From her Asian heritage to Europe to New York, and back to France, there is no overlooking Sze-Lorrain’s cross-cultural influence. She carefully extracts rich words from every corner of language. Powerful themes bridge from her previous collection, including family members as prominent figures; the speaker’s grandfather, grandmother and mother acting as pedestrians passing in and out of her memory. Other nature images also draw us in—the moon being extremely present, as well as animals like gazelles and dragons as in her sequenced poem, “Sonata Amorosa,” and in particular the third section, “Transgression.” Yet perhaps her most striking command of language is in her shrewd word choice: she never fails to deliver a subjective world of sensuality, through orchids, classical orchestras, or mussels.

I dipped into cold tea
a lemon tart. A lump of sugar sank
to the bottom of my cup. It was your
body. It was my heart.
— “Pearl”

Her ability to transform human sentiments such as uncertainty, irony, or restlessness is like giving us the gift of synesthesia: in ‘emptiness’ we can taste mussels marinières, in ‘pain’ we see a volcano, in ‘loneliness’ we hear bees multiplying. These profound links are never forced, but subtle and symphonic. She masterfully takes us strikingly outside of our everyday trajectory.

… The fields, say
the ancients, an unwinged sea
of lamps. In the space,
concentric silence expanding
outwards. Into the stillness,
and on into distance. Crickets question
twice.
— “Still in the Night Fields of Hokkaido”

Dipping into this lush reflection, we can feel the speaker whittling down life’s fascinating imperfections to compressed images, as in her poem “Trouville, 2011”:

With confused trees and gods, the world is a budget theater.

Repeating the word ‘my’ in certain titles also resonates as a meditative declaration. Sze-Lorrain writes imagined obituaries of things still alive, not simply her own being but of abstractions such as nudity, melancholy, or the year 1980. Then, there are concepts we’ve all harbored in our minds before—such as the eventuality of death or a funeral. Yet the poet has reinvented them. Using ‘my’ as an affirmation, she re-writes these somber moments as surreal but precise events. Each entry forms a luminous encyclopedia of the body and mind. In transforming our perceptions of them, she suggests new ones we have never imagined before.

My coffin is round.
Perfect fengshui.
I lie like Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man.
The sound of wild gods drumming in my heart.
— “Notes from My Funeral”

My Nudity
delivers what is important
and unimportant
about my body, between action
and repose, at room
temperature.
— “My Nudity”

The speaker tries to inhabit an identity within her own sensual purgatory. Just as a meditation allows us to question, Sze-Lorrain questions and then reflects: “What is pride? The image inside us.” She beckons us to peer at a silent film reel projection or a fall into stranger’s unexplainable dream, both dark and breathtaking:

… Ocher moths
over the whiteness
of the screen where trees clutch
the hungry rain, running
after wrong spirits. Someone is making
room for the wind.
— “Javanese Wayang”

But are these pieces ‘dark’ themselves, or do they simply invite us into an unused room in our imagination, where we had previously turned off the light? With that in mind, don’t let the somber title fool you. You’ll be pleasantly surprised to come across Sze-Lorrain’s humor within the melancholy. In “Digesting an Academic Symposium, Some Months Back” for example, she writes, “Someone came with her pet maltipoo, paraded naked with semi-confidence.

Or perhaps in a moment of fretfulness in New York:

… No one here speaks French
in the right tenses. No
one sins
unless advised.
— “117 W. 75th Street”

Throughout the book’s progression, there seems to be a mounting precision and illumination. At first, we experience funerals and the speaker’s own otherworldly death. But in Part III, “Not Thinking about the Past,” the speaker comes back to life. This vitality is perhaps the most confrontational in “Return To Self,” the final piece of the collection: “Some of my friends write from a prison in their mind. I am happy and complete sentences. They ask me why.”

I know how to live with my ambitions. It has to do with kindness and this confession. Sze-Lorrain’s pieces exude a compelling wonder and fragility. The poet succeeds in a challenging venture, achieving poems so meditative yet unafraid. My Funeral Gondola seems to be urging us to look in the darkness for the light, something mysterious and luminous behind a heavy curtain. Perhaps we should listen to Sze-Lorrain’s inner voice:

Watch the shadows, not
the puppets. —
“Javanese Wayang”Biography

Related Posts:

• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

This is Dan Chelotti. Dan Chelotti, who I imagine as a very careful shopper. First, he is ambivalent, like the non-plussed kind of ambivalent. “I don’t really want / the things I want” he says in “The Giantess Is Coming.” What doesn’t he not want? Lots. In this poem it includes an Italian villa, a whistle, and a donkey that comes to that whistle. But in other poems it includes things like eating a hot dog while running the bases for a home run. Or walking righteously while wearing headphones. Or being named Per. Why doesn’t he want these things? Partly because this is what life is in the 21st Century. We wish, then we deny that wish. Many of these poems feature Dan Chelotti talking himself out of what he tells you he wants. How about this one: “I’ve read heaven / is half-finished, overcrowded.” from “A Perfectly Good Ottoman.” If you haven’t gathered at this point, there is a pool of miserable that stands as landscaping in these poems. Not misery. These are not poems of dread. Only miserable.

Which doesn’t necessarily sound like a recommendation. Granted, there are poetry books that operate on miserable alone. Chelotti’s is not one of them. Dan Chelotti’s x has something else: wonder. And what a concoction it is to mix ambivalence and wonder. You need to read this book if only to spice up your Contemporary American Poetry world, which is like an overproducing orchard of wonder these days. Have you read Heather Christle’s The Trees The Trees? Have you read Ben Mirov’s Ghost Machine or M. A. Vizsolyi’s The Lamp with Wings? I would maintain there is a special stance Chelotti accomplishes by juxtaposing his wonder to his ambivalence. It’s something similar to Mathias Svalina’s Destruction Myth, where the optimism animating a creation myth is employed for a negative critique of some contemporary phenomenon. But the occasion driving Chelotti’s poems always feel more mundane to me. More incidental. Like I could be the guy living through this poem.

And this is how the poems surprise you. “You could live this life,” the poems say, “but you probably don’t.” You probably do experience a lack of determination in your life (i.e. like every time you visit facebook.com), so does Dan Chelotti. But then he has so many other options. The following is a perfectly mundane opening to the poem “Real Work”:

When the phone rings,
even in the middle of
a sandwich, I feel obliged
to answer. I see
a single vestigial board
of what was
a treehouse.

Here, a picture of Dan Chelotti eating lunch in his garage? Living in 1995 with a cordless telephone? But now, just six lines later, the poem starts looking at the most unlikely possibilities:

The Galaxies that fly
over my house
shake my house.
I pause mid-sentence,
let them pass

Do you want to know where this poem ends? With our beloved gravity leaking into another dimension. This is the mind of a Dan Chelotti poem. A place where consequence is sharp and versatile and easily manipulated by any new possibility, and it’s probably one you hadn’t considered before you started reading. Which might make these poems sound like they’re impulsive. They are. Kind of. Try impulsive like you’re trying to decide whether you should buy the new copy of People Magazine or not.

Of course, that statement presumes to understand the motivation behind the Chelotti poem. FYI, I haven’t figured that out yet. And that’s absolutely fine with me. Because I like listening to Chelotti’s voice. It is both momentous and casual, and akin to a reality where all realistic potentials have been infiltrated by just an incrementally better imaginative potential. Isn’t this a lot like the argument Wallace Stevens makes for the poetry of Marianne Moore? “To confront fact in its total bleakness is for any poet a completely baffling experience.” Says Stevens. And so the poet acknowledges reality as one of the fact-alternatives to be combined with other imaginative alternatives. Think Moore’s sublimely intuitive series of factual observations, but replace it with Chelotti’s fantasy alternatives to the mundane, and you get Facts 2.0. An improved reality! Or perhaps a reality more aptly described by the abstract variable, x.

Related Posts:

• Incarnadine by Mary Szybist
• Murder Ballad by Jane Springer
• “The Lamp With Wings” by M. A. Vizsolyi
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

As befitting the first movements of an origin story, Skin Shift opens with the apocryphally titled “Orange Colored Sky,” a poem that serves to introduce some of the poet’s obsessions, namely with femininity, mythology and childhood. Hittinger writes:

Hittinger sees Diana Prince, aka Wonder Woman, as a model for his own blossoming femininity, and thus goes about mimicking Lynda Carter, who portrayed the character on television, with the accoutrements of his childhood bedroom. All this interest in Wonder Woman stems from the grace and ease of her metamorphosis from normal woman to super woman—the speaker of the poem craves the same transformation, both for its ease and for the final product. Superheroes are considered to be the modern equivalent to mythological figures in some circles, and Wonder Woman, whose mythology is indelibly linked with the Greek Pantheon (she’s the daughter of Hippolyta in the comics) seems like an appropriate to guide the speaker’s nascent queer urges from a “leaning toward” into a “learning toward.”

If the young speaker of Hittinger’s first poem wants to transform into Wonder Woman, to harness her power, it comes as no surprise that one of the poet’s chief modes of writing is through persona. This tendency to dive into the skins of others helps us to parse the book’s title—Skin Shift isn’t simply about transforming from human to superhuman, it’s about shifting into another flesh altogether. The movement can be horizontal as much as it is vertical. Some of the personas adopted by Hittinger’s speakers include an astronomer, an ornithologist, a geologist, and an alchemist. The poet enjoys stepping into their skins because they offer both a specialized eye and subject, and a way to “Laugh. Clear the jam. [And] Start again.” Other poems in the book—such as “Circe’s Letterpress” and “Samson in Reverse”—collapse the distance between biography and persona, mimicking some of the impetus behind Skin Shift’s opening poem, but no other poems collapse this distance as effectively as the poems in the book’s third section, “Narcissus Resists.”

“Narcissus Resists” is split up into five smaller sections, each headed by five “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poems, and containing three poems that each start with the letter “C,” the lone exception being the fifth “Metamorphosis of Narcissus” poem, which ends the third section. It seems to be no accident that all the poems in this section are fourteen lines long, though they do not bare the qualities (meter, rhyme) of traditional sonnets, they seem inflected (or provoked) by the spirit of the “sonnets” in Henri Cole’s Middle Earth and Blackbird and Wolf. These “sonnets” are far more naked in their content than Cole’s, recounting the troubled adventures of Hittinger’s Narcissus, a young gay man who idolizes a Madonna-like pop star and hosts an online strip show. These poems cleverly repurpose both pop culture and the myth of the Greek figure, exploring the way shifting from one skin into another can be destructive. In “Metamorphosis of Narcissus IV,” Hittinger explores the collective ire of Narcissus’s spurned suitor:

Transformation isn’t a key to self-discovery for Narcissus, it’s a way of avoiding himself and the havoc he’s wreaked, intentional or not, in the lives of others. Narcissus wants to escape, his guilt manifesting in this ghost dog image, but cannot because Narcissus, much as he might resist, only sees himself. The poems in Skin Shift do not shy away from the implications of shifting from one’s skin to another—they do not indulge in the fantasy such role change can bring, but also in the ways shifting can feed into revising history, denying the reality that the self imposes, or as a means for coping with trauma. Hittinger’s poems are ambitious in their scope and in how artfully they balance raw emotional language with thoughtfully constructed conceits. Ultimately its hard not to find another skin for yourself nestled somewhere between these pages.

Related Posts:

• Fair Copy by Rebecca Hazelton
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

In “Poem Capitalism” she describes how she practices

this thing I call Objectless
Objectivism. Like: I face the thing, but also
am the thing—so we aren’t. Once, I was content to find
the marble hollow. Filled with a giant star. Now

laved in grease, I rub again against
that dry nubbin in the great warehouse Archyron—(this is not
some reference you’re supposed to get, it’s just this
weird feeling I had.) The yellow frame darkens. I live

in the light but perish in the industrial warehouse,
under the specter of marriage, of hip. Again I wrote
a meaningless poem! and left me
with all the burden of meaning. He died, and she—

We carried her through

Following John Berryman’s lead, Ted Berrigan, in both life and “the poems” succinctly nailed the riff “he died” (“dear Berrigan. He died/ Back to books. I read.” Berrigan’s “Sonnet #2”) Božičević drops in the reference, but then goes further, opening up the question of what about her? And, with the help of claiming a plurality, i.e. “we”, takes the poem beyond where they left off, into a further doorway. Carrying (in fact, rescuing) the speaker of the poem, the body itself, away from the trap that consumed both previous male poets, in life as well as in the work.

Not that death isn’t seemingly everywhere for Božičević. Born in Croatia in 1977, Božičević has been on the fringes at least—if not in the middle of—violent war torn situations. I don’t feel it is poetic fancy when she writes in “Casual Elegy for Luka Skračić”: “I / study from Luka’s textbooks, later he / gets blown up walking to film school, Luka / dies for his art.”

Božičević’s poems are diatribes that refuse become didactic. She’s too busy interrogating herself as much as she is the world, for the poem to slide into meeting easy expectations. In “War on a Lunchbreak” her own gendered sexuality, and that of her friends and the larger society, alongside her past history and current nationality status, caught up between her homeland and her adopted United States, surges to the surface as she reflects upon the hellish clerical job she’s stuck working just to get by. She asks, “What’s war?”

Eternal countrylessness.
Lady poets writing about cock,
not thinking about gender. My friends married in Vegas
to good-ol’-boys or hipster drummers, just ‘cos they can, or
when I contemplate
starving myself
so I’d be “the bomb,” or. I’m sorry
I keep tossing and turning. My livelihood here

depends on people who’ve never tasted
war, and act offended when one leaves work
on time. Not that I ever lay hiding

dying in a ditch, but if I had, I think I’d
know much about dry grass, the incredible value of it:
Simply to see the stalks
move would be enough.

I’d like to have time to type this,
but all day long they’re looking over my shoulder.

Where the poems in Rise in the Fallmay appear to be going in search of death, Božičević is in fact only drawing attention towards realizing life. These poems are affirming her concern with how to live, what’s required, where to find it. As dark as the subject matter gets at times, the over-riding encouragement that this is life, get on with it, is ever just as insistent. Be brave is the message. There’s nothing to fear once you look at things head on.

I think I nod at the true death: when from a moving train
I see a house in the morning sun
and it casts a shadow on the ground, an inquiry
and I think “Crisp inquiry”
& go on to work, perfumed of it—that’s the kind of death
I’m talking about.

An angle of light. Believe in it. I believe in the light and the disorder of the word
repeated until quote Meaning unquote leeches out of it. And that’s
what I wanted to do with dame Death, for you:
repeat it until you’re all, What? D-E-A-T-H? ‘Cause Amy
that’s all it is, a word, material in the way the lake moves through the trees
is material, that is: insofar, not at all.
Because we haven’t yet swum in it. See what I mean?
(“Death, Is All”)

Božičević does not mince words. “I’ll tell you straight up: / you don’t get to talk about Mayakovsky: / take that skateboard and go back to the suburbs. And talk about them.” (“About Mayakovsky”) It is totally great to have poems by a relatively young poet so directly address everyday reality while remaining free of pretension. There’s no placating search after any
specific lingo of MFA craft or other academic jargon. Božičević is all-poet, crystal clear about what she wants to say and who her audience is. The humor is rampant. After reading, “A Poem for You” it’s ridiculously difficult (if you could manage it before) to ever look at any My Little Pony with a straight face again:

I want to write a nice long poem for all you straight girls.
Your religion’s rose and glass castles
hold no place for me, I’m out of my princess phase.
Your pink pony wants to fuck you
She’s limp with longing from being
always touched and hollow,
comb-tugged right out of her field:

Oh I’m too tired to worship at your kittenish emptiness.
For years my emptiness echoed into yours: Oh Hai!
For years I’ve been your pony, and I wanted to fuck you

without your pink dress, the glitter and the organs,
all colorless—

But Božičević is not at all just about putting down “straight girls”. As she goes on to say, “I’m over it.” The poem continues unfolding, complicating its own intentions which are, and never should be, entirely clear.

I love someone now, she’s teaching a class,
she had a bad dream & threw the lotion
at the hurtful door, and I love her, there’s nothing hollow there.
There’s no void in the straight girls either, not really.

This yard is in you, ladies,
green and monn-lit, where you prance like difficult adult Bambis:
that’s not desperate, that’s beauty. I only wanted
to have my fill, as I fill her:

undo you first, then balance out the void in a weighted way
so then you’ll know: How
do you do a Barbie?
With meaning. Women, I’ll defend
your beauty

when no-one else will: when you’re lacerated with IVs
and wrinkles, I’ll say how I filled you with Awwww.
When you’re a crazy-eyed teen who hears voices & sings them
out at an American Idol
audition, a sparrow

aping the starsong ringtone–
I’ll get it. I love you when you’re not quite right.

Božičević opens the possibility that poets might strive to be heroes. Not necessarily ‘saving the day’ kind of heroes, but heroes nonetheless.

Look
at any object & see
the shimmer of philosophers playing inside…And they’re
what you want. And it takes a show-off, sacred whore
you say you don’t
believe in, but ecto-drool over, to make
them emanate: and I don’t got that, babe. I’m sitting here,
wet from my run and
know that somewhere among these ducks and squirrels and,
reflected in the car hood, ducks
and leaf silhouettes
is a way for me to manage
the pain of:
all I ever wanted was to serve.
(“We’re the Aliens We’ve Been Looking For”)

That’s not to say that Božičević doesn’t call ‘Bullshit’ on playing out that role. Still, she does both get the girl and is the girl. Plus, she writes it down always telling it straight. No apologies. She’s not expecting anything further from poetry than the opportunity of the poem itself.

Related Posts:

• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

If pith is the mode of the automaton and the worker bee, then Desolation: Souvenir, Hoover’s latest work, puts smoke in the hive. His work is the interruption to the monotony of habituation, deadly as Schlovsky claims. It calls attention to the anemic patterns of habit, using pain and courage to carve through.

Though Hoover is relatively prolific, his writing is capable of traversing, if not discovering within itself, new measures of emotional depth and conceptual difficulty. The entire volume of his published work should be the call to invent new concepts in the prizing of poetic superheroes that acknowledges the sustained lift of a long-fighting heavy weight. Scars and blows all gorgeously legible.

Desolation: Souvenir starts at the point where language fails (as maybe it is supposed to if it is to show it is capable of meaning anything that would touch us): the death of a child. The brief poems piece aphorisms into elegy. The awkward junctures function as attempts at connection, solace, that instead show the gaps – of what is unknown, of what is suffering, of what’s been lost. In “the dream and now a field,” Hoover’s speaker identifies the “vain remedy” of language in the aftermath of emotional evacuation: “the consolations pour/ those unseen wither/ thinking’s like a wind/ tying knots in twine” (14).

These elegies are not only for the loss of a person, but address the sense of impermanence inherent in language in the moment it seeks to comfort, to close a gap or cover an open wound. Hoover writes in “and what is last in us”: “touch is a form of speech/close your eyes to imagine/open them to remember/forms are firm, shapes shift” (29). Where the contradictions do not result in a zero sum, instead verify the irrational logic of the heart suffering what is ultimately unthinkable, impossible.

The language is colloquial; occasionally literary references crop up, and then recede back into the subtle mixture of short lines, references to the personal and to cycles of earth, and transient, lithe meditations on the nature of words, and reality.

In a short section at the end of the book, called “The Windows (The Actual Acts)” Hoover spends twenty four pages on an exercise which seems to be for the purpose of trying to get language to be something real. They are propositions. If propositions are meant to illustrate the things of the world that are, and that can be said, all else is nonsense. In “The Windows” Hoover is carving even more depth to his unnamed speaker. In a move to fix language to say and to be what is, to imply permanence, and, therefore, the propositions function to claim the unchangeable immortal truths of the world. They are a gorgeous defense to the metaphysics and splayed logic of language when confronted by death.

Hoover’s propositions, however, shape what is with humor and a lush bleed of the illogical into what is: “A new species of clam being eaten by a new species of bird./ And there’s no new man to record it./ To imagine a world is to clean it./ Hard to conceive of a dirty new world.” And, here he leaves us, in a dirty new world – with perfect half-finished lives, sentences, thoughts, and sort of made beds. Where people and words suffer and die, or survive and maybe get shocked hard enough into having to be something new.

Related Posts:

• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams

I don’t mean to suggest that Adams employs trickery. Quite the contrary — her writing is specific (without being limiting) and straightforward (without offering a conclusive narrative). In the opening stanza of the section “Winter Came” she writes:

This was the year I deserved the winter,
and when it came there was nothing
I could say—
I could not send it back.

It had come for me.

There is nothing hidden here; Adams is not playing games with her reader. She shoots straight from the hip, and her aim is true.

It is difficult not to imagine the “I” in these poems as Adams herself, although one never knows. Perhaps, like the many versions of Jane Doe that we meet in the title section of the book, the “I” is many versions of Adams. Perhaps the “I” is entirely other from the writer (though I am more doubtful than usual of this).

The “I” in Forty-One Jane Doe’s takes on identities. She is Pandora, opening the box: “It was me. There was no lock or key. I just asked, ‘Shall I?’/And the stars fell out.” In the first section of the collection, aptly titled “A Mystery Story,” she is a detective, investigating the weather. She is alternately knowing and wondering, known and unknown.

What is clear throughout is the presence of a narrator, serving not as lecturer or advisor to the reader but as guide and interrogator. The “I” addresses the reader directly in the section “Technologies”: “My body./Reader,/he strokes it in letters” and “Reader, you and I have been lashed/by the weather. We’ve been let down.” A few pages later, the “I” questions the reader, asking “Do you know mathematical beauty, reader?” and then acknowledges itself:

It is an act of extreme egotism to believe
that my being [here]changes the city.
Disrupts it so.
A windbreak. A shadow caster.
My breath catches. Extends.

Self or selfless,
I am in the way.

Whoever she is, the “I” in Adams’ poetry is aware, of herself and of everything she encounters. She is as inquisitive as she is introspective — Forty-One Jane Doe’s is a book of investigation, of questioning. “Why must the body insist?” asks the narrator in a later section of the book. But as we’ve already been told, “The detective/she leaves it to you.”

There are clues that serve both to clarify and to confuse. “The first clue is snowflakes,” but also, “The first clue is wide-eyed.” There are hand-delivered clues and clues made of “paper/wrapped.” There are hints and evidence. And, “Some days there are no clues/other than the patterns of migrating birds.”

There are windows. Pandora gives her box an intentional window “[t]o become perceptible; to be expressed; to permit passage; to make manifest. Maybe for all these reasons. It caught a cluster, a bee and a thistle; the spindle of a watch balance. The sun on the tip of a matchstick.” Later on, there is an accidental window, an unintentional aperture as “the ceiling collapsed,/the roof opened to reveal the sky/yawning back at me—.”

And, of course, there are the Janes. The title section begins, “There are Janes for everyday./And there are sometime Janes.” There are recognizable, apparent Janes and there are hidden Janes. The Janes are distinct and unique, but crowd them “in a graffitied bathroom stall” and “they would all be dialing the same number.”

Adams shifts back and forth between the plural and singular in this section. The many Janes sometimes coalesce into one Jane:

Mornings, Jane tries to look so tall,
no matter what she’s carrying.
She strides down the wooden train platform, one hand
holding her skirt against the breeze, the other clutching.

And then are split apart into multiples again:

One day there were high rise office buildings
and tenements and grids
and alleyways sunk under with rain water.
And then the Janes came with them.

Above all else, the Janes are aware: “One Jane Doe remember burying / Jane Doe in the sand. There is a moment, she says,/when you know what you are doing / is wrong, but you do it anyway.” This is a poetry concerned with the specificities of the universe, of nature, of science and of the body, of love and of pain. The Janes are aware, the “I” is aware, and Adams is aware.

Forty-One Jane Doe’s closes, fittingly, with a question:

If you know the end,
if the day has already come
and another begun for you
can you tell me of it,
so I may know
what to look for?

Like I said, this poetry is magic. Ultimately, Adams challenges her readers to observe intensely the world around us, to decide for ourselves which particulars are clues to be deciphered and which questions are asking for our answers.

(Note: Three short films, created in tandem with the writing, accompany Forty-One Jane Doe’s. The images presented in these films serve to reinforce and inform the poems. I’d recommend reading the book in its entirety prior to viewing the films.)

Related Posts:

• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
• My Funeral Gondola by Fiona Sze-Lorrain
• X by Dan Chelotti
• Skin Shift by Matthew Hittinger

I entered the book from its first pages, drawn in and distracted from my own private pain by Orr’s play of language down the page. Orr’s short lines run up against his long sentences. The brief poems are only momentary intervals within their long sequences. He has something both simple and complex to say. I think I think something about what I am to think, and then Orr asks me to think again. I think I think something about what I am to feel, and then Orr asks me to think again.

Love overwhelms us.

Or death takes

One more
Of those.
We cherish most.

Where else?

Where else can we go? (68)

Immediately I copied these lines out of the book and passed them along. For these lines, alone, I could have chosen River Inside the River to discuss in this month’s club. But this book shows us that nothing, no matter how singular or solitary, really stands alone, and so it is not just for these lines that I selected this book.

I often say that reading poetry, and writing it, means taking part in a long conversation, one that has been going on around us all along. We can jump in with our own way of seeing things, sharing in the dialogue for awhile. Then we, and so much of what we love, will be gone. River Inside the River reminds us these things are true, both the long running conversation and the brevity of our time in its midst. This book acknowledges the frailty and continuity of mortals and their words.

Starting with Adam and Eve and their simultaneously immediate and eternal loss, Orr pulls at the root of all heart ache. “To Speak,” “To See, “To Write,” “To Name”: These are the titles of the first five poems in the book, taking us to the base representation of the verbs, before the complications of tense and time and case. Soon enough, though, in the book’s sixth poem, when the worm fails to appear for the grand naming ceremony in Eden, “a dark shroud” (17) is stitched through the cycle, and even this careful design begins to be corrupted. How quickly Orr brings us to the point. “The book said: everything perishes,” he writes in a later poem. “The Book said: that’s why we sing” (89).

In the collection’s three sequences, “Eden and After,” “The City of Poetry,” and “River Inside the River,” Orr balances the need to say things newly against the impossibility of saying anything new. He gives beauty reign equal to anguish. In the middle of “The City of Poetry,” just after he he asks where else we can go, in the face of love and loss, besides the city of poetry, Orr writes, “If you’re halfway honest, I’m sure/They’ll tell you this city, like the human heart,/ Contains it all–spun sugar and gossamer,/But also deepest grief and even horror” (69). The book deals with loss, yes. The book confronts Orr’s own difficult history, and also our nation’s, and also the world’s. But the book also talks about love and hope, the spaces we’ve created, through imagination and determination, where we can rest and love and grow to be ourselves. The book talks about the “Mother’s House” and how that is just another name for the transformative power of verse.

Despite or maybe because of the length of each cycle, the individual poems in this collection are spare, often as short as eight or twelve lines. Most made up of three or four beats, and some as little as one. Why go on and on?

River inside the river.
World within the world.

All we have is words

To reveal the rose
That the rose obscures. (124)

We all know what happened in Eden and afterward, so why go on? We all know that people we love will die, that love can corrupt us, that humans are hard on each other time and time again. Why go on? Why rehash, at length the old familiar song? Except that we need, sometimes, often perhaps, to know we are part of something larger than ourselves alone. Except that the writing brings us to something new. The words can “reveal the rose/That the rose obscures.” At times in this collection we run across familiar forms (Oh look, a villanelle!) and names as familiar as Shakespeare, Sappho, Baudelaire, Dickinson, Neruda, and we see them as we always saw them, but yet we see them new. Those poets, like so many people, are lost to us. Those old forms are past their prime, and even the new forms are made up of nothing that’s new. I could be devastated by all of this so easily, but I am not. I turned to this book because I wanted the busy work of reading poetry, the distraction of working through words, but Orr reminds us that poetry is alchemy. In the process of reading about grief and beauty and people and forms I knew, Orr introduced something that made everything altogether new.

“I’m an old man/ Made young again/ By the poems I love,” writes Orr as he closes “The City of Poetry.” I could go on and on quoting lines and stanzas from this collection, evidence to support my admiration for this book which is, in turn, evidence to support the need for poetry. I could go on and on quoting moments when Orr has reminded me, newly, what it is I always knew. I could go on and on, talking you through this book, but I won’t. You’ll need to take this journey on your own.

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All across America, men are inventing
the steam engine while women sew
the faces of presidents into quilts.
If a whistle is left alone in the forest
it may restore a measure of silence
to the world. Television
reminds me of a math problem
I got wrong on the SAT. Come on, Kathy says,
can’t you just enjoy it for once? By now we know
who patented the steam engine,
but think of all the men who tinkered around,
helping to invent it. Kathy is like one
of their wives, knitting a scarf
out of peach wool. Kathy, I say,
feeling a burst of goodwill,
I’ll give you all my collectibles.
Thanks, she says. I’ll take the John Lennon
dinnerware set for eight. As I walk home
to get it, the world looks like
a Brueghel painting and all the trees
are sending off beautiful
little equations into the air.

Let’s note at the start that the first law of thermodynamics is that energy is constant, just so we’re all on the same page. So: what’s going down here? I think a compelling argument could be made that ultimately Shapiro’s speaker’s exploding the idea of individual tasks (“think of all the men who tinkered around, / helping to invent it”), which is why the title’s significant: if energy’s not lost, then all the work done, in a big enough context, leads to every development. Maybe that’s a bullshitty metaphysical stretch, but it seems, at least according to this poem, sort of reasonable. Aside from that aspect, the poem’s fairly thick with what’d have to be called philosophical stuff: the half-joke about something in a forest and who’d hear it comes in for revision, this time as something to “restore a measure of silence / to the world,” and television—that greatest pleasure-giver, that narcotic of light and laughtrack—”reminds me of a math problem / I got wrong on the SAT.” Whatever you decide that those lines mean, they’re trying in their way to bend and tweak things —just look at the fact that the linebreak turns television from a math problem into a math problem the speaker got wrong.

And, of course, there’s math: math in the bit about TV, and math at the poem’s end, and it’s those equations I want to focus on for a second. Because, of course: regardless of the poem’s title or ideas, that’s just a beautiful image, the notion of trees “sending off beautiful / little equations into the air.” It’s just gorgeous, which is the other thing to note: Lauren Shapiro makes gorgeous poetry, and there are lines in this book that’ll stun—you’ll dogear every sixth page or so. But take a second to humor the possibility that there’s more going on: if the poem’s about energy being constant, and if the poem addresses notions of somthing’s invention coming not just from the Eureka-shouting discoverer but from everyone who tinkered up to the discovery, and if the poem ends with this gorgeous image or idea of trees offering/transmitting equations—literally things for other people to solve, or try to solve, anyway—that surely all adds up to something, yes? Maybe that’s an optimistic read, but I finished that poem sort of stunned at the potential Shapiro was seemingly offering: that the world is, as she says in the book’s title, Easy Math.

Here’s another—here’s “ESL Students” from early on in the book’s first quadrant of poems.

They ask, Why is it in the car but on the bus?
I turn up my hands and give them a pained expression.
There is a moment of quiet anger. Then they pop
open their blouses and the buttons fall
like foreign coins to the floor.
They stand on the desks. They kick the air.
We’re sick of this bullshit, they say.
I am very still. I look them in the eyes.
We’ve show you our tits! they shout.
Yes, I say quietly, and begin to unbotton my cardigan.
The class is silent. For some time we stand there naked,
they on their desks and me in front of the blackboard.
Then Maoki says, There is a difference scene
in every room in the world.
Our clothes are but the lint of a passing era, says Hana.
I will light a candle and watch the prayer moths
circle the room like used napkins, says Oui.
I don’t speak. A shadow passes over the left
side of my chest. Then the bell rings.

I won’t go through and nerdily take apart this one, but just look for a second at what Shapiro’s pulling off: these students don’t understand, or are frustrated by, the weird inconsistencies in language—they’re frustrated that the coding system of meaning is fucked or flawed. Fair enough, obviously. And in response, they get naked. Play along however you like, but it’s hard not to feel like they’re begging for language to reveal (at its best, shouldn’t language be perfectly transparent—shouldn’t I be able to say I feel good and have that be 100% clear to anyone I talk to? Isn’t one of the big crap deals of language the ambiguity, the way it fails?), and when they realize this new language (ESL students) won’t, they reveal themselves, like a dare: here’s what we’ll do, not language, do your part. Maybe that’s a drastic misread. But then it gets even weirder and cooler, with three students offering these strange lines toward the end, and what’s the teacher do? Doesn’t speak. Take the poem however you want: the drama enacted in it has to have something to do not just with communication, but with the ease of communication, with what we expect systems (math or language) to provide for us if we offer our dilligence.

I want to make clear, too: it’s possible the book is in fact doing none of this stuff, and it’s just a very good debut collection of poetry with sharply memorable lines (“When I reach out for you, there’s a tiny genie / in my right ear saying, Go! and an enormous / elephant in my left saying, What the fuck / are you thinking, you little shit?” from “First Man Gets the Oyster, Second Man Gets the Shell”; “I’ve always wanted to be the softest piece / in the chess set. I’ve always known / there never was a soft piece in the chess set.” in “A to Z”). Easy Math is, as far as I can tell, a really beautiful scattering, an attempt to find sense and sustenance (emotional, aesthetic, whatever). Such of course could be said about lots of books, but the big value in Easy Math that I can find is how it doesn’t quite solve, doesn’t quite offer anything as simple as closure. The last line in her poem “Dominoes” applies well to the experience of reading this book and being forced to reconsider the world around you, the one you’re trying to fix, or escape with books, or whatever: “Why couldn’t you see any beauty in that?”

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Born in 1934 to Italian immigrants, Ceravolo got an engineering degree, served in the Army and wrote ardent, engaged poetry until shortly before his death from a brain tumor in 1988. He studied with Kenneth Koch, and won the first Frank O’Hara Prize for Spring In This World of Poor Mutts. He was always considered something of a “poet’s poet,” appreciated with detailed loyalty by writers who felt hugely grateful to have been introduced to his work. Collected Poems is the banquet with all the courses to validate their enthusiasm.

Koch called a Ceravolo poem “an amazing perceptual archaeology,” and that’s a good place to begin, with its engagement of what one senses (perceives), and also what one must dig for. Ceravolo’s combinations of words, line spacing and the music they make both amaze and stop breath.

“Passion for the Sky,” from the O’Hara Prize volume, gives a brief glimpse of how so much comes together with so little :

It is a flawless love poem, for the person who is loved and for other offerings night holds.

There is an almost relentless urgency in every line, demanding a level of being awake that could be enervating, but miraculously isn’t. With Ceravolo reading becomes both energizing and, more often than not, a time-out to praise, as well as a respite from surroundings. “Dive in!” I want to shout in response to “Inland:”

This poem makes me think of Bruce Springsteen’s “Hungry Heart,” as do other Ceravolo poems, in part because, deliberately avoiding stardom, he lived in mundane Bloomfield, New Jersey, where typical Springsteen fans lead lives of unheralded emotions . Bloomfield is close enough to New York to satisfy many appetites, and Ceravolo was an eager consumer, admiring Ted Berrigan and absorbing the grit and rough beauties that the area had to offer. He was also not completely immune to the lure of surface glitter, and posed for Francesco Scavullo, the lens master best known for glamming up Cosmopolitan Magazine for many years. The Wesleyan staff was wise to use one of Scavullo’s smoldering portraits for the cover of this book, as a way help hook a new generation on a talent that ranks with the best that American letters has to offer.

“End of the World” could be about any place, including the industrial parts of New Jersey not far from where Ceravolo lived and worked :

This is the kind of poem that makes me ache over the fact that Ceravolo is not with us to share a bill with Gary Snyder, Michael McClure, Ed Roberson and other living masters. His physicality is ever-present, sometimes with the plain elegance of “Lethal Sonnet:’’

Ceravolo was a man of many parts, laboring to unite a whole and to do it with integrity. Engineering is an occupation that has more room for poetry (think precision, dedication, symmetry, and a lust for questions and answers ) than one might immediately assume. He made room to fall in love, to marry and have children and be attentive to those he loved. He fed his muse in ways that honor the sacred without ever crossing the line into a slackness that bruises the raw holiness he sought, found and celebrated. Sometimes his short poems say it best :

“Vision.”
Sacrifice love and record position
The goats balance
On beautiful mountains.

“Promontory”
At dawn whatever light
returns, my heart
becomes quicker and quicker
in the night.

He was also wounded by events beyond his control, taking them in as if they were his own, as if suffering for them could somehow heal individuals ripped apart by the decisions of others. “Lament #2 for Lebanon” is too long to quote in full, but like almost everything in this collection, shows bravery, balance, and pure art:

Tomorrow night before the winds blow down
the hungry trees : they’re swaying in the mist,
I want to stop this grove from filling.
Stars in our sleep ride the massacre
in corners of destruction’s nest.
Suns of chords
like dialysis or death.
unknown
Oh Lebanon
land of wood,
defoliated dreams, decapitated screams.
land of wood
Like a pawn you lie
in the middle of the beast,
in the midst of an
old land of sorrows
of controversy crossing the soul.
A dark walk in the desert!
A scorched memory’s toll!

The entire piece is about twice what you see here, and is, like every word in this volume, (including David Lehman’s rigorously appreciative introduction) a “scorched memory” and well worth the price, the toll of time spent with this incendiary material.

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Boehl’s book has an intriguing and eclectic construction. Before the book proper begins, Boehl presents a cast list—including Jack Spicer and Mark Rothko as rival pirate captains—that foreshadows the book’s theatricalities and its concerns about art as a replicative device. This cast list gives us a glimpse into the tension between reality and a constructed presentation (or representation) that runs throughout the book. In the opening poem of the book’s first section (both of which are named “Map (of the New World),” the speaker interrogates mental representations and constructions and their disconnect from reality:

Remember how smoke
issued from the stacks
like the dreams of factories
when the factories were the dreams of cities
and cities were the dreams
of our immigrant parents?
There are no factories. The city
rises in a cacophony of billboards
dreamt for us
like the factories and the steam
of our orphaned language.

Despite the mental conjurings of smoke and factories and cities, we’re reminded that these are really just constructions, and not real things with the negating gesture of “There are no factories” and, in the poem’s closing line, “There is no city.” The gesture is the same one from the “No Hay Banda” scene in Lynch’s surrealistic film Mulholland Drive, which shares with this poem–and the book itself–a deep interest in the disconnect between the real and the representation. It also seems that the poem’s opening question, and the imaginative leaps the simile and metaphor initiate, suggest unstable ontologies and referentialities, as affected by the need to mentally construct/reconstruct (“remember,” “dream”) and illustrate things via comparative proxies (simile and metaphor).

I’m also drawn to the idea of “orphaned language” in this context of interrogating signification and representation. By the sheer nature of this book’s project, many of the poems have a fair amount of self-consciousness about both themselves and the way they accumulate to produce the book’s narrative trajectory. It does not seem surprising, then, that language may be stripped of its progenitors, and exist for the sake of itself. These concerns with the rootlessness of both language and experience suggest the closing lines from another poem in the “Map of the New World” section, “Lighthouse,” when the speaker asks, “Is it true / that to sever our roots is death / or is there life on the ocean?” We’re left to consider with the speaker if it is possible to exist in the middle of the sea, “like the ship / rootless / watching the world / unwatched.” And it seems, according to Kings of the F**king Sea is also a subtly political work that interrogates past actions and present motives, and how the intersection of the two creates the speaker’s present self. A recurrent tension runs through the book in which the speaker expresses his desire for belonging while ignoring the costs. The enjambments in “Ceremony (Heroes),” suggest this tension:

This is the part where
the admiral
tells you you’re great
for all the terrible things
you’ve done to those people.

The enjambments enact the speaker’s paradox of acceptance and clean conscience, with a figure of importance providing affirmation, though for terrible things and ultimately the recognition of fault by the hard self-referentiality that comes with the personal pronoun that begins the last line of this section. The breaks affect the speed of the lines—and the speaker’s thoughts—in such a way that we are painfully aware of the speaker’s suspicions juxtaposed against his struggle to accept the accolades and community. The poem concludes with the lines

And I looked
at the other sailors
their tables decorated in ribbons
and I wanted to be on the sea
forever and ever.

In these lines, the speaker answers his previous question about whether one can live on the sea, unrooted to the world. In finding community in the other sailors, he indeed establishes roots, though only temporarily, soon collapsing beneath the weight of his loneliness made greater by the sea. In the end, he realizes that “Nobody wins. Some just lose more beautifully.” Kings of the F**king Sea is a book that compels us to cling to the imagination and the “desire to remake the world” that it entails as a way to salve our loneliness, which comes at us ever like a flood.

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