Poetry Reviews

An Image Not a Book

Kylan Rice
Parlor Press ($16.95)

Kylan Rice’s debut poetry collection An Image Not a Book takes its title from a line in Yeats’s 1917 dialogue poem “Ego Dominus Tuus” (which translates to “I am your Lord”), a phrase originating in turn from Dante’s La Vita Nuova. Rice’s poems craft a “branching opening” conversation with Yeats, Dante, and the reader, boldly asserting, “I am here to try to tell you / what I love.”

What better place to begin such a conversation than a wedding. Opening with “Epithalamium,” the collection introduces the marital scene and offers the first image to the reader’s eye: “a banquet in a field.” The following poem, “Garland,” presents ten intertwined portraits described as “[a garland of souls].” Together, these two poems chronicle the “strain / of assembly” and cue up the collection’s themes of eros—intimacy, promise, betrayal, abandonment, and apology. Throughout this exploration, Rice artfully holds “in tension” the observer and the observed, reminding us that “looking / in” does not equate to truly participating.

The reasons behind the poet’s sense of separation seem to relate to the concept of the “book” more than to that of “image,” suggesting a struggle with the very nature of his art form. Rice yearns for an image of “fidelity” intertwined with “levity” to soothe the restlessness accompanying his quest for connection amidst disconnection. His poems pulse with this tension, enacting a “bent-thorn syntax” and often evoking a feeling of wading through water “to the thigh” or “hip-high.” After being “loosened by a wound,” the poet craves fidelity to self and others, yet he grapples with the fear of losing sight of the line between realism and idealism, caught between “the object in the image” and “my desire for it.”

Ultimately, Rice’s poems wade deeply into the anxiety of the search and wrestle with the haunting fear of not finding the elusive ideal image. Striving for “something less / / than groundedness,” Rice beckons readers to join him in a quest for love amidst the paradox of existence as it “speaks its alternating oath of late / and soon.”

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

The Matrix and Eecchhooeess

The Matrix
N. H. Pritchard
Primary Information ($20)

Eecchhooeess
N. H. Pritchard
DABA ($24)

by Richard Kostelanetz

N. H. Pritchard (1939-1996) was a New York-based artist and writer whose The Matrix Poems 1960-1970, originally published by Doubleday, has the significant distinction of remaining the most innovative one-author collection of poetry ever released by a commercial house in the U.S. It was groundbreaking at the time not only for its typographical and verbal departures, but for its author’s race, as fifty years ago, in the wake of Civil Rights protests in 1968, our commercial publishers became more open to Black authors than they had been before. It is only appropriate that his innovation be honored now in our current time with new reprints of his two major works.

The Matrix’s cover had a knockout black and white photograph of its author with half of his face in shadows, wearing a collared shirt with a tie and jacket. Pritchard looked elegant, much as Ralph Ellison was elegant—but whereas Ellison emerged from a fatherless family, Pritchard’s father was a physician who immigrated to New York City from “the Antilles,” as his son so elegantly put it. Whereas Ellison didn’t finish Tuskegee, Pritchard went to prep schools before taking his B.A. with honors from NYU and continuing with graduate school in art history.

When I first met Pritchard in the early 1970s, soon after The Matrix was published, he greeted me in his darkened studio apartment on Park Avenue. Though only a year older than me, he seemed not just more sophisticated, but unique in all the ways that a creative person can be. Pritchard’s personal letters resembled the illuminated manuscripts of William Blake; to my copies of his books he added not just a personal inscription but a handmade enhancement of colors and lines that I treasure.

The poems in The Matrix appeared in several formats that still look alternative today. Words were crushed together; some were printed upside down. Weighty phrases were repeated within the page. Words both familiar and unfamiliar had extra spaces between the letters. While some pages had just a large single letter, on other pages the print ran to the outside edges, suggesting that it might well have continued beyond it. The Matrix challenged how a writer’s Collected Poems should look.

As for the texts themselves, they approached the limits of semantic comprehension, as Pritchard’s ideal was what he called the “transreal,” a reflection of his awareness of mystical, supernatural modernism in the visual arts. On an opening recto page was this epigraph for himself: “Words are ancillary to content.” Later in the book, the fourth page of “Gyre’s Galax” repeats the phrase “above beneath” from top to bottom, sometimes amended by the words “it” and “in.” Pritchard wanted to take poetry into a domain previously unknown, one that was indeed above beneath.

In 1971 a second Pritchard collection, Eecchhooeess, appeared from New York University Press; it is perhaps the most radical one-author poetry volume ever to appear from an American university press. Repeating many of the same challenges posed by The Matrix, Eecchhooeess is no less brilliant; its eerie sounds and typographical innovations chimed right in with the Black Arts movement of the day (Pritchard was affiliated with the literary collective Umbra).

The most unusual quality of these new reprints of Pritchard’s books is that they appear intact, with their original front covers duplicated, each totally devoid of any new preface or afterword. Not even Pritchard’s biographical note is updated; only the title and copyright pages are different. While contemporary readers might wish for more background on this utterly unique writer, to get such authentic reprinting a whole half-century later is a treat for fans of groundbreaking poetry indeed.

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Rain Taxi Review of Books Volume 26, No. 3 (#103) | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2021

At His Desk in the Past

Franz Wright
Foundlings Press ($20)

by Jon Cone

The son of a literary giant who became a prolific and beloved poet himself, Franz Wright died in 2015. While Wright’s poems were unsparing in their examination of his troubled past, they often moved heroically towards light, reaching for the possibilities of grace and transcendence in volumes such as The Earth Without You (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 1980), Entry in an Unknown Hand Carnegie Mellon University Press, 1989), and The Beforelife (Knopf, 2001). Wright frequently used religious terms in his work, but even this never seemed heavy-handed, because he never let go of his profound belief in poetry’s ecumenical capacity to provide solace. This new chapbook offers readers one more chance to enjoy the pure devotion Wright had for poetry and to witness the craft as he practiced it in his final years.

At His Desk in the Past, which contains an informative and lyrical afterword written by Elizabeth Oehlkers Wright, comprises fragments Wright composed during five days in January and March of 2012. Subtitled “an homage to Karl Krolow,” a well-known German poet and translator, it riffs on a single Krolow line of six words—“It’s raining in a dead language,” as translated into English by Stuart Friebert—that Wright considered sublime. Like Coltrane moving into and eventually beyond the melody of “My Favorite Things,” Wright uses Krolow’s line as the elementary substance for fueling further poetic imaginings rich with meaning, where his memories crest the surface and his emotions live and breathe anew. These fragments feel part of a much older poetic tradition, an oracular performance only a poet as committed as Wright could achieve. There’s additional emotional poignancy in knowing these fragments come to us while the poet battled the cancer that was killing him.

The homage begins at the moment of inaugural light, the moment of birth: “First light. It’s raining again in a dead language. Green. It’s raining in a dead language. . . . The empty and utterly silent house filled all at once with the sound of my name posed, in my young mother’s voice before I finally slept.” In the next fragment Wright suggests via a third-person analysis that he is writing of Krolow, though it is impossible not to imagine he is also writing about himself, recalling his own early formative and mysterious encounters with language: “He has lived a long time. It has happened before. He suddenly heard quite distinctly and apropos of nothing words that enchant him and continue to throughout the day although he could not tell you why or what they mean and wouldn’t try.” This is what language does for Krolow, Wright imagines, and what language does for Wright too, we can imagine: It enchants.

Wright worked with a digital recorder, and these poems maintain an incantatory force. They migrated from an original sound recording—Wright had a superb reading voice—to transcription onto the page and eventual assembly into this volume. Because of that method, the reader can find at certain points a searching hesitancy as Wright employs iteration (oral composition naturally allows iteration as a technique to facilitate continuation) as well as the sudden and abrupt stop that approximates the musical rest. Thus:

IT’S RAINING in a dead language he writes at his desk in the past, silent man of the millions of pages still traveling toward the world
no

The wonderful movements in Wright’s fragments seem to carry both original poet and Wright far from the world where they first appeared. In one of the book’s most exquisite moments, the house where the mother and the new child are first encountered is transformed into a church where the mother sits with the son as the world outside darkens at dusk and candles burn and flicker inside. Implied here is the presence of sacred beings, angels and bees:

HE SMELLS AGAIN the faint honey scent dust and incense speechlessly he feels the loneliness of tapers as the stained glass turns to black; they wane in there alone with no company but him and his mother and fueling the small brilliant radius of fire that auras varying altitudes of fire and honey-colored irises of icon eyes that follow unseen beings, muted beings of invisible gold iridescent as they gravely

The sudden broken stop is lightened by the following fragment with its delightful wordplay:

BEE-iridescent

In the poem’s final lines, there is a duplication of the poet at his task of repeating the hexagonal line, after having recalled his “mother’s shadowy face in profile” and “storing up Christ’s eyes ultimate altitude forever gazing down.” Wright returns us to the image of himself speaking the six words of Krolow:

AS HE QUIETLY SAYS THE HEXAGONAL sentence aloud barely breathing silently reciting

EACH WORD of it once before writing it down, feeling blessed, and once more before giving it back.

Perhaps that is what all poets do: Listen to the rain and hear in it a long-dead language which is the mystery of poetry itself, beyond our power to explain or understand. At His Desk in the Past is only forty-seven pages, but it speaks volumes and adds much to the Franz Wright canon.

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Absent Here

Bret Shepard
University of Pittsburgh Press ($18)

by Jeff Alessandrelli

Bret Shepard’s second collection, Absent Here, could be called a “project” book, in that all its poems are centered on one topic—in this case Alaska, which here seems less a state than a state of mind. Tundra, darkness, Arctic, body, language, absence: certain words that repeat in the text feel less written than lived (and indeed, as the author bio on the back cover tells us, “Bret Shepard is from the North Slope of Alaska”). Lines from the serial poem “Here but Elsewhere” are emblematic:

The absence is enormous in the Arctic.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Some deaths create other ways to die.

Some losses you only understand once

your body and mind come back together
wherever it is beyond what we name.

Shepard’s approach in Absent Here is both reflexive and discursive. Early in the book, “On Ice” asserts:

Faces retain what the world gives back to us. We see it
in the mirror. Because it is already done, the mirror reflects

small ways we reduce. Like ice rolled over mistakes,
we grieve what we touch, the selves we try to change too late.

Toward the end of the collection, in “Summer Camp,” a bull caribou falls dead, and by being “taken apart” it is simultaneously “also reduced to more.” From any angle, there’s a sadness to Shepard’s Alaska, an overhang of the past’s erasure against the present’s inevitability; the speaker is often looking back at what once was and is no longer. “Territories,” which contains the epigraph “Report paints grim picture about Alaska Native language fluency, but hope remains,” begins with the decree “I’m missing a language for what is lost,” followed by the repetition “Tundra. Tundra. Tundra. Tundra” and the lines “In difficulty, a grammar for the vastness // measured in millions of eye lengths.” In this white and desolate landscape, the speaker considers the weight of poorly made past decisions (“The village voted itself dry / again. What is paradise // but a final tally of choices / given to innocence, sin // given to sunless days”), and what isn’t seen—absence piled upon absence—matters just as much as what is.

“Territories” is also notable for the line “I don’t have a language that isn’t white,” a reference to the region’s tumults of snow that also hints at a racial component to Shepard’s picture of Alaska. The observation is well-deserved—after Hawaii, Alaska has the highest percentage of Indigenous residents among U.S. states—and Shepard is wise to foreground the particular absence of non-whiteness his own whiteness dictates. Still, Absent Here is not a confessional text in any standard conception of the word; its poems are imaginative, far flung, and oftentimes non-linear, and even moments that seem to relate the author’s personal experience exhibit a stark refusal to accept a solid version (or vision) of selfhood. Take the opening section of the collection’s final poem, “Here but Elsewhere”:

Language doesn’t make decisions. It keeps
guessing. When I was given my Inupiaq

name, Jenny Felder talked me into sounds

from the book listing each possible version
nearby. I still hear her. I would speak them

now if my mouth could shape the words.

In his well-known review of Kenneth Lonergan’s Oscar-winning 2016 film Manchester By the Sea, critic A. O. Scott notes that it is “less concerned with nostalgia than with the psychology of loss.” Absent Here is squarely interested in the same thing. Although the book is filled with ideas and images of Alaska that a non-resident might also initially recognize (darkness, isolation, snow, etc.), Absent Here steadfastly troubles any fixed picture of Alaska—as a project, as a state, Alaska (like the self) remains ongoing amidst its vast and immediate absences.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

What Good Is Heaven

Raye Hendrix
Texas Review Press ($21.95)

by Jennifer Saunders

A remarkable debut collection, Raye Hendrix’s What Good Is Heaven interrogates kindness and mercy while exploring love’s complicated gestures. In “Animal Instinct,” the speaker remembers finding a squirrel “fallen from its piney drey, eyes still sealed // with birth” while walking in the woods with her father and dog. She jerks the dog’s leash to prevent it from eating the squirrel; her father tells her to “leave it to die quickly— / let the dog have his merciful doggy way.” Instead, she brings it home to “a slow death over days / in the rust of a long-dead hamster’s cage.” The adult speaker wonders how “to know when kindness / means crush instead of heal.”

The animal world often provides Hendrix with fodder for such meditations. In “The Bats,” the father and daughter find baby bats frozen to death. The daughter reaches for them, but her father

says to leave them for the wildcats
             and the dogs that run the mountain

he asks me to be more like
             winter                     beautiful but hard

he says despite my softness
                                             everything must eat

The poem “Mercy” shows the inverse: kindness dressed as harm. Here, child and father find a near-dead raccoon, and this time he “gave me the rifle / said it was time I learned // mercy.” The father’s efforts to push the softness out of his daughter is not an unkindness but an attempt to armor her against the violence of the world.

Just as kindness and harm are intertwined in these natural scenes, so too do they interface in human relationships. As a Southern queer poet, Hendrix understands that people and places one loves can do harm. “Daughter” begins:

I was loved with a Bible
              a belt        I ate Ivory

soap          I was sent out
              to choose the switch

Perhaps even more tremulously, it ends:

He once told me         (made me
               swear to keep it secret

to never tell my sister)
              that he loved me the most

Thus is the recipient of the father’s greater love also the recipient of his greater harm. In “Bloodletting,” Hendrix writes directly about the relationship between care and harm:

if the Greeks can be believed
then opening a vein
is Hippocratic: violence
cloaked in an oath of care

Hendrix also interrogates their own complicated love of a Southern home that has not always loved them back. They depict their hometown of Pinson, Alabama as a place where roads are “pothole-pocked / and going nowhere,” “the people are proud // to be holdout Confederates,” and the corrupt Mayor is replaced by “another reclining in his chair.” “But there’s jasmine here,” Hendrix counters; “There’s light.”

In “Pinson” and in What Good Is Heaven as a whole, the litany of details accumulates with force. Noticing and holding them itself seems to offer a proof of love—who but a lover could write “the algae // a million emeralds sunk just beyond / the shore”—but Hendrix gestures at their own love through these observations as well. Some of the softness the father in these poems had hoped to temper remains, and Hendrix’s readers are the lucky beneficiaries of its survival.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Near-Earth Object

John Shoptaw
Unbound Edition Press ($25)

by Lee Rossi

Poetry can be personal, but as T. S. Eliot famously insisted, it can also be impersonal. Can it ever be both at once? In his latest collection, Near-Earth Object, John Shoptaw mixes disparate elements—formal and informal, autobiographical and traditional, and, yes, personal and impersonal—creating a work that takes various paths to express the existential crisis of our time: the effects of climate change.

From the outset, Shoptaw offers a guided tour of various disasters and disaster zones: the asteroid Chicxulub, clear-cut forests, the North Pacific Gyre, climate refugees, desertification in the Sahel. It’s not pretty. “Dry Song,” which beautifully reworks some of the basic motifs of Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” reveals the terrifying reality of salmon unable to reach (or leave) their spawning beds because streams are running dry:

But the drought has pierced to the mountain route
and shown me rock under the shrunken mantle
and sand it fed to the river mouths, barring
salmon on their redds from salmon in the sea.

“Back Here” takes the tack of using the patois of “Swampeast” (southeast Missouri), Shoptaw’s boyhood home. “We believe in everything life has given us,” the speaker says—the few good things, the many disappointments. “We believe in you,” he tells the prodigal poet, but goes on to say, “Honestly, we don’t know what to believe. / We don’t believe you do either.” Finally, though, the speaker admits: “We know. The earth is dying. We get that. / . . . / Naturally, we’ll do what we can. / Only please don’t ask us / to change our climate for yours.”

Employing skewed formalisms in many of the poems, Shoptaw emphasizes that resilience and creation are as much a part of our behavioral repertoire as violence and despoliation. He craftily leans into the little-used “Poulter’s Measure” (a popular Renaissance meter) for an antic anecdote about the fried chicken of his youth. The poem begins with memories of a visit to a boyhood chum:

We play with our trucks out back in the dirt, where plump
red hens peck for bugs but keep clear of the hackberry stump.

Then checkers on linoleum in the kitchen
where Chuck’s mom in a red housedress turns: Cornflake fried chicken?

The music is charming, but there are deeper currents. Comparing himself to his friend, the speaker notes:

I grew on the wrong side of the rails but the right
side of the river in Missouri, Chuck on the wrong side

of both.

Shoptaw also likes large canvases; the final sequence in the book, “Whoa!,” revisits the myth of Phaeton in light of the environmental woe already upon us. Throughout the work’s twelve parts, Shoptaw offers many of the traditional pleasures of the long narrative poem, among them learned lists (flowers, decaying glaciers, unrepentant polluters), elaborate similes, and inflated rhetoric. Shoptaw’s list of “wide-waking annuals and perennials,” for example, is as specific and delightful as Milton’s famed list of flowers in “Lycidas” without dispelling the somber and elegiac tone of the whole:

snowdrops, crocuses, daisies and daylilies,
rice in flower and maize in silk,
woozy jasmine and heady grapevines . . .

Of course, all these pleasures are in service to a larger design. As our modern-day Phaeton (here cleverly named “Ray”) courses recklessly, he disturbs the jet stream and sends untimely cold snaps on New England and New York, causing disaster around the globe:

Coulters
and ponderosas, yellowed and browned, engraved
with trilobite grooves by pine-bark beetles
wintering northward, had turned from trees
into tinder.

Notice how Shoptaw’s four-beat lines evoke but don’t slavishly imitate Old English accentual verse, the alliteration deployed almost casually to reinforce the drive of the narrative.

Ray, it might be noted, is clueless, but at least he has the excuse of youth and inexperience. Not so “the fossil lordlings / . . . out / sledding with their kids in Central Park”; “Where’s the heat?” they want to know, their cluelessness a testament to their motivated ignorance. Since this is a mock epic, retribution is called for, so in Shoptaw’s telling, Earth herself fires a lightning bolt at Mister High and Mighty, ejecting him from “his plump white boy’s life.”

What Shoptaw offers readers, then, is not an answer but a fantasy of reprisal, one with no more impact on social policy than the tagging of a freeway overpass has. Perhaps that’s what most writers do—scrawl texts in hopes it might shock us into saving ourselves from tragedy. Few, however, do it with the force and elegance of Shoptaw.

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Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Spring 2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

Here, There and Nowhere

Valery Oisteanu
Collages by Ruth Oisteanu
Spuyten Duyvil ($30)

by Bill Wolak

Valery Oisteanu’s Here, There and Nowhere depicts a life savored intensely in the moment—one that risks everything with every single breath. As Oisteanu states in the collection’s foreword, “My poems are spontaneous recollections of traumatic events, fragments of forgotten dreams, nebulous states of mind, illogical episodes and subliminal sequences of ecstasy and redemption.” These poems offer somnambulant marathons into the unconscious, trances that reach out like embraces of moonlight, sporadic erotic wildfires, and of course, a truckload of unabashed surrealistic provocations.

Like César Vallejo, Oisteanu offers a poetry of committed enactment rather than intellectual contemplation. Take “The Revolutionary Cultural Exchange”:

Struggle is a state off mind, awakened consciousness
Defend your rights, resist, persist, walk to the edge of life and death
The military invaders will hang themselves with tools of suppression
Freedom continues to grow in the harshest terrain
As clenched fists and open brave hearts march on

Clearly, Oisteanu isn’t waiting around for either the revolution or the apocalypse. He advocates a more active approach, as he states in “We March”:

We march and we march some more
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
We march for the end of wars and for better human rights
We march in the polluted streets and demand clean water
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
And we march for the women trafficked abroad
And for the workers dying at work
We march in our sleep
We march all night
We march ’til we die.

Extending his vision to all corners of the globe, Oisteanu’s poems about the war in Ukraine are exceptionally moving, and his “Navalny Blues” is simply heartbreaking. But just as he protests the current state of contemptible affairs, Oisteanu is also hopeful about the future. Love is where he grounds that hope, and in fact, Here, There and Nowhere is dedicated to his fifty-year relationship with his wife Ruth (who provides twelve color collages). “My Wife Ruth” contains extraordinary descriptions—“Her breasts move counter-clockwise to each other / . . . / Her hands create the secret greenhouse / Her songs make the flowers sway and shiver”—and praise of erotic love permeates the book:

Sweat on sweat, the lovely lover chanting improvisations;
these love chants remain suspended in the air.
No one is giving up their fantasies,
no one records their salty dreams.

There is always something stunning, surprising, or enigmatic in an Oisteanu poem. Sometimes it’s a startling title (“Landscape of Unfinished Dream,” “The Subway in the Sky,” “Rent My Shadow”); sometimes it’s an astonishing first line (“This is a poem inside a poem”; “Welcome to the end of the mind”; “No more sleeping on the roof of imagination”). As a surrealist, he is no stranger to the marvelous, and his poems abound in striking linguistic transformations. Consider what he does with the image of trees in “The Peace Enigma of Stillness”:

Herds of trees in the distance
Wailing below a dark undertow
Some fall toward the empty sky
Burning with the speed of an invasion
How hard they try to become birds

Perhaps Oisteanu himself best describes what his poetry aims for in “Madness Unlocked”:

We revolutionize clouds from within,
we purge ourselves of sentimentalism,
of avant-clones, of bourgeois culture.
No more brainwash of hip academia
back to the roots of blues and jazz.

What else, after all, should poetry do in the face of disasters of the changing climate, horrors of ever-widening wars, and the stubborn persistence of worldwide pandemics, but “save the holy madness of Life”?

Poetry Reviews

Rain Taxi Online Edition Winter 2024-2025 | © Rain Taxi, Inc. 2025

YOU

Rosa Alcalá
Coffee House Press ($17.95)

by Christopher Luna

Rosa Alcalá’s fourth poetry collection is a thrilling masterpiece filled with prose poems that challenge and disturb as they dig deep into the terrors that women face. Throughout, readers are also invited to contemplate the complexities of voice and perspective in literature.

An introductory piece outlines where fear begins for women and girls and prepares readers for the unconventional approach of the text. Alcalá makes an important decision to rely upon the pronoun “you” to tell her story. At first it may seem that this allows her to remain one step removed from the painful memories she shares; “Isn’t the second person a form of hiding?” Alcalá asks. But the poems that follow fully explore the slippery magic of the pronoun “you”—how it can alternate between standing in for the reader, the author, and an ever-shifting cast of characters.

Alcalá tells us from the start that “I was trying to write a book about my mother,” but “that in the absence of her I mothered myself all over again with worry, / which is how I mother.” In this light, the “you” in every poem has the potential to be the poet, her mother, her daughter, another woman, or even womanhood itself, and sometimes more than one of these at the same time. Alcalá seeks to bear witness to the violence committed against women, but “being my own witness was itself a risk. How can / I see events unfolding when the body is completely symptomatic / of other bodies, including / its own.” She continues:

The problem with memory is that only words can re-create it for others.

Each word its own past and desire
for a future.

Each word, each sentence, a fragment.

And how do you untangle from the telling the speaker’s motives?

Later in the book, in “A Girl Like You,” the poet uses the second person to address both herself and a person she wrote about for her first real assignment as a journalist: a thirteen-year-old girl “whose tender body was discovered next to the Cuban bodega where your mother would send you for bread.” In the second half of the poem, the dead girl talks back, taking Alcalá to task for using the tragedy to further her career:

You want to know who did it, how it could have happened to me and not you. You want to weave it into a cross to protect the door to your daughter’s room. Or worse, for a poem. . . . Was your first intention to make my murder elegiac? Remember when you couldn’t pronounce that word correctly, when others saw you as you were, a girl who knew so little but elbowed herself to the front to be heard.

Nearly every poem contains horrific gut punches as well as sentences of such sublime beauty that you may temporarily forget their disturbing subject matter. Alcalá uses her fear as a map, seeking “narrative logic to order the / mess of memory” while never losing her faith in language’s potential to express the ineffable and reveal the truth about our lives. In this bold and innovative work, she has achieved her stated goal to “leave my daughter this book as manual, as heirloom; like my mother’s wedding dress in the unreachable part of my closet, both glamorous / /and warning.” Charles Olson once proclaimed that poems are “high energy constructs”; Alcalá’s YOU contains writing so powerful it may cause your heart to combust.

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Poetry Reviews

Poems 2016-2024

J.H. Prynne
Bloodaxe Books ($50)

by Patrick James Dunagan

Most poets deliver the proverbial “brick” of a collected works only in their final years, or else leave it to be delivered posthumously by others. Not J.H. Prynne. Since his 300-page 1982 gathering Poems, which collected all he felt worth preserving at the time, Prynne has delivered three subsequent “bricks”: 1999, 2005, and 2015, the last of which approached 700 pages. Now at eighty-eight years old, he’s added the equally colossal addendum Poems: 2016-2024. It is a magnificent, startling output during what might be the poet’s closing years of writing life.

This volume gathers thirty-six collections ranging in length from relatively brief sequences of a dozen or so pages up to the full-length Of Better Scrap (Face Press, 2019). Across this period the small yet inventive Face Press in Cambridge, England has been Prynne’s faithful publisher, responsible for originally publishing twenty-four of these titles, many of which were slim chapbooks printed on fine paper with care given to best represent the work as physical document. While these qualities are impossible to completely carry over to a larger collection, some attention has been afforded to details of the original publications. For instance, poems from Dune Quail Eggs (Face Press, 2021) appear in a larger print, centered upon the page, with extra spacing between individual words, likely similar to their chapbook appearance:

Green foist   crust mound
                    met
drain plume feast bride
                    eye
nails thumb avoid trail
                    bay
ghost braid prune force
                    toy

Other variances in font and size, or decorative section numbering, have been likewise carried across with a few of the collections, along with an accompanying image from the original versions here and there. For those new to Prynne’s work, this choice offers some awareness of the poet’s initial conception.

Prynne’s penchant for pushing towards the edges of language—often to an opaque abstraction—rarely offers any familiar foothold for readers expecting common levels of coherence, as in “Or But Invaded”:

other-worldly. Even surly toasted double joint dent
scented bell air surfactant lizard, tolerant pink win
arrant count radiant immunise. Into prize, instead
fast ahead confuse at the window endowed likewise
twist, then vaporise.

This might lead unfamiliar readers to charge that Prynne sets one word after another according to some arbitrary ordering. Yet Prynne wagers that there’s depth worth exploring in “the theme of arbitrariness.” In his talk “Stars, tigers and the shape of words,” which he delivered in 1992 at Birkbeck College, London, Prynne explained:

Briefly stated, the theme of arbitrariness concerns the nature of the relation between the sense or meaning of a linguistic utterance (spoken or written) and the forms of its expression or performance. If a language is considered as an evolved set of signs or codes, do the items of its production (words, sentences, speech-sounds) bear any distinct and significant individual relation to meaning or idea; or does the relation of message to medium make sense only within the context of the system, and not at the level of individual items?

Certainly, in a poem such as “Or But Invaded,” punctuation and sentence structure remain intact even as the individual words are often estranged from general semantics—yet the potential meaning of each word has been added to, enlarged. Associations emerge from out of the possibly arbitrary order; “tolerant pink win” might be the dawn or dusk hour at which “air surfactant lizard” emerges from their lair. It’s difficult not to associate some intention, even if exact elements remain murky.

On rare occasion, Prynne drops in an uncharacteristic acknowledgement of a poem’s circumstances, indicating, for example, by the note “34,000 ft.” that a poem was written while traveling on an airliner, perhaps on a flight to or from China as is his wont. There are also what might be taken as outright cheeky moves, like the epigraph for Memory Working: Impromptus: “Always have a point in mind / when you resolve a scale line” is attributed by citation to Pianogroove, an online piano school with the motto “the world’s best piano teachers—at your fingertips.”

In some poems, Prynne hits a decidedly different tonal note: “To catch slant sunlight as cat prowling, in earth warming from cold in browning tints, twigs in fashion with new glints to show upswelled. Light wind in morning, to activate a day aloud, ahead already remembered, chill now but soon declared and voluntary.” Such clearly descriptive lines of beauty are reminiscent more of a passage from Emily Dickinson’s Letters than what’s expected from Prynne. In addition, there are the koan-like “Travellers’ Tales” (note the plural possessive) at the end of Memory Working, which present riddling allegories explicitly set in a natural setting, à la fairy tales.

Then there is the hilarity of Snooty Tipoffs (Face Press, 2021) with jagged rhymes (“Music in the ice-box, music by the sea, / music at the rice-bowl, for you as well as me”) found throughout its five sections, in each of fifty-six parts except for the final section, which ends on:

      57
For you I’d do
    the whole thing through
below, above
    for now, for love.

The expanse of Prynne’s output during these last eight years is astounding. Poems: 2016-2024 shows an unparalleled poet holding forth at the height of his powers, from the sheer jubilance of titles (such as Passing Grass Parnassus (Face Press, 2020), with its epigram “Sing different songs on different mountains”) to the final sentence of “Penance at Cost” from Foremost Wayleave (Face Press, 2023):

Compunction ructions burnous turnabout riotous break
pressure gauge caramel kerbside far and wide intertidal angled
stairway apple crumble cinnamon evenly cloven down to earth.

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Poetry Reviews

I Don’t Want to Be Understood

Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
Alice James Books ($24.95)

by Oscar Ivins

In Joshua Jennifer Espinoza’s collection I Don’t Want to Be Understood, anti-trans sentiment is both structural and structuring; the atmospheric quality of transphobia affects what and how the poems’ speaker dreams, dreads, desires. A hauntingly intimate portrait spanning a life from childhood to today, the collection is deeply attuned to both the harsh and harmonious pitches that accompany experiences of transition in a society that is hostile to trans happiness.

The collection is inwardly panoramic. As the speaker, “a light in the form of a girl,” travels through courthouses, airports, and a menswear outlet in Hollywood, we are beamed into the neglected—and sometimes purposefully avoided—corners of her mind.

The opening poem, “Airport Ritual,” offers a science fiction twist on the anxiety-riddled experience of going through airport security while transgender. An epigraph stating “The following is a true story” conjures the paradox of security scans: Your body is intimately scrutinized while you’re told it’s not personal. “An anomaly is spotted. A woman is taken aside.” Then a TSA agent informs the traveler that she will need to touch her. When the traveler shares that she is transgender—“unsure if she means this an a warning or an apology”—the poem shifts register into absurdism: “the thing in her pants that set the sensors off suddenly expands” and keeps expanding to fill the terminal, the airport, the city of Irvine, until the military is called in.

By invoking facticity before bursting into the mythic, Espinoza teases and subverts cisgender expectations of what a trans narrative should do. The poem’s epigraph signals a common complaint made by trans people about trans literature: As transgender writers gain relative prominence, often the books that sell the best are the ones that cater to a cisgender audience. Whether that means work that flattens transition into an “it gets better” narrative or work that is overly expository to the point of redundancy, it is a reality of the publishing industry: Sometimes the only way to achieve a modicum of financial success is to fit one’s work into a preexisting box, one constructed by the institutions of cisness.

Reading “Airport Ritual” as a trans person, I feel deeply the truthfulness of this story—the dread and anxiety that arise from this kind of interface with the state. In the poem, while pundits discuss the benefits of forcing trans people into detention facilities,

            The woman at the center of the plasma or whatever-the-fuck-it-is
            just wants someone to say one thing to her
            that doesn’t feel like kite string wrapped around an open wound
            in a warm, strong wind. But it doesn’t happen.

Through this play between literalness and absurdism, Espinoza flips the cultural script that says trans people are delusional and transition is science fiction, instead casting the cisgender state as the true site of hysteria. While cis society turns up the dial on fascism, the woman at the center of the poem is simply trying to live.

One of the most compelling aspects of the collection is the way it portrays transition as transcendently positive at the same time as it is traumatizing. A common trope of trans cultural production is the idea of transition as linear. In this formation, one’s life before transition is rife with confusion and anguish but through transitioning the pain of daily existence is relieved; one becomes stronger, life becomes better. This is not untrue, and Espinoza’s work highlights how transitioning is a way of getting off autopilot and pursuing embodiment on one’s own terms. In “The Present,” Espinoza describes the dissociation of closeted life:

For a lifetime, sensation was
a single thread
in my wardrobe of pain.

It is a metaphor more easily grasped in the reverse: pain as a single thread in the wardrobe of sensation. Through this inversion Espinoza deftly shows how dysphoria can warp and narrow experience and lead to self-alienation. As the poems in this collection express, to transition is to leap into feeling more.

Yet as Espinoza’s speaker becomes more connected to herself and to her life, she also registers the pain that has surrounded her—she can no longer dissociate through it. Espinoza’s attention to the family as a site of violence is particularly affecting. In “To My Parents,” she writes, “I was the mantle above the fireplace, the one that held our portrait. // I was the frame around the photograph, but not the photograph.” Being a closeted trans person can feel like being the one holding it all together while living as a background fixture in your own life. The speaker’s religiously inflected childhood trauma, her youth spent hiding and self-numbing, shape the psychic landscape years after she has left home, come out, and her mother’s gotten a “trans ally tattoo.” In this way, transition can make life feel harder when you are experiencing the pain your mind has protected you from—as Espinoza writes in the resplendent “Return to Light,” trauma “reminds you to forget its presence.” I Don’t Want to Be Understood posits that through this remembering and daily survival, we can do more than find ourselves: If we are lucky, we can create ourselves.

Poetry Reviews