I’ve been a fan of Joseph Lease’s poetry since I read his first book, Human Rights; and his latest, aptly-named collection, Testify, just released in April from Coffee House Press, is as taut and thrilling, as full of urgency and humility as I’ve come to expect his work to be.
Testify begins with Lease’s long poem “America,” a poem that echolocates between the Dow and prayer, between CNN and what it feels like to live inside a body, between rhetoric and “the water’s skin.” Lease’s work frequently manages this complex mapping of intersections between the personal and the political, but does it with an incredible music, with a precision that allows ambivalence to live in the poems the way it does in our most intimate conversations, the way it does in our lives:
AMERICA
my scream is a brand name:
blue—for awhile—
elm trees and summer and birch trees and sky, elm trees
and summer and birch trees and sky: expensive houses,
expensive houses dying: this lack of justice I acknowledge
mine—
America, one extra summer night—he wants to (you
know) feel like a giant eyeball–
I come back to Lease’s work again and again because of what it teaches me about language and form, but mostly because of what it knows about feeling. This is poetry that gathers in handfuls of the world and offers them up as crystalline images, smells and sounds. This is poetry not as an idea but as an experience – evocative of a vast multiplicity of ideas:
SEND MY ROOTS RAIN
presence was broken for a while, stillness was floating in
plaid dark like a promise to the living and the dead, and the
most horrible heartburn, and the old couple in the kitchen,
lights out, lights out, waiting for sound—and the leaves roll
just like faces, and the faces blow like thieves, and we all
keep our explosions, and you taste joy in the night, and the
lost boys answer slowly, and the corpse picks up the phone,
and we all claim that we’re holy, God won’t leave our
dreams alone—
This spring I taught work from Lease’s second book, Broken World, to a class of undergraduates at NYU. In our class discussion, the students were using their best English-class lit-crit language to describe the poem’s symbolism and meaning, until finally someone said, “it’s beautiful.” That is, in the end, the most accurate, and perhaps the most useful, description of Lease’s work: it’s beautiful. Read it.
