What can we know about the things in our lives? What is the relationship between the thing and its properties? How do things possess their properties? In the three poem cycles of Balloon Pop Outlaw Black, Patricia Lockwood leverages the philosophical capacity of poetry to explore how mass media, the fluidity of quantum physics, and the idea of precession of simulacra, destabilize the idea of “properties,” and how that destabilization changes the relationship between the things and the properties that define them. Along the way, she writes strange, brilliant, fantastic poems.

What are the properties of a figure, recreated over and over again, represented over and over again, and experienced over and over again, so much so that people feel they have an actual relationship with that figure? What binds together an image on a poster, in a comic, on TV, or in a movie? Using an abstracted poetified version of Popeye, Lockwood explores how entities of mass culture and mass media, handled by person after person, writer after writer, illustrator after illustrator, develop a strange reality distinct from the strange reality of legendary, mythical, religious and other cultural characters like “Coyote” or “Jesus.” Though Lockwood specifically asks, “What is Popeye?” questions like “What is Batman?” or “What is Kermit the Frog?” or even “What is Marilyn Monroe?” naturally follow. This first section, “When We We Move Away From Here, You’ll See a Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung,” despite being the most focused of the collection, will be difficult for most readers. Not only is Lockwood grappling with a very abstract idea, she is also establishing the act of grappling in her collection. She is simultaneously exploring a bizarre, uncertain, and confusing idea and laying the ground work for the exploration of such ideas.

Science used to answer the bizarre, uncertain, and confusing. It used to straighten the blurry lines of endless replication into numbers and laws. But now, physics is discovering phenomena as strange as anything that can be imagined. Spooky action at a distance describes a physics of unstable properties with definitions that shift with shifting perspective. Lockwood writes, “Any piece of paper on which ‘popeye’ is printed counts as a Will, as it contains his signature, his witness, proof of his death, a list of all the property he owns, and the name of his inheritor,” creating an image of fractured singularity, as cogent a description of the madness of quarks acquiring mass through fields of energy you can find outside of equations. “The Mouth,” is filled with shuffling characteristics and in one line from “The Quickening,” she beautifully captures what it means to our experience of the world when its fundamental particles are so unstable; “When checkers are green and blue instead of red and black, they are a game about the ocean and not a game about the war.” The piece can now change color in our hands, forcing us to choose the composition of our experience. “A house in Kansas is made of Kansas. A house in the jungle is made of the jungle. The house here is made of there, is made of the air that a house displaces,” and “Inseparable things are easily separated, she knows. The name of the tea at one end of the string, the tea at the other.”

But choosing the defining properties from the quantum array, does not solve the problems of definition and property. Once you consider the idea of simulations, or copies, “preceding” their originals, and how this extends to effects “preceding” their causes, the distinction between the property and the thing it defines evaporates as well. “Below, from another world, the idea of a house was forcing itself upward, trying to come out on the other side clothed,” Is the house the property of the idea or is the idea the property of the house? Did the idea build the house or did the house build the idea? Even the material of the house won’t stand still. “It’s hard to tell where the house ends and the outside begins—the surrounding of the house almost seems to hold it up.” Is the house made of “house” or excluded space? Is the space made of “not house?” What makes the consideration of making? Precession is a rabbit hole of reason and Baudrilliard’s explication tied my brain in knots. It opens into levels of abstraction foreign to just about everybody. But poetry, by its nature, speaks to our abstract mind, the aspects of our intelligence comfortable with chaos and paradox, and so Lockwood’s images give precession a clarity I’ve never seen in philosophical writing.

Still, Lockwood wrote a collection of poems, not a treatise. Lockwood’s shorter poems are quality works as individual objects and have the intelligent strangeness I personally look for in poetry. Even when grappling with these abstract ideas, Lockwood grounds them in tangible images, giving us the opportunity to both grasp the challenging ideas and enjoy the beauty of pictures painted by words; “A year has gone by without her noticing—time does not flow smoothly here, but grows in bunches like bananas.” At least in terms of Lockwood’s poems, you don’t need to choose, all the properties are always available. Some readers will be put off by the density of this collection, especially while Lockwood is establishing the book’s project, but there is enough beautiful language throughout the philosophical exploration that I believe most poetry readers will find a lot to like. Even separated from the overall structure, “The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation,” “The Salesmen Open Their Trenchcoats, All Filled with Possible Names for the Watch,” “History of the House Where You Were Born,” and others are fantastic poems.

Though poetry is a useful tool for philosophy, I have to ask, what is the end result? Can poetry translate these phenomena into our more “mainstream” systems of sense-making and life-living? If not, how does its exploration inform or assist or contribute to the thoughts we intend to think and the actions we intend to take? If there is no way to carry material from one to the other, is it good, bad, or neither to have a divided consciousness as the standard operating procedure? How could we ever evaluate the material in a way that helps us live better lives as better people? And yet, the impossibility of these questions does nothing to diminish my love of poetry. It might be the source. Too many poets and poetry readers hide from this impossibility, assuming those succinct images of daily life, daily emotions, and daily nature told in daily language are fundamental. That assumption, though, is supported by avoidance; that crystal clear image is only crystal clear if you don’t look at it too hard. Once you do, it is endlessly faceted by the very impossibility it sought to avoid. Balloon Pop Outlaw Black is a bold, brilliant, intelligent, strange collection of poetry, one that transforms that impossibility from an adversary into a dance partner.

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Music and poetry have always been intertwined if for no other reason than poetry, in large part, depends on audio for meaning. The question of the distinction between the song lyric and the poem solidified into a debate, at least in America, with Bob Dylan and his heirs, when listeners started paying attention to the substance of lyrics independent of their sound in the song. It was when the distinction was blurred, when lyrics began to support the scrutiny of words on the page, that we really began to question how to tell a song from a poem. At best, this consideration has produced a kind of “know it when I see it,” spectrum, where we can agree that even the best Rolling Stones lyrics are not poetry, while most of Patti Smith’s work probably is, maybe adding the almost tautological, “if it needs the music it’s a song, if not, it’s a poem.” By deciding the works in The Word on the Street are songs, Muldoon directly engages this debate, offering his own definition by example.

This poses a major challenge to the reviewer; there is no “The Word on the Street” album. As much as the publisher designed this like a CD insert, it’s a hardcover with a hardcover price. I have to approach the lyrics as poems, because, with the exception of the five songs on the EP, I can only experience them as poems. And as poems, only three of them succeed; “Good Luck with That,” “Jezebell was a Jersey Belle,” and “Put Me Down.” In all three, we see the direct energy of rock ‘n’ roll merged with Muldoon’s wit and sophistication. Muldoon writes intricate poetry, and in these three poems, especially “Jezebell was a Jersey Belle,” we see an excellent translation of that intricacy into the simplicity of couplets, lost loves, cheating hearts, and political outrage. However, this translation is at the core of what makes The Word on the Street a disappointing collection of poetry.

Rock lyrics have a strange kind of successful superficiality, the visceral thrill of shouted certainties, telling the world what you think, see, and feel as loud as you can for three minutes. But, too often, Muldoon seems to believe rock lyrics are just simplified poems. Which is not to say that long lines and complicated rhyme schemes guarantee quality, but that the removal of them does not guarantee intensity. Furthermore, I found it difficult to intuit the sound of the lyrics from their format on the page. Even in poems, there should be a sense of the audible rhythm from the printed page, or, as in the case of Muldoon’s best work, a flexibility that allows the poem to “sound” good no matter how the reader interprets that “sound.” In this collection, I couldn’t hear the songs from the words.

Even listening to the available songs on The Wayside Shrines website didn’t add to the substance of the lyrics. Of the five songs, only my appreciation of “Feet of Clay” and “Black Box” was improved by listening to them. With “Feet of Clay”, the song revealed a rhyme scheme I really should have noticed in my reading. It came closest to matching my personal image of a “Paul Muldoon rock song.” With “Black Box,” I was able to hear how the wit of the lyrics lead into a traditional declaration of rock ‘n’ roll affection. But the other three gained nothing from having the missing substance added.

One of the benefits of reaching a point in your career when you are an “important writer,” is that not every single one of your works needs to be important, you’ve earned the privilege to play pick-up every now and then. If Paul Muldoon has fun writing song lyrics, he has earned the privilege to publish a collection of his song lyrics. Furthermore, I know from personal experience that writing and playing songs is fun, whether you’re good at writing and playing songs or, like me, pretty terrible at it.

The Paul Muldoon completist, will want a copy of The Word on the Street, and, if you happen to catch The Wayside Shrines and like what you hear, you can get the lyrics. But otherwise, this is a skippable collection; at best, it’s the lyric book for an album you can’t listen to, and, at worst, a weak collection from an otherwise great poet.

Editor’s Note: As the Wayside Shrines have said in the comments, there is a “Word on the Street” album, available at no cost from WaysideShrines.org. We regret the error.

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D’Annunzio opens with a description of his technique; the sound of paper being cut into strips, the arrangement of his body on the hospital bed, the angle of the writing board, the position of his fingers, the motion of his hands precisely controlled so “none of their shaking is transmitted to [his] bandaged head.” (p. 3) He discusses the progress of his recovery, describes his pain (“Tonight the demon takes my glowing eye in the palm of his hand and blows on it with all the might of his swollen cheeks.”) and relates his treatment. He even closes the poem with a recapitulation of the opening image, a demonstration for a visiting friend who noticed the “sibylline sheets scattered across the bed.” Somewhat like the Dadaist aleatory composition that preceded and Oulipo’s formalism that followed, the method of composition is part of the fabric of the work. The blindfolded D’Annunzio wrote a stunningly visual, 288 page prose poem, one strip of paper at a time.

Reading Notturno is like following some inherent turbulence from painting to painting in an art gallery. “The motorman is from Siracusa. We talk about the sun, the heat, the oranges, the almond trees in bloom, Taormina; I see the Latomie again, the theater, the Venus, the Ram…” (p. 25) “Touch the bottom of my wound with melody, and there awaken ineffable colors that exist only in the light-spectrum of stars.” (p. 119) “The fire is like a tattered flag, hoisted up a mast.” (p. 183) “I dreamt I was folding my flesh like a colorless cape./ Then I dreamt I unfolded it and hung it from a nail jutting out from a colorless wall.” (p. 208) Notturno is composed not just of lines and paragraphs but of verbal portraits and landscapes.

In the Post Scriptum, D’Annunzio writes, “The optic nerve drew from every layer of my culture and prior life, projecting countless images into my field of vision with a swiftness of transition unknown even in my boldest flights of lyricism.” (p. 290) When one is blind, other senses intensify to compensate. With D’Annunzio, instead of another sense compensating for his temporary lack of sight, the language of sight intensified. In essence, “Hallucination takes the shape of a reality so vivid that present, speaking people are, by comparison, bodiless phantoms.” (p. 227) Through his linguistic sensory compensation, D’Annunzio captures one of the powers of literature; creating an experience with a depth of substance greater than reality.

To describe Notturno as a substantive work is a dramatic understatement. Death, war, the Aristotelian elements, Catholicism, Futurism, and Fascism. The body in pain. A Song of Myself of cracks and seams. An In Search of Lost Time for WWI pilots and Venice. Martyrdom and valor. The sanctification of soldiers. The transitions of technology. The bravado of the poet. The power of the image. Translator Stephen Sartarelli says this, “His is a poetics of accumulation and contradiction sustained…by his stylistic mastery holding it together.” (p. xiii) Notturno is a scholar’s/critic’s/reader’s mine, an endless vein of interpretation; a bounty that poses a strange challenge to the reviewer. How do you demonstrate the expanse of the work in a little over a thousand words? One does not review Notturno, one writes a thesis on Notturno.

However, contemporary readers will be puzzled, if not downright disgusted, by D’Annunzio’s military chauvinism. When considered alongside his contemporary English language war poets, his ebullience for war and his fetishizing of death in war is baffling. Veterans usually aren’t so damn jazzed about fighting. One of the closing images is of a peasant who slowly drowns himself to avoid revealing the location of a ford in the river to the enemy. To me, this is a very complicated image, but to D’Annunzio, it contains some of the simplest and most direct lines in the poem. To him, dying for the fatherland is the best of all possible deaths. It is “an even better way to die.”

But even as he glorifies war, he does not sanitize it. “He sets the grim package down on the counter the way a merchant lays down a bolt of fabric to be measured by the yard./ These are the remains of Alfredo Barbieri from the Ljubljana mission.” (p. 66) “One barrage of fire had massacred our men./ The bloody pile was far away but seemed to be approaching with a slithering of entrails.” (p.256) He was wounded. His friends and comrades killed. He mourned the fallen with a passion approaching mania. But not only did he glorify war in writing, he begged to fight, and used his fame and influence to secure permission to fly on bombing missions even after his afflicted eye was amputated.

Given this romantic chauvinism and commitment to fascism, it’s clear why D’Annunzio hasn’t been read much in English, despite his prominence and importance in 20th century Italian literature. For some reason, it has been easier for contemporary readers to forgive these flaws in the Futurists than in D’Annunzio, perhaps because of how they fit into the broader trajectory of avant garde literature. But Notturno cannot be reduced to this one flawed theme. It has too much depth to be cast aside with the rest of fascist literature. As D’Annunzio himself says, “I write like one casting an anchor: the hawser pays out faster and faster, the sea appears bottomless, and the fluke never manages to catch, nor the hawser to tauten.” (p. 14) Or, to return to the idea of sensory compensation, D’Annunzio is writing to enact experience, to engender things from words, to make the hallucinations real. As much as a writer can succeed in this, D’Annunzio succeeds. He gets close to the power he describes here, “I like the name so much that I need only say [zagara] to smell the fragrance.” (p. 82)

My notes for this review include several pages of quotes, lines I was compelled to record because my duty as a reviewer is to transmit, as much as possible, a representation of the beauty I find in the book, and because transcribing is my way, as a reader, to honor the author’s triumphs. To D’Annunzio’s mindset, highlightings, underlinings, and transcribings are medals readers pin to the writer’s chest; the proof of valor, the record of triumph, the substance of honor. Following that image, Notturno is like a vastly decorated general; intimidating, ambitious, intelligent, and, in all connotations and denotations of the word, excellent.

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The strongest poem in the first three books is “Vija Clemens & The Case of the Nocturnal Pocketbook.” The speaker imagines reading a mystery with that title, and, essentially, writes the mystery in the course of his imagining. Moments in the poem recall Paul Muldoon’s recent collection Maggots, in which prosaic storytelling is extruded through the fluidity of poetry. Black writes, “I wish I were reading a mystery called/ Vija Clemens & The Case of the Nocturnal Pocketbook/ in which an insensitive amateur detective named Abner Badminton/ gets hired to uncover the mystery behind Time Magazine art critic Richard Lacayo’s statement:” and “The whole case hinges on the impenetrable ‘superabundance of subdued visual incidents’/ as we follow Badminton through the usual ruses, twists, & turns–.” Black begins constructing an interesting tension between the mysteries detectives solve and the mysteries poets solve, while toying with principles of art and criticism. It is a complex arrangement of ideas, building towards a fraught but fascinating conclusion. Until Black writes, “until he discovers the obvious, which is that it doesn’t really mean anything at all/ beyond sort of sounding good.” He concludes with this idea, “And everyone agrees it just sounds good.”

In poem after poem, in the first three books of Uselysses, Black declares, in an almost off-handed way, that poetry can’t do anything important. He is demonstrating self-conscious awareness of the limitations of the written word, or catering to some requirement for realism, or accepting the freedom of effort without responsibility. Though it’s probably true, “poems can’t/ make people stop being assholes, or end greed and suffering,” (p20) shouldn’t poets be writing to change that. Furthermore, shouldn’t the reader decide what the poem does or does not accomplish. This is not to say that every poet should try to save the world with every poem, or that there is no beauty in the pointless, or that the poetic voice should be messianic, monumental and monotone, but Black’s mitigating interjections disrupt whatever the poem is accomplishing, by breaking the reader out of whatever images and ideas the poem had been conveying.

The book changes course in Moby K. Dick. The inherent playfulness of the collisions seemed to free Black from the pressure to be self-conscious. The images are allowed to fend for themselves in the reader’s mind, and, as a result, are much stronger and more interesting than those written in doubt of their strength and interest. “I tell you: The truth involves innumerable shakes of obscure cheroot bullied into phantoms of the inconceivable–/ supersonic, jet-propelled, propeeler-driven dicks of truth trepanning the subconscious,” from “Lord Jim Thompson.” (p80) In “Huckleberry Finnegans Wake,” Black writes, “I’ve got only one memory: Hamlet’s yawn–/ a song to be cutting up with a pair of sissors, “ and “Male & female we unmask the ghoon to an inch of his core/ & I warn’t myself as I opened the door.” In “Farenheit 49,” we get “They stood by the luminous dial of his watch with verse in their heads/ at the end of the Holy Roman Empire amid the splendid delusions of paranoia.”

Witty, diverse, inventive; the success of these poems suggests that, regardless of the artistic inspiration drawn from Hopkins and Whitman, Black might have been more successful orienting his work towards X. J. Kennedy and recent semi-surrealist James Tate.

The best work in the collection is the long concluding poem, “Prophecies for the Past.” Here the images and storytelling roll unfettered by doubt. You can feel that, at least while he was writing it, Black truly believed in poetry.

This is also the most sensory poem in the book. There are more colors, more shapes, more sounds, more textures. We are out of Black’s mind for a while, and in the world. “The smells of lilac and Nerf football; Aim toothpaste, Margarita mix, and/ wet Spring alley dirt in Dana Heffler’s mouth.” The sensory details, the specificity of event in lines like “You’ll buy a beige Pac-Man t-shirt at a dime store in Solvang,” (p102) and “Eating plums in a tree on Nevada Avenue all afternoon with a Jehovah’s/ Witness named Jordan,” (p113) and the palpable passion for the action of poetry, make “Prophecies for the Past” a brilliant mosaic of identity potential.

“Prophecies for the Past” chases “Song of Myself” and “Howl.” It is an ambitious, nostalgic, almost delusional chase utterly disconnected from the state of contemporary American poetry. It is a throwback to times when poets were heroes, when the written word was a force of nature, when reading and writing were inherently political, cultural, and personal activism. Our poets and our nation have changed so much that we may never summit those mountains again, but shouldn’t every American poet, at least at some point in their career, try. Long poems of the stature and ambition of “Song of Myself” and “Howl” may never be written again, but we cannot accomplish what we do not attempt.

The more poetry I read and review, the more poetry begins to feel like an arrangement of personal affectations; sometimes the reader shares the affectations, sometimes the reader doesn’t, and sometimes the arrangement transcends itself into a more universal entity. It is a belittling perspective, but poets like Black spend a lot of time belittling poetry. Is the idea of “poetry as affectation,” any more dismissive than lines like “wishing they were ideas instead of similes,” (p41) and “Rusty because I hardly write/ poems anymore not that I have anything/ against them, but they can’t possibly make/sense of the world?” (p52) Black is an imaginative poet with a talent for verse and a unique sense of humor. When he releases himself from doubt, he writes intelligent, playful, and fun poems, but too often he lets doubts about the grand potential of his work disintegrate their actual achievements. In “Prophecies for the Past,” Black proves he can write towards big goals and big ideas, and, even if he doesn’t reach them, accomplish something important in the process.

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• The Word on the Street by Paul Muldoon
• Notturno by Gabriele D’Annunzio
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• selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee

In “Harma Hissarlik,” Yang writes, “each form/ following its intention,/ each carving/ a hidden glory.” From that image I saw the work as a sculpture garden. You can wander through the “word-spirits,” focusing on what catches your eye, skimming over what doesn’t, enjoying the accumulated atmosphere of artistic experience and expression. In “Lyric Suite,” Yang writes, “…I walked with her/ thru the lattice streets of the island/ feeling lost but safe/ …streets where people/ read and cooked, played/ chess, elders watched children,/ commerce spilled into/ conversation, her neighborhood at the city’s/ brink.” From this, I imagined being lead around a village by an elder who shared the old names and old words, telling the histories and stories that defined the village.

Ultimately, Vanishing-Line is more focused and more coherent than a sculpture garden or a village tour. In “Elegy for Ling,” he shows us, “old men sorting thru rubble, brick by brick/ rebuilding the ancient walls/ while the ring roads expand/ while machinery explodes/ the celebrity architects multiply/ ignorant of the original design.” Vanishing-Line is a work of archeology. Yang examines places, people, and cultures in time, exploring their context, their causes and effects, their implications and consequences. He displays ancient words like Clovis points; “Izdubar,” “Zagros,” “(Manittuwond then Plum/ stone, Pluym or Pruym plume Patmos)” “qayaq.” He discovers quotes like potsherds, finding value and context in lines by great poets, historical records, and direct descriptions like those of the explorer Gertrude Bell. Finally, language itself is like a geological record. A culture describes itself through the words it uses and the words it doesn’t; “Lying and deceit are unknown among them because they cannot say it.”

This act of archeology culminates in “Yennecott,” a sprawling, ambitious, brilliant exploration of the discovery, colonizing and exploitation of North America by Europeans. Yang is trying to preserve not just the events of history, but the process of those events, discovering the emotions and ideas of today in the words and stones of the past; “From the ancient base of Piraeus passage/ wharves crowded with trade, sea wine-dark// West to the ‘final stop’ of Olson’s Pacific, Ahab/ ‘END of individual responsible only to himself’// Up to the moonlandings, rockets opening prospective,/ space, secret silo sites below, disgrace, Guantánamo, Bajram.”

But we already have archeology. We have museums and history books. Why apply poetry to a problem which appears solved. In “Yennecott,” Yang writes, “Bierstadt’s stereoscopic expedition/…His Rocky Mountain Lander’s Peak/ the ‘consumable landscape,’/ …Shoshone ideal, 1864/ staged tableau painting, among one/ hundred artifacts…/…today, in the museum gallery,/ mountain grass lake bathed/ in saintly sunset, figures/ of romance concealing/ a history of devastation.” (p111) For all its aspirations of fact, history is a form of storytelling, once used to romanticize as often (or perhaps more often) as it is used to reveal. Poetry has always been one of our primary romanticizers, making it uniquely able to strip conquering historians of their romantic veneer.

Yang’s poetics of archeology continue in the “Bibliographic Note and Acknowledgments,” which is more a manifesto than the usual boilerplate citation of sources and thanking of family. Yang argues for poetry as a technique and expression of history; a compartmentalizing of human events, as all works of history are, that does not sever the inherent connections of event to event, culture to culture, person to person. Though Yang doesn’t go so far as to argue traditional history is inherently inaccurate, Vanishing-Line is an attempt to fill in what is excluded by the rigors of fact and the structures of prose. In history as we understand it, “There was a before and after/ the during consumed.” All past was once “now” and poetry speaks to “now.” To Yang, poetry is capable of communicating the consumed during. It is a “library tablet found underground,” whose immediacy is not buried by the passage of time.

Different readers will have different experiences with Vanishing-Line. It can be devoured in one sitting. It can be picked at over time. Many will enjoy it as a sculpture garden or a village tour. Others will enjoy an even more transient interaction with it, drifting from “word-spirit” to “word-spirit,” content to soak up the artful arrangement of words on the page. But because so much of our poetry today seems to be focused on those isolated moments of emotion, I would urge readers to work with the harder more sustained themes in -Line. Yang is making a statement, something solid that can describe the world, and perhaps even change how we understand and interact with it. Though many readers and poets prefer to drift, to Yang, a poem is to dig.

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selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee by Megan Boyle raises questions, about its own poems and about poetry in general. How important is contemporary therapy culture to the style and content? Is this a singular work or a collection of works? What is the difference between realistic and banal? Is realism a useful goal for poetry? Is this a poetic voice or is this how Megan Boyle thinks? Is this a kind of theoretical oral anthropology? Where can a poet go from this style? Is this a style? Is this poetry? Even if the questions lead to frustrating answers, reading the book is still productive.

I tried to label Boyle’s style—anti-style, meta-irony—to create a handle on what I was reading. At times, it feels like the ersatz blog style implied by the title, but even the most mundane what-I-did-and-where-I-went blogs try to include a sense of emotion or a connection to wider humanity in their writing. Post-emotive? When Boyle is insightful, this style allows the brilliance of the insight to shine through unfiltered and unaided by the mechanisms of literature and poetry, sometimes with powerful effect; “i am powerless to my eight-year-old self who tripped while running toward a balance beam” and “my body is taking advantage of my ability to endure anything.” Hyper-Hemingwayism? Sometimes this style makes Boyle the wittiest person at the party; “will smith is a visual manifestation of the suspension of disbelief it takes to imagine realistically interacting with aliens” and “i have no idea what ‘bohemian rhapsody’ means but ‘bohemian rhapsody’ is extremely sure of what it means.” But other times, she just says stuff; “from the perspective of my tongue my mouth feels infinitely huge” and “i laughed genuinely several times and think he did too.”

Most of the poems are fairly short and written in stanzas of a few lines each, but Boyle’s strongest poems, and the poems where her style—whatever I end up calling it—is most compelling, are the exceptions; long poems composed of long stanzas. These flaneurs through an event, idea, or mind make the style feel more like a voice and less like a technique. Furthermore, the longer build up makes her best observations more powerful, by giving them background, source material, context, depth. From “every thought i had while walking to school,” she writes, “am i actually interesting or do i just want to construct a view of myself as ‘interesting’ so i can feel like i shouldn’t die?” In a shorter poem, that line might feel like forced existentialsim, but because we’ve been reading someone try to be interesting, we feel the tangible importance of the question. The same principle applies to the conclusion of “everyone i’ve ever had sex with.” In isolation, it might seem too clever by half, but because it is in the context of a complete evaluation of sexual experience, it has an immediate universality; “what i felt after completing the list…irrationally hopeful, glad i’m not in the past, puzzled at why i’ve diverted to other people about my personal safety, relieved i don’t have AIDS or children.”

In some ways, Boyle’s work is best understood as a New Journalism Poetry; a newspaper reportage of an individual’s life and thoughts. Personal journalism is based in the idea that all experiences are ultimately, “personal” and the objectivity of traditional journalism adds an artificial barrier between the events reported and how people actually experience them. Post-Gonzo? In this capacity, Boyle is an insightful journalist. In “4.09.10” she writes, “mostly i just try to be well liked in social situations and not die,” which is one way to summarize life. If you’ve ever endured an interminable family holiday, you know Boyle is dead on when she writes, “the dynamic basically consists of externalizing resentment about our collective compulsion to worry by making each other feel a little bad sometimes,” in “my family on thanksgiving and most holidays.” And on the experience of literature, Boyle reports; “…i relate to 97% of what lydia davis says, but i’m not sure if it’s because we’ve actually had similar thoughts, or because her style of writing makes me think we’ve had similar thoughts.”

The name of another writer stayed with me from the diction of the table of contents to the very last line. A little googling showed there is more than just a convergence of style between Boyle and this other writer; there is an actual personal and creative relationship between the two. I’m not going to write the other name in this review for two reasons; if you’ve read the other writer’s work, you’ll see the convergence immediately; and, if you haven’t, I want you to be able to experience selected unpublished blog posts of a mexican panda express employee on its own terms. The questions this relationship raises get at the heart of my frustration with Boyle’s work; a frustration from being unable to say Boyle is a great poet and unable to say one should not read Boyle’s poetry. Her work constantly raises questions, but unlike other works that have this effect, and regardless of her insight and observations, there is a chance the answer to every one of Boyle’s questions is a fundamental, existential, exhausted, “no.”

Ultimately, the insight is the insight, whether presented in sentences or lines and no matter how lush or sparse those sentences or lines are, and no matter what genre is affixed to the containing cover. However, a style that assumes inherent value in language itself includes something else beyond whatever direct insight is being offered, something I believe is important and valuable. There is bravery in writing without that something and some readers will appreciate that bravery as much as I appreciate language, but Boyle’s style is not more true or real for existing without it. Every writer’s style, including Boyle’s, is an affectation; to write is to be artificial.

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The Broken Word is a breathtaking, precise, beautiful, gruesome, coming of age story set during the Mau Mau revolution, with the storytelling power of the best novels. The sickness of colonialism. The totality of certain bigotries. The hypocrisy of occupier supplied Christianity. The effects of war on the soldier. There is a vibrant density to the work that reminds me of Heart of Darkness and Waiting for the Barbarians. Grappling with the problems of an adolescent entering adulthood in a society skewed by violence and oppression, Adam Foulds’ narrative poem is an intellectual, visual, and sensual triumph.

The poem opens “Compact glare of a match flame in daylight// and the waiter’s dark hand still/as an ornament, the flame an upright leaf/ tending to Jenkins as he sucked his cigarette alight,/ because the train had slowed.” Whether it is lighting a cigarette, putting one out, or the aftermath of an execution, Foulds’ images are as complex and well-composed as great paintings, telling a coherent story while speaking to abstractions in our imaginations. “Jenkins held his cigarette down/ into the ashtray until it was out/ the last smoke crawling up his hand, into his sleeve,” and “he’d have to clean with bucket and sponge/ each wet red gust/ from the station wall.”

Much of the power of these images comes from their almost taxonomical precision. A gas light through a wet window is a “blue daisy of gas flame.” The sounds of pistol practice in the distance are “…faint dry thwacks,/ a fly butting against a window pane.” The upright leaf, the fly against the window, the blue daisy; these exact images are like land mines in a field and the surprising phrases, like “wet red gust,” set them off. And sometimes it does feel like something has been blown off: “Three weeks later two of the men came back,/ worldless and unsteady, heavily edited. Between them:/ nine fingers, two ears, three eyes, no testicles./ No good to anyone, they were let out/ to wander briefly as mayflies/ and die as a warning.”

The structure of verse, with its lines and stanzas, creates a pacing to the story; a natural and significant momentum, that lets the reader feel unrelated events and experiences; a momentum most prose is incapable of creating. Furthermore, in prose, we expect certain events. If we meet a character who is not a soldier, and then see the character as a soldier later, we want to know the how and why of enlisting. But we don’t expect the same kind of phenomenal rigor in poetry. Jenkins does not have to get off the train. Tom does not have to sail back to England. The conclusion of the Mau Mau revolution does not need to be communicated. This imbues the events and images included with an extra resonance, because we know they were included for reasons beyond getting a character from one significant place to another. Foulds’ leverages this selection, along with the imagery and other poetic techniques, to make The Broken Word a powerful story as well as a powerful poem.

Beneath the story of revolution and colonialism is a traditional, almost mundane, coming of age story. The usual events in a bildungsroman are here, but skewed by the violent society. Tom returns from school to his family’s plantation during the Mau Mau revolution. His first adult act is to hunt and kill rebels; “So Tom’s father offered Tom,/ offered him up/ with an awkward shove/ as men offer their sons/ out into the world.” His first experience with sex is when a compatriot on the hunt rapes a native woman in the bushes. He has the same exuberance and folly of all adolescents, but they manifest while he beats a prisoner; “He swung and swung/ across the breaking stave of the man’s forearm and collar bone/ until it seemed the prisoner shivered/ and gradually fell asleep,/ but Tom, Tom had too much energy and carried on.” In a different circumstance, Tom would have come of age as nearly everyone does, and that might be Foulds’ point.

The revolution follows Tom back to England and university. He has a recurring nightmare in which he beats his tutor to death. While on a date with Eleanor, they see two drunks in a harmless fight, “not even a drop of blood,/ all their insides inside,” and Eleanor is concerned. Tom, “Light-headed, made fond/ by her ignorant concern,/ he started to boast./ If you want to see them hurt,/ I know how to make them suffer.” The first chance he gets, he forces himself on Eleanor, though she is able to arrest his ardor before something irreparable happens. And after that incident, he loses sleep to the point of illness. Tom may have left Kenya, but the process of becoming an adult in war, has taken something from him that cannot be replaced, and that void torments him.

All of which makes the ending totally baffling; baffling in that provocative and exciting way great literature is capable of, baffling in the, “Wait, did she just throw herself in front of a train,” way. When Tom finally apologizes to Eleanor for his behavior, she doesn’t just accept his apology, she says, “You sound surprised. Look,/ it’s just, well, if you want/ things to…progress, usually/ young men start looking,/ you know, do I have to/ spell it out? In jewellers’ windows.” Their previous interaction was borderline sexual assault. Tom is clearly suffering from his past and they haven’t talked about his time in Africa. Eleanor is ready to marry him after a few dates. Does she just want to get laid? What can we hope for their marriage? What does this ending do to all that has preceded? What kind of story, exactly, have we just read?

One of the universal themes of literature is the tension between words and phenomena; the gap between what happened and how we tell others what happened. Because of it, all real literature should have unanswered questions; lingering mysteries, that make the reader responsible for the next idea. We write both about that gap and in the hope of closing it. With war writing, there is the persistent, unspoken hope that if we narrow that gap enough, if the right words are written, if we fix the experiences of war and oppression in the perfect line, we’ll finally be able to stop ourselves. Whether that hope is productive and whether Foulds writes with that hope or not, The Broken Word narrows that gap as much as anything I’ve read, making it one of the triumphs of recent literature.

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