All of which is to say that Dobby Gibson’s new collection of poems It Becomes You are of the type that both grasp and grapple with this conception. Such a notion is made clear from the start; the first poem in the book, “From Parts Unknown,” asserts:

What’s undone is done.
Truancy has lost its allure.

I’m finally content to sit here
and use some of the few words

I know to mark the present
as it slides silently into the past

and assumes the mantle
of the spent moment.

These are, clearly, not the declarations of a youthful provocateur. But nor are they the wizened musings of a writer who has come to the end of his/her days , thus feeling beholden to reflect on the actions and mis-actions that have now passed for his/her life. Instead, they are the short, wrought proclamations of a poet that is willing to cede the fact that so much of what we exist in is culled “From Parts Unknown;” much later, in the penultimate poem in the collection “Postscript,” Gibson writes:

Even as the sun rises,
the darkness approaches.
You are the monster of your own campfire story,
and the telling of it
has been your life’s noblest deed.

You can’t bear to be alone,
but this is the best evidence you have
that you’re still here.

In a charming café a thousand miles away,
a couple sits across from one another
and reads the news in silence.
It’s up to you to choose
what happens next—it always has been—
and it’s okay to choose not much.
Some ice snaps in a glass.
How still the world is.

Not much. This isn’t a defiant statement re: how to live or not live one’s life. Instead, it’s one borne out of sheer necessity, out of cherished routine. “…I am trying to be a decent middle-class father, / which requires living close to adequate schools/ and inexpensive packaged goods” Gibson writes in “What Follows Us Now Must Soon Enough Be Carried.” Father or not, this sentiment rings true for the majority of contemporary American poets, many of whom are also members of the middle-class and, out of need if not desire, also frequent consumers of “inexpensive packaged goods.” Some fervent systematic derangement of the senses is not, in all honesty, what most (but not all, of course) American poets writing today are concerned with.

Although never overtly, It Becomes You thus accepts this belief at face value, furthermore asserting that it could not—should not—be any other way. Posterity is for ghosts and ghosts alone. To be alive today and tomorrow can only be enough.

Related Posts:

• Wikipedia Says It Will Pass by Diana Salier
• I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
• The Silhouettes, by Lily Ladewig
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

Salier is a straight ahead, “no ideas but in things” poet and many of the poems in wikipedia says it will pass are narrative vignettes, ones that have staunch beginnings and endings. Her work is furthermore a definite product of its technologically advanced age: some of the book’s titles include “my gmail makes you laugh so hard” and “this poem is a chatroom and you have left the chatroom”; in “what about the dinosaur problem” she writes, “i write poems in my phone and export them via bluetooth” (11). beach boys to walt disney to firefox, every word is in lower case. Punctuation is used sparingly. Yet the content of the work in the collection is—to use an ill-advised word— timeless. The speaker in nearly every poem in wikipedia says it will pass is in love or falling in love or trying to get over the fact that she is no longer in love, and this circumstance provides the reader with appealingly little respite—like the speaker, at the beginning of the collection we are also immersed in the joyful throes of a newly blossoming relationship; at the end of it we are also, tearful, forced to make the statement “when i say I don’t believe in love/ i think i don’t believe in us” (15).

As a result of this some might call Salier a poet too self-absorbed, too concerned with her world (or at least her speaker’s world, a speaker that—a la Frank O’Hara—does very much seem to be a stand-in for herself) and not the world. But to make such a contention would be missing the point, simplifying self-regard (universal) for self-obsession (egotistical). In “i like human as a word but not as a concept,” one of the best works in the short 22 page volume, the speaker reiterates and repeats the poem’s title—“i like human as a word/ i like human as a word/ but not as a concept”—before going on to assert “and not as an excuse.” I’m only human—it’s the easiest thing in the world to say after making a mistake. But in “i like human as a word but not as a concept” Salier makes clear that such an assertion is nothing more than passing the buck; it’s the fact that we’re “only human” that makes us worth knowing, worth kissing, worth loving. And to deny this is to willfully forget what being “human” truly means—or should mean.

Sleeping and dreaming also figure significantly in wikipedia says it will pass but for the book’s speaker both activities are less welcomed releases and more necessary burdens. They remind Salier’s speaker of what was. The entirety of “i found you, ms. new booty” reads:

every morning you’re not here
rapping bubba sparxxx
grabbing my flat ass
to wake me up
i grab it myself
i can’t rap
i don’t wake up (8)

“i wish it was secretaries’ day” begins with the lines, “i had a nap dream: you were selling refreshments at a play/ you stood really far away from me/ and you said i wish it was secretaries’ day/ and I said so, what, are you like a secretary now??… and you excused yourself to go to the bathroom/ and i thought you wanted me to follow you/ like for old times’ sake/ but i think you just really had to pee” (3). What Salier’s poetry lacks in ambiguity it makes up for in universality: we’ve all had this dream. And when woken from it we all feel the same way: tentative, precarious, rolling over on one side of the bed and quickly back again.

The Red Ceilings Press isn’t the biggest or most well-known press in the world and Diana Salier isn’t a household name. But her work—and wikipedia says it will pass—deserves a wider audience. Salier’s poetry captures the minutia and potential desolation of love while at the same time highlighting its giddiness, its euphoria, its fundamental loveliness. And wikipedia says it will pass is an enjoyable, engaging chapbook to read—and reread and reread. It promises greater things to come.

Related Posts:

• It Becomes You by Dobby Gibson
• I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
• Letters From Robots by Diana Salier
• The Silhouettes, by Lily Ladewig
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

Comprised of three sections—“Parties,” “Beauty” and “Devastation”— in a plethora of free verse forms, I Live in a Hut thus bears the standard hallmark of most volumes of contemporary poetry. What distinguishes Smith’s work, than, is its insouciance and wholly unabashed nature; these traits of hers were no doubt one of the primary reasons why Matthea Harvey chose I Live in a Hut for the 2011 Cleveland State University Poetry Center First Book Prize. Smith is unafraid of being zany. She is unafraid of beginning a poem with the lines, “My eternal flame is more eternal than yours. My bivouac is more permanent than your eternal flame. At night when your soldiers are praying ceaselessly for less rain and more underwear, my soldiers make underwear out of rain” (“Manifest Destinyland”) or “I still don’t understand why the French aren’t fat./Let them get fat. The French. Let them try to/ sadly smoke in postures of disregard and regret/as a statue now that they are fat” (“Un Peu”). She is, as has been made clear, unafraid of titling a poem “Fuck You.” Or “Becky Home-Ecky and Her Fourteen Boyfriends”; “Why I Am Not Famous.” Irony has become somewhat of a pejorative word in contemporary poetry circles—we want our poets to write poetry that is sincere, as sincere as organics apples falling off organic apple trees on organic apple farms— but Smith’s poems are often joyously ironic. A poem like her “Seriousness” revels in the pleasure of making such assertions as “I wore my honorable badness/ badly. I felt uncomfortable/ but honorable…Excuse me, I must go drink some poison.”

It’s simple, really: Smith’s poems are fun to read. This is a reductive and facile categorization, to be sure, and stating someone’s poetry is “fun” often means it is deficient in some manner or overly simplistic. The word fun has such little purchase in literary criticism because it means essentially nothing—what is “fun” for one reader is laborious and dull for another. Smith’s kind of fun, than, is of the type that is actually fun. Think laughing out loud. Think verbal waterfalls, linguistic roller coasters. Slips and slides and alliterative rolls off the tongue. Inside jokes that cement new friendships. The poetry in I Live in a Hut is fun in that it holds to the first two definitions Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (2nd ed.) gives to the word—“something that provides mirth”; “enjoyment or playfulness.” “Becky Home-Ecky and Her Fourteen Boyfriends” know what I mean. Overweight or not, the French know what I mean. And you, too, know what I mean. Fun. Fun.

To great effect Smith’s poetry employs irony, to be sure. But to use that catch-all word once again, it is also often sincere, disarmingly so. I Live in a Hut takes as its centerpiece the poem “Beauty,” which is the longest work in the volume and comprises the entirety of its second section. “Beauty” is wrenching in its presentation of what beauty means or can mean or does or can do. Early on in the poem the speaker relates that

Because with beauty there are only two
directions, the one we all know

with the cathedrals and the night-
blooming flowers, everything composed
by dull symmetries, and the other direction

which is to see beauty in gutter water
or broken shoes, and which depends
so on the entirely on the first direction

that we all know it, too.

To be able to see the beautiful in both the majestic and the hum-drum ordinary, in the luminosity of the towering mountain in the distance and in the tiny crumbs of dirt beneath one’s feet: it’s a familiar sentiment, one that the poem’s speaker acknowledges is not her own. “Let’s move on,” she says in “Beauty’s” fifth stanza. “…I/ have only promised to attempt. / I have attempted.” From there the poem discourses on beauty’s potential failures—“At this point in our exploration/ somebody should die to remind us/ how useless it is to think this way”—before seguing into what is acknowledged as “the third/ kind of beauty.” This is of a type that is more idiosyncratic than those other two kinds; it deals less in universal themes and more in personal sentiment and feeling. It’s the type of beauty that makes a reader want to call up an author to shoot the shit with them, one that is “conferred” rather than merely recognized. “The boy whose name I scratched/ into my bedroom wall behind my pillow…I conferred beauty/ because I watched him, the well water/ I conferred beauty upon because I drank it…” Beauty of this kind is the most important and the most ignored, disregarded; the fact that beauty is in the eye of the beholder means that it might be beautiful to you, just you, and no one else. It’s beauty as declaration, no matter what anyone else thinks. “[H]ow embarrassing it is to love the world/ in this way.” And yet necessary, so very necessary—Smith’s “Beauty” makes this clear.

In conclusion: After reading and enjoying I Live in a Hut I’d like to call S.E. Smith up on the phone to chat. “Terrific” friends I’d like to be. I doubt it will happen, but the desire is there—and that doesn’t happen, with me at least, very often. I Live in a Hut is worth reading. Thank you for your first book of poems, S.E. Let’s gab. Let’s talk.

Related Posts:

• It Becomes You by Dobby Gibson
• Wikipedia Says It Will Pass by Diana Salier
• The Silhouettes, by Lily Ladewig
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević

Consisting of 13 like-minded sections, The Silhouettes does not differ much from the vast majority of contemporary American poetry collections; in a variety of free verse forms Ladewig writes poems on a multitude of various subjects and themes. Many of them are interconnected—see the 3 recurring titles in the book, “On Silhouettes,” “Templates” and “Shadow Box”— and notions of fashion, technology and modern-age doing and being come up continually. Throughout Ladewig resolutely refuses to say either too much or not enough; the mystery of her work clasps sweaty hands with its vivacious readability. Her poems are funny, at times.

Her poems are serious, at times. They’re direct; they’re disjunctive. They don’t pander to the reader yet at the same they aren’t afraid of making decidedly un-oblique questions/statements like “What is the worst fashion/beauty/love advice that’s ever been given to you?” or “The problem with watching movies about air travel is/ that in reality your never get to watch yourself take off/ from the outside”. I wouldn’t go so far as call Ladewig’s work in The Silhouettes standard (or some variant thereof) exactly—but to be honest it isn’t that much different from a lot of other stuff out there. To any reader of contemporary American poetry it’s familiar. It’s recognizable. It has antecedents. To a certain degree at least it’s nothing new.

What sets Ladewig and The Silhouettes apart, than, is that it doesn’t attempt to classify itself as something it’s not. Read any blurb from any award-winning (no matter which award) poetry book published in the last 15 years and the inevitable words inevitably arise—“new,” “needed,” “discovery,” “transcend,” “vital,” “fresh,” “exceptional,” “extraordinary.” I could go on. The irony of such high words of praise, of course, is that 98.5% of all these “vital” and “extraordinary” collections of poetry are forgotten about 2 or so years following their publication; after that, they are relegated to the teeming shelves of so many half-dusty university libraries. Unread, they dwell only on themselves. Unread, they dwell in themselves, their entire life a fervent prayer to be picked up once again. And to be interlibrary loaned, passed amongst several different sets of hands, is to enter the rarefied air belonging to heaven.

The Silhouettes has not been accredited by anyone in the field of contemporary American poetry. Somewhat astoundingly, the collection is blurb-less (at least on the actual physical copy I possess; if you search for it, Dara Wier does provide one online at SpringGun Press’ website). Instead, on the book’s back cover is—get this— an actual poem written by Ladewig, one that is also contained within. Essentially representative of her poetry as a whole and taken from the aforementioned “Shadow Box” series, in its entirety it reads:

You can always return to a room, even if it no longer exists. Even if you don’t pray, there is something soothing about pressing your palms together. Bowing your head. They say that much of our decision-making is a result of biology. They say when you visit Russia you never for a moment forget that you are in Russia. I smelled you and within five seconds I knew. Nothing stays clean. Not my white t-shirts. Not your white jeans. The skin between a sailor’s tattoos. I bathe and then I have to bathe again. If I keep repeating what I think I should want, I might start believing it.

With no one to vouch for it, Ladewig’s “Shadow Box” here is forced to stand on its own, and I would say it passes muster. In particular the line “Even if you don’t pray, there is something soothing about pressing your palms together” rings true—to press one’s palms together is soothing in some fundamental sense-—and the end sentence “If I keep repeating what I think I should want, I might start believing it” seems to suggest that faith is simply repetition and repetition is the eternal semblance of enacting belief—to be faithful one merely has to live in the world and exist, has to accept the circuitous nature of day-to-day living. It also reminds me of my weight problem. How many times has my (right) arm extended itself to my (only) gaping mouth? 1 million times? 10 million? “Repetition is necessary,” Ladewig asserts in a later “Shadow Box” poem. “It evens out the body.” And, mercifully, according to Ladewig my overeating is an act of incalculable devotion, of unassailable faith and belief.

There are other poems in The Silhouettes that distinguish themselves just like this particular “Shadow Box” does and numerous memorable, insouciant lines that stand out throughout. Among them: “Like how if nobody looks at my naked body then I will never be truly naked again” (“Shadow Box” 18); “There’s a certain drug/ people take that makes them/ feel like trees. I’m better/ at the jerky movements. / Take me to the supermarket/ of your hips and I’ll build a home” (“When I Dance”); “At nightfall our shadows turn into choreographers. They instruct the dancers not to touch but to imagine touching” (“Shadow Box” 30). Just like any poet worth his or her salt, the best of Ladewig’s poems stay with you, plain and simple. They remind you that to be a poet is to be both a liar and a truth-seeking oracle, and that in the end there is no real difference between the two.

The Silhouettes didn’t win any major national awards. It did not change the scope and focus of contemporary American poetry, nor did it—on its back cover, in black ink against a sheer white background—purport itself to. What it did do—what it does do—is provide the reader with well-crafted, well-constructed poems, ones that deserve reading and rereading. Nothing more or less. Ladewig’s debut collection of poetry is worthwhile, engaging and provoking. It is deserving of your time, but it will not change your life. And it didn’t at all help me with my weight problem. My unseemly silhouette.

Related Posts:

• It Becomes You by Dobby Gibson
• Wikipedia Says It Will Pass by Diana Salier
• I Live in a Hut by S. E. Smith
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević