It has been a while since I’ve seen any work by Georgia-based poet Monica Fambrough, back to her full-length debut, Softcover (Boston MA: Natural History Press, 2015) [see my review of such here], although her author biography suggests a self-titled chapbook appeared in German translation by Sukultur at some point. There are such delicate, honed lines to the eight poems across Fambrough’s BLUE TRANSFER. “my wedding ring / thin / as a mint,” she writes, as part of the opening poem, “A SHELTER.” She manages lengthy stretches across such lively accumulations of short phrases, one line following another, carefully set with an ease that is crafted, careful and clear. “Our children, / asleep in their beds / arrayed like canapés / in their particular positions,” she writes, as part of the poem “MEXICO POEM IN TWO PARTS,” “holding in the still space / of time between / when you think / the baby will wake up / and when the baby wakes up.” Her poems hold such a soft intimacy against declaratives, offering a sequence of quiet, precise details. Or, as the first third of that same opening poem reads:
delicate blue transfer
the little life
I bring with
light
everything it
passes through
it passes through
beautifully
even Styrofoam
I will cling
to a ritual
until it is all
that is left
I haven’t seen much work by Brooklyn-based poet and translator Alexis Almeida—beyond the chapbook-length translation she did of Buenos Aires poet Roberta Iannamico’s Wreckage (Toad Press International Chapbook Series, 2017) [see my review of such here]—so I was quite pleased to catch THINGS I HAVE MADE A FICTION (2024), winner of the 2023 Oversound Chapbook Prize as selected by Andrew Zawacki. The pieces here, fourteen in all, are untitled prose poems that each begin with the prompt “I wrote a book where…” and swirl out across such lovely distances. As I’ve mentioned prior, I’m fascinated by works that hold to such deliberate echoes, the most overt in my recollections being works by the late Noah Eli Gordon. These pieces are gestural, open and flow with a prose adorned and propelled through lyric but anchored by logic. Or, as the last sentence of the final piece reads, itself a kind of encapsulation of the project as a whole: “So it went this way, where inside the lists were other lists that started to leak and form paragraphs, and the longer I wrote them, the more it felt like something was happening (a wave), and what I had wanted, or failed to want was taking on the particular shapes of these sentences.” Might this be an excerpt of something larger, longer, even full-length? According to her author biography at the back of this particular title, her translation of Roberta Iannamico’s Many Poems is forthcoming from The Song Cave this year, and her first full-length book, Caetano, is forthcoming next year with The Elephants. I am very eager to see where she goes next.
I wrote a book about pulling, what is a word when pulled from inside another word, or a sound when shaped from another sound, what is a story pulled from another one, what made the original seem less true, where is a dream still pulling you in the morning, why do people say pulling an espresso shot, what does it feel like to write a word that immediately invokes a force in you, what becomes locked when you pull, what shuts down after so much effort, if someone turns away why does it pull in you, what is what pulls you to stay awake long into the night, or toward the door in the morning, are you pulling, or waiting at the beginning of something’s life, have you ever been so afraid as when you didn’t know which, it’s a constant feeling like something tilting inside you, like the walls of language disappearing as soon as you wake up.
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