Ripatrazone’s presentation of a few carefully chosen imagistic motifs proves to be impressive as the collection unfolds. Frequently invoking the ephemera associated with popular culture—including bumper stickers, Westerns, and the occasional V.H.S. tape—Ripatrazone’s poems use these objects to mirror, and often complicate, the narratives he constructs for characters within the book. He does not attempt to draw clear boundaries between the inner lives of these characters and the cultural artifacts that surround them, but rather, he embraces the permeable boundaries of the self. He writes in “Good Morning,”

The Westclox AM/FM digital radio
had a cassette recorder: my father
taped the bass line of “Good Times”
and then scratchy Robert Plant,
but one weekend he had us,
my brother and I captured his
snoring… (41)

Here Ripatrazone suggests the myriad ways in which the individual’s experience is mediated by shared culture, its rituals, and its various artifacts. “Good Morning” subtly suggests the ways that one may subvert these received ideas about the world, thus claiming agency over culture. Yet Ripatrazone adeptly problematizes such an interpretation by interspersing this personal narrative with brand-names, implying that even acts of subversion are mediated by the society one inhabits. This is Not About Birds is filled with finely crafted poems like this one, which lend themselves to multiple careful readings.

Ripatrazone’s use of the persona poem to explore these recurring themes proves equally impressive. He frequently underscores the commonalities between different individuals’ experiences, suggesting that popular culture wields a somewhat homogenizing influence. Yet the book also suggests the myriad ways that individuality manifests itself within this sea of “V.H.S. tapes,” “strip joints,” and “Pilates.” Ripatrazone’s best work explores this intersection of individual and collective consciousness. He explains in a piece entitled “Crossing,” written in the voice of a high school swim team member,

We idled in the Oldsmobile while the cargo
train slowed forward. I paged through
his Frye catalog and recognized his pair among
Earthen Clay, Burnt Chestnut, Hand Stained
Brown. Each stood against backgrounds
of mountains and rivers. He asked
if I liked boots but my answer
was lost under the shuddering rails. (22)

Ripatrazone presents us the detritus of a consumer economy—a landscape littered with Oldsmobiles and shoe catalogues—yet also suggests that this glittering ephemera retains a dark side. Just as the character in the poem fails to fit within this paradigm because of his sexual orientation, the poem suggests that alienation proves inevitable for those who are part of collective. This theme surfaces throughout the poems, as hunters, daredevils, and swimmers find themselves at turns accepted by and estranged from the people who surround them. In many ways, Ripatrazone’s use of the persona poem illustrates for the reader the many forms that alienation can take. His presentation of a single theme becomes increasingly complex and multifaceted as the book unfolds. As a result, the myriad voices within the manuscript retain a wonderful sense of unity when considered as a whole. Nick Ripatrazone’s This is Not About Birds is a spectacular new addition to this writer’s body of work, as finely crafted as it is insightful—a truly remarkable book.

Related Posts:

• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
• “Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

Readers already familiar with Darling’s work will not be surprised to find that The Moon & Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell is a story told exclusively in footnotes. Darling is a poet interested in “writing poems that allow multiple voices to coexist within the same narrative space,” as she states in a 2012 interview with The American Literary Review. Darling goes on to mention in that interview finding, fittingly, inspiration in both Joshua Clover’s The Totality for Kids and Jenny Boully’s The Body: An Essay:

When I saw prose, footnotes, and other appropriated academic forms, I immediately expected a linear narrative. I was delighted when I found something altogether different – the wonderful associative logic that drives poetry. I became interested in creating these unusual relationships between form and content in my own work… footnotes, glossaries, and appendices invite the audience to take a more active role. I like that readers are surprised when texts make these demands, and ask them to participate in the work of the poet.

In approaching and evaluating Darling’s work, it is imperative to understand that she is a poet in dialogue with other poets’ work — that of contemporary writers like Boully and Clover, and that of older poets, namely HD. Further, Darling is a poet whose work is in dialogue with itself. Darling has published five books between 2010 and 2012, and these books often seem to reference each other, sometimes directly and sometimes indirectly.

The Moon & Other Inventions is divided into seven chapters, each with a clear heading to help guide the reader through the fragmented footnotes that follow (respectively, A History of Inventions, Astronomy, Horology, Ornithology, Music, Cartography and The Moon). But even these delineated chapters bleed into each other, working with and against each other to perpetuate this quest for ongoing interconnectedness. Throughout the chapters, reappearance of device and mechanism, of imagery pertaining to the moon and astronomy and mapping, and of words like “sky” and “machine” all serve to reinforce these relations between the presented fragments.

There is a character “she” whom we track through the chapters of The Moon & Other Inventions. It is “she” who is looking through her telescope at the start of the
first chapter, when “She placed the apparatus beneath her bedroom window.” It is “she” who in the chapters on Astronomy and Horology “noted deviations in the moon’s trajectory” and “described this device as the height of precision,” and who “during these years…felt as thought she would be faced with a decision.” As we move into the chapter on Ornithology, “she” is opening “the cage when the shades were drawn.” In the chapter on Music, it is “she” who “unfurled the score, a sequence of unfamiliar chords sounded…” And in the final chapter, it is “she” who “alludes to a recurring dream, in which she sees her image reflected in one of the smaller lunar basins.”

Of course these may be (and likely are) many shes rather than one woman. But the repetition of the pronoun offers additional guidance to readers as we move from fragment to fragment and make the necessary jumps from footnote to footnote. “She” offers us a foothold, a tangible link to follow as we move through these enigmatic pieces of information, definition, found text and collected image.

Darling’s poetry is not for readers looking for straightforward narrative. This is poetry for readers who want to be asked to forge their own connections between what is provided and what is not. This is poetry for readers who are open to multiple interpretations and readings. But Darling does not ask that we do all of this work. She is flipping switches, opening doors and building rooms in which her reader can create his or her own plot(s). She is setting scenes and recording facts, providing definitions and even appendixes of actual images, all of which her reader can put to use in moving through her writing. Darling is as inviting as she is cryptic and ultimately, she is offering us the opportunity to do our own imagining alongside her.

Related Posts:

• Forty-One Jane Doe’s by Carrie Olivia Adams
• This is Not About Birds by Nick Ripatrazone
• Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
• Counterpart by Elizabeth Robinson
• “Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling

Champion’s use of traditional literary forms proves impressive as the book unfolds. My favorite poems in Reluctant Mistress create a sense of discontinuity between style and subject matter, presenting subversive content within received forms, which have been used most frequently by male writers addressing a silent female “beloved.” Champion’s poems strive to show the reader that these arcane courtship rituals, and the way in which we represent them in literature, still inform contemporary relationships in unexpected ways. Consider “Villanelle for Past Lovers”:

I cherish all the lovers in my past.
Some say it’s my greatest flaw.
A broken love is not meant to last.

I line them all up in my mind-an unlucky cast-
repeatedly playing their parts unrehearsed and raw.
I can’t stop loving the lovers in my past.

Here Champion presents a subversive message within a received literary form. By doing so, she skillfully revises the gendered power relations inherent in traditional love poetry. The female beloved is no longer silent, nor passive. Likewise, monogamy is no longer the ideal for the heroine of this story. Champion ultimately re-imagines what is possible for female characters within the love lyric, expanding the parameters of traditional forms like the villanelle. Like many other poems in Reluctant Mistress, “Villanelle for Past Lovers” proves as thoughtful as it is finely crafted.

Along these lines, Champion’s poems frequently give voice to voiceless characters from this master narrative. Mythical figures like Daphne and Psyche deliver beautifully written soliloquies, suggesting that Reluctant Mistress should be read, at least in part, as a corrective gesture, an attempt to recover parts of literary history that have been lost or overlooked. Champion writes, for instance, in “Daphne, Upon Transformation,”

Finally. These veins have turned
to roots, soaking nourishment from the earth
with stoic self-reliance, no longer needing

the channels that course in others
seeking passion

In passages like this one, Champion draws attention to a character who inhabits the margins of a predominantly male master narrative, ultimately asking us to reconsider what aspects of myth, culture, and history we fixate on. What’s more, the poet situates contemporary mistresses, young girls who eschew marriage, and women who take pleasure in sensual experience within this trajectory of silenced female voices. Reluctant Mistress draws our attention to the cultural mechanisms that cause us to relegate these stories to the margins, offering readers provocative social criticisms while maintaining lyricism and a sense of humor throughout. In short, Anne Champion’s first book is a truly wonderful debut.

Related Posts:

• This is Not About Birds by Nick Ripatrazone
• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• “Melancholia (An Essay)” by Kristina Marie Darling
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

Reading Melancholia (An Essay) requires that we do some work. The reader has no choice but to
create the main story line that has been buried beneath all the baubles, trinkets, and tchotchkes, which includes the piecing together of the lost lover himself. He may be lost, but Darling does include three untitled letter fragments that address him directly. Letters, surely, are an essential part of the lost lover narrative—maybe even more than the silent trinkets left behind—but they have a tendency to give the game away—to embarrassingly say too much. The love letter fragment, on the other hand, with all its immediate mystery has the exact opposite effect. We are lured on without being told very much at all. In the first of her letter fragments, for example, Darling writes,

Dearest—

you were like bits of broken glass
when the jewelry box shattered
night & the ocean’s coldest shore. (“untitled fragment” (i))

Here the lover is likened to the shattered glass of the jewelry box. In “untitled fragment” (ii), the lover is reduced to the memory of “the silver button/ on your black wool coat” but like the previous letter where the image of the jewelry box extends to include night and the ocean, the silver button extends to include a “a dream within a dream.” The lover’s materiality is never as direct as it may seem from the avalanche listing of things in the book because he is not actually present leaving the beloved to yearn and yearn:

Dearest—

(this letter will burn & burn). (untitled fragment” (iii))

It is both an erasure—as I imagine the beloved burning these letters in her fireplace—and an extension into endless longing. With the lover missing, unnamed, in the shadows, lost to time, it falls to the reader to gather him up again.

Darling uses fragmentation to force the reader to engage in the making of the text. Fragmentation, which may have reached its height in the poetry of the modern period, has a history in the Romantic period as well. Although Keats is not named in the collection, he was certainly a poet who knew something about melancholy, nightingales and fragments. The appearance of the Elgin marbles in England, for example, generated a large number of poems from writers of the time and brought fragments into the popular imagination. Some poets of dubious repute were writing fragments on purpose hoping to pass them off as ancient, classical texts, but others came to see that fragments and fragmentation could provide unique opportunities for expressing the radical subjectivism that came to be de rigueur among the Romantics. These poets had access to classic is through its ruins only—the bits and pieces of a bygone but also longed-for era. It is the same interesting marriage of longing and loss that Darling captures in these poems and without ever giving in to our desire to know the whole story. She manages the trick by being faithful to two dictums: “To select and omit, as a poet would” (“noctuary, definition”) and “To name, as a historian would” (“melancholia, definition”).

Related Posts:

• This is Not About Birds by Nick Ripatrazone
• The Moon and Other Inventions: Poems After Joseph Cornell by Kristina Marie Darling
• Reluctant Mistress by Anne Champion
• Rise in the Fall by Ana Božičević
• Desolation: Souvenir by Paul Hoover

beloved. The raison d’être of the melancholic’s affliction. Consider the graceful line of his wool coat, its fabric dark against the towering snowdrifts.

courtship. A set of social conventions that gave rise to their exchanging of love tokens. These antique pendants, which held locks of tangled hair, were inevitably lost in the great avalanche.

locket. An object onto which her memories were inscribed. When she thought of their evening soirées, its clasp seemed smaller, more intricate.

memento. A foreshadowing of their ominous tête-à-tête. The charms she would unpin from her blue silk dress.

mourning. Described as a year of pathological grief, in which her locket gave rise to a luminous and deathly narcissism.

nightingale. A harbinger of both despair and the onslaught of winter. Its bright mornings and colorless evenings.

ocean. Now iced over, this body of water was said to reflect the imperceptible radiance of their courtship. Compare, in its present state, to a discarded necklace, pendant, or charm bracelet.

–Kristina Marie Darling

Read the Rumpus Review of The Body is a Little Gilded Cage.

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