Jessica Laser, The Goner School

 

Edward Thomas

Sometimes I read you for anger
To see in your face

The confines of a medium.
What wouldn’t I think

To be a thought in your head?
The youngest and most beautiful

Love no one, but still I love
Everyone I’ve loved.

“I love roads”

Unlike a governmental body,
Mine can be shot

In the street in the broad
Daylight of democracy

I’d leave this country
But democracy loves me.

The latest from Los Angeles-based, Chicago-born poet Jessica Laser, following Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides (Seattle WA: Letter Machine Editions, 2019) [see my review of such here] and Planet Drill (New York NY: Futurepoem, 2022) [seemy review of such here] is The Goner School (Iowa IA: University of Iowa Press, 2024), a book constructed via five numbered clusters of poems, stretched across some curious distances and divides. The first section, which holds the twelve-part sequence “Berkeley Hills Living,” offers, as part of the fourth section: “My ancestors / did more than flee the Tsar, sell used clothes / on Maxwell Street. The whole time, they were / praying me into being. That I live / is the sign of their success.” There are such long distances, long strides and stretches, across this particular assemblage of poems, one that offers strobe and sage, commentary and concern, across cultural, interpersonal and political spectrums. The poems provide a window upon the world while composed with an intimacy of self, and of friends; a community, even through or despite the resounding chaos of a warming planet and other crises. “Eliot touched my face and told me / I would live into my nineties.” she writes, to open the twelfth and final section of the poem “Berkeley Hills Living,” “I ate some cream of mushroom / soup Eve made. Michael drove home / while I navigated, reciting all the poems / I’d ever known to stay awake.” She writes of attempting to exist and move forward across into an uncertain future, while simultaneously working to best live in the world as an ethical thinker, human and cohort. To close the title poem, as she writes: “I always said what kind of person I was / I was that kind of person [.]”