, where he is the assistant poetry editor for Hot Metal Bridge. He lives in a house without a furnace in Point Breeze.