Es Lv, footprints

 

Everything people say about owls is a lapse because everything they say
Comes from reading or hearsay but owls do not live in information or other
People, owls live in hollows      inside this shell there is nothing
Inside this shell is nothing, all sound of ocean      everything I say is
A lie because everything I say comes from the same source as what they say
I am disorder I am on the side of disorder, the theoretical end of entropy
Is uniformity      everything I write is true because everything I write
Comes from my life that is a nontransferable path no one else can live it
Not any better or any worse      lack of proof is the fatal flaw of
Retroactive manifestos I can know how things happen but never quite the
What or why in histories      untended hedges straggly oleander bushes
Cement walls with bits of colored tile pots in a similar style with tangles
            (“NO ONE ELSE CAN LIVE MY LIFE”)

I was intrigued to discover this new full-length poetry title by the mysterious Es Lv, the book footprints (Brooklyn NY: ugly duckling presse, 2025), a title physically set as a graceful square, due to the lengths of the lines. Despite being less than one hundred pages, footprints feels an expansive text; so big it nearly overwhelms. Only by entering the collection can one see the forest for the trees. “The violence is fresh today.” writes the poem “COMMODITIES,” “There is no need / for spices.” The poems in footprints collect into an assemblage of lyric expansiveness across poems set in four quarters, including a section-length sequence. There isn’t anything within the book that provides details on the author themselves, but for a couple of threads in the acknowledgements, including “My relationships with the words in this book became poems slowly.” and “The labor and artistry that transformed my manuscript into this book are a kind that effaces itself, making effort look easy or special efforts go unnoticed.” and “Every poem in this book was made with other wayfinders, authors whose words and trailwork found me when I was looking for them, star patterns, swells, color of clouds, my origin.” There is a charming and wistful sense of appreciation in these lines for the almost mystical knowing and unknowing that makes writing, specifically their writing, possible. As far as author biography, the publisher’s website offers only this: “Es Lv’s poems are invitations to build together, connections and worlds. Born into a Taiwan under martial law, they have lived many places and many roles. In art framing, in solidarity movements, in seasonal work, and many others. In her writing live those nested sensibilities, exhaustion and possibilities beyond, and the camaraderie. And much luck.”

“Why might a person change their name.” asks the opening of the poem “STRANGE IF THERE WERE NONE FOR US,” a poem that also offers, further along: “It isn’t a lie. right now we’re living / In a world where anyone with any motive at all can come / In anywhere at any time in any manner. / It’s the lack of policy that creates / Chaos. theoretical physics chaos is efficient. / The events of last night / No longer exist. it’s more of a story [.]” The shift in capitalization adds for an interesting alteration of rhythms, although for these poems, propulsion is key, and the poems are hefty: not only are they footprints, set as a kind of witness or demarcation of where one has been, but an ongoing list of considerations for possibility, and directions still to come. “Have a sense of self,” the poem “NO ONE ELSE CAN LIVE MY LIFE” writes, further on, “gods and heroes are strictly / For the masses      is it fairer that you obey nature / Or that nature should obey you      incommunicable / Language used for communication with individual persons / Will not contain other forms of relationship [.]” The poems, individually and as a single unit, exist as monologues; poems that feel as performative as they do meditative, and set on the page; sweeping gestures of line and length and sound. “History is not about the past  this story my story is about the present and / what i choose to do with it,” they write, mid-through the collection, “My lived experiences are my most precious credentials / If i want a better world i will have to be a better person // If we want a better world we will have to be better people [.]”