Don’t forget that the spring edition of the ottawa small press book fair has been scheduled for June 27th! The best of the small press in Ottawa,
twice a year since 1994!
Charlottesville VA: Aditi Machado’s latest
is the chapbook-length poem Rhapsody
(2020), beautifully produced by hand by Brian Teare’s Albion Books, as the second title in series seven. Currently the Visiting Poet-in-Residence at Washington
University in Saint Louis, Machado [see her ’12 or 20 questions’ interview here] is the author of the poetry collections Some Beheadings (Nightboat
Books, 2017) [see my review of such here] and the forthcoming Emporium (Nightboat Books, 2020), as
well as a translation from the French of Farid Tali’s novella Prosopopoeia
(Action Books, 2016).
Let us exercise our vocal cords.
Let us draw them out
limbs.
Let us say there is always a longer or shorter
tress, always congruities, blissful, bitter
rhythms, sprung onions splitting, violins in
harmony that is harmonic, chaos that is
chaotic,
in sense that is sensible, in here it inheres,
out there
rapid rabbits. Let us labor under these notions
as under the cantus planus factory whine.
Let us stumble around, humming, stumbling,
humming.
Then something in the shape of leaves,
something in the touching of ‘red.’
The
poem Rhapsody explores a wonderfully
playful, thoughtful and sing-song meditation on flora, fauna, myths and
ordinary speech through the lyric, and the lyric fragment, in a way she describes
certain poems from her debut collection in “A conversation between poet-grammarians” with Serena Chopra published at Jacket2: “the subject feeling itself out in language.” What I have
been enjoying about this small poem, this small collection, is exactly that:
how she slowly draws out her thoughts, and her sentences, one thought immediately
following another. At times, she moves in different directions, but ever
forward, as she writes: “Some systems proffer / all vowels alliterate and in
all / prose a prosody.” The effect is stunning. Machado’s canvas is large, and
complex, and I could easily see this as part of a larger book-length structure,
whether set within the context of other poems, or, itself, as a book-length “Rhapsody.”
Brooklyn NY: Lately I’ve been going
through two different titles by Brooklyn, New York poet and artist Cat Tyc, her
CONSUMES ME (Brooklyn NY: Belladonna*,
2017), produced as #222 in the Belladonna* Chaplet Series, and I Am Because My Little Dog Knows Me (b l
u s h, November 2019). I’m fascinated by Tyc’s sweeps of lyric prose, existing
somewhere in an odd space between fiction and poetry, documentary and memoir.
Unlike Machado, Tyc’s narrative sweeps aren’t propelled via the intricately-linked
fragment but an extended rush of accumulated sentences.
That word, imagination, always connects me to
the naïve, so I think this is why my first draft of an animal came out kind of
cartoonish. Like a street artist drawing at a tourist attraction.
I imagined a cat of human size wearing a button
down shirt, gingham, and khaki pants. A belt and the shirt tucked in like a
very old man.
So, that is exactly who I meet when I finish
climbing down the hole but we both know that it is not right. He is not the
animal I am looking for.
He tells me, “I am only a figment of your
imagination.” Then looks down at himself, shrugs and said, “Not bad.”
Then he led me down a hallway where behind
every corner was a dog.
Every dog I ever cared for when I used to work
as a dog walker.
And then there is the door at the end of the
corridor and I know before I open it that I will see my dog, Thurston.
But this feels too obvious. (I Am Because My Little Dog Knows Me)
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