Juliana Spahr, That Winter the Wolf Came

My body is unremarkable, not at all singular, as I walk up to join these other bodies, and it remains unremarkable, not at all singular, as it walks with others, takes off into the street when others do, usually after someone yells block up block up into a megaphone. Then we walk together and yet unevenly out into the street, darkly clad because the facebook invitation said to wear black, in small groups, some faster, some slower, some holding hands, some on bikes, some with canes, sometimes someone in a wheelchair. There is always a megaphone at the front. And then a second later, someone usually on a bike, off to the side, blocking traffic until we cross the intersection. This person calm, smiling.

I have a tendency to anxiously slow down. I also stay to the side. I am nervous, anxious. I want to keep saying this. I am an anxious body. Shortly after we step out into the street, the white vans, which have been idly waiting nearby, pull out and the motorcycles drive up from behind. Engines then and bright directed lights. (“Brent Crude”)

American poet, editor, collaborator and critic Juliana Spahr’s most recent title is That Winter the Wolf Came (Oakland CA: Commune Editions, 2015), a collection that furthers her engagement in social justice, environmental concerns and political anxiety, as well as her use of repetition, chant and unrelenting accumulation. Really, to call Spahr’s poetry books “collections” is a bit of a misnomer: her poetry books are created very much as book-length works, and less a “collection” of scattered pieces that somehow group together, whether deliberately or accidentally, into a theme. That Winter the Wolf Came is a direct result of, and response to (as the inside flap informs), “this era of global struggle.” The blurb continues: “It finds its ferment at the intersection of ecological and economic catastrophe. Its feminist and celebratory energy is fueled by street protests and their shattered windows. Amid oil spills and austerity measures and shore birds and a child holding its mother’s hand and hissing teargas canisters, it reminds us exactly what we must fight to defend with a wild ferocity, and what we’re up against.” Spahr is both author and co-editor/publisher of Commune Editions [see their collaborative “12 or 20 (small press) questions” interview here], a press founded to produce works very much in keeping with the kinds of poetry Spahr writes around global social and environmental issues. Over the past couple of years, I’ve become far more aware of poets across North America working such social and political issues into their works (some of whom have been working in such veins for years), from Canadian poets Stephen Collis and Christine Leclerc to Jordan Abel and Marie AnnHarteBaker, and Shane Rhodes and nikki reimer (among others), as well as Commune Editions Spahr and Joshua Clover [see my review of his recent Commune Editions title here]. It seems a number of the language poets have reclaimed what was once referred to (neither enthusiastically nor complimentary) as “political poetry,” allowing the language to enhance and beautifully articulate what had been done so rarely well, and far-too-often presented as dogmatic.

It was all good and it was all fucked while it lasted. But eventually Non-Revolution and me were over. It was not that one day I woke up and knew it was over. What we had, Non-Revolution and me, was like all relationships, built to last. But unlike many relationships, everything was against us. Yes, we cared for each other. Yes, we learned to tend to each other’s wounds too, to medicate and to bandage. But we suffered from a larger social lack of care or worse a relentless disdain. We were together but we were in it alone at the same time. Except the state was there with us in all sorts of ways. And we suffered from too much of a different sort of care from the state. And we knew history. We knew we would not be together long. (“It’s All Good, / It’s All Fucked”)

In nine extended poems, including prose-poems, Spahr is adept at pulling apart an idea and stretching it across a wide canvas, composing pieces out of a staggering amount of small detail. Hers are incredibly complex, complicated and straightforward poems made of multiple working parts towards a single purpose. One element I’ve always admired about Spahr’s poetry is the way in which she uses the direct statement (akin to Canadian poet Lisa Robertson), pushing the use of accumulation and repetition so relentlessly that the poem reads as a kind of chant, or mantra. Her cadences are hypnotizing, and hold such incredible beauty.

I am waiting.

Said this out loud.

Said to no one in particular.

Said we are waiting.

Some of us are waiting.

Waiting for the assembly of fish.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to storm the waters.

Also waiting for the assembly of trees.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to be infiltrating the land.

And waiting for the assembly of animals.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting. Waiting.

Waiting for the assembly of birds.

Waiting to be complete.

Waiting to fly the sky dark.

Waiting for the impossible.

Said waiting.

Meant waiting.

Waiting to fly the sky dark.

Waiting to be complete. (“If You Were a Bluebird”)

A short interview with Christine Leclerc, Jacket2

My 27th 'commentary,' "A short interview with Christine Leclerc," is now online at Jacket2.

commentaries : Jacket2 : some notes on Canadian poetry,

Beginning in January, I will be posting three months' worth of commentaries on Canadian poets, poetry and poetics over at Jacket2, thanks to a kind solicitation by Julia Bloch (adding to the pieces I've already had posted there). Watch for a series of interviews with and short essays on Gil McElroy, Nikki Reimer, Phil Hall, Shannon Maguire, Roland Prevost, Christine Leclerc, Pearl Pirie and plenty of others. Just keep checking the link here. I'll most likely be posting at least twice a week.

Ongoing notes: Meet the Presses’ 2014 Indie Market

On November 22, 2014, above/ground press participated in our first ever Indie Market in Toronto, hosted by Meet the Presses, and had a magnificent day! We’re hoping we might even be invited back, possibly. And of course, there was far more than this at the fair that I was able to pick up (and even more I didn’t get a chance to get near). So many amazing publications! There is simply never enough money, and never enough time.

Already there are a couple of post-fair reports online by others, including those by Ryan Pratt, Kate Sutherland and Stuart Ross, as well as a photo by/of Lorette C. Luzajic; given that I currently work at the whims of the wee babe, perhaps I’m lucky to get mine posted at all.

London ON: I’m constantly amazed by at least one title by Baseline Press every season, and the crop this time ‘round included the new chapbook by Montreal writer Sarah Burgoyne, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes (2014) [see my recent review of her previous chapbook, here]. Unlike the prose-works of her previous chapbook, Love the Sacred Raisin Cakes is a small collection of more traditional-looking lyric poems, yet poems rife with narrative longing, from the stretch of the title “his death left no capital of the world, neither here / nor anywhere else,” “prophecies of my youth fulfilled but not in the way / one expected” or “it was not in parks that i learned humility,” many of which, her acknowledgments tell us, are borrowed “from lines of Czeslaw Milosz’s poetry.” It is as though each title clears the way for a narrative framing or thread merely hinted at within the body of each piece; as though she writes each poem not to tell a story, but to suggest, and even fragment. Even her poems want to tell you stories, which she responds to by breaking them down into smaller, disconnected portions.

the word revealed out of darkness was   pear

someone has been writing

on your perfect menu

and your spirit has left you

for a stranger passing by your home

in the basement

you brew tea

and a list of rebuttals

a shadow hums in your window

as dusk la-tee-das

behind the mountain

the fruit was bold

to appear that way

you think

and no one prepared

for the smaller wars

LaFarge WI/Hamilton ON: From XEXOXIAL Editions, comes Hamilton writer and composer Gary Barwin’s “the wild & unfathomable ways” (2014), produced as the fifty-eighth issue of Xerolage. The description of the journal reads: “Visual poetry, copy art & collage graphics, each issue devoted to the work of one artist. Xerolge is a word coined by mIEKAL aND to suggest the world of 8.5 x 11 art propagated by xerox technology. ‘The mimeo of the 80s.’ The primary investigation of this magazine is how collage technique of 20^th century art, typography, computer graphics, visual & concrete poetry movements & the art of the xerox have been combined. 8.5x11, 24 pages each. Subscriptions $24/4 issues. For overseas delivery, add $15 for airmail printed matter.”

[the poem above is reprinted from NEWPOETRY] There is something of Gary Barwin’s concrete and visual poetry that has been developing over such a long period that it feels as though it has always existed, and hasn’t been appreciated nearly enough. Given his work as a lyric poet, fiction writer and composer of music, the thread of his wonderfully playful and inventive letter-poems deserve far more serious consideration and appreciation than what has occurred so far. It’s curious to see: derek beaulieu might build some of his visual and concrete poems (specifically, the letraset poems) using the individual letter-forms themselves as building-blocks, but Barwin’s attention is far more specific, often focusing on a single letter or character or two, and making the slightest, smallest twist. Might a selected works be in the cards, possibly? I really think a healthy collection of Barwin’s visuals is seriously required, with a good-sized critical introduction.

Vancouver BC: Given that it won this year’s bpNichol Chapbook Award (announced mid-day during the 2014 Indie Market), I suppose I’m rather late on getting to the party on Vancouver poet Christine Leclerc’s Oilywood (Nomados Literary Publishers, 2013), a title that has actually been sitting on my desk for some time.

We listen to water.

We go float in it.

The ocean makes us giggle.

     We giggle when we’re in it.

But no matter how advocacy demands

our sketches, the future is far from

shapeless—already flush with months,

minutes and—

                            hear  something

                            —

assholes. It has power, movements,

press releases. And it’s full of sound-

tracks to make you feel you’ve just seen

a movie, like your life is something—

                        hard to leave

—like a supertanker.

Composed as a reaction to the Kinder Morgan Pipeline pipeline debate and protests, the collaborative structure of Oilywood was discussed recently in an article in the University of British Columbia’s campus newspaper, The Ubyssey, written by Jamey Gilchrist. As Gilchrist writes:

“One of the idea’s was to put a giant “Oilywood” sign on the North Shore mountains as that image would act as a mirror to the Hollywood hills sign and its associations with a pro-development and a pro-oil stance that we are seeing in Western Canada and around the world,” said Leclerc.

Leclerc found inspiration for her poetry when she spent a summer around different regions of the Burrard Inlet. During her time there she went to the beaches, collecting interviews, pictures and water recordings. She noticed how many people spent their time there and if they knew about the proposal to expand the pipeline significantly. This curiosity led to community workshops where “people were asked to write down some memories and knowledge about the inlet on a rough map. These sorts of community input[s] were used to create the chapbook, in addition to Kinder Morgan news releases,” said Leclerc.

I’ve long been aware of a grouping of poets and poetics in Vancouver specifically, and British Columbia generally, engaged in their immediate social and political concerns in a way I don’t really see happening (certainly not at the same level, if at all) in the rest of the country. Given the recent protests around the pipeline, writers, academics, poets and many others have jumped feet-first into the fray, living their politics in a way that has deeply impressed me, and even made me challenge my own actions—how does one attempt to further live and act in ways that might actually affect positive change? Leclerc’s sixteen-section Oilywood is reminiscent of another Vancouver poet’s work, Cecily Nicholson’s From the Poplars (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] that also worked, via a poem constructed out of a collage of sources, including archival and interview, to document the activities of a particular a geographic space (albeit over a far longer stretch of time) and the actions of outside interests that attempted to profit from actions that not only occupied but devastated that same space. Can a poem affect change? Perhaps it can, if it forces open a conversation. One can only hope.

For me, the saddest thing about being

human is the—

                        shifting baseline

                        —

It’ll be weird to be like, remember the

polar bears? Or, remember when we

would swim here?

I’d be traumatized if I couldn’t go to

the beach. I mean, people pay stupid

amounts of money to live here. It’s not

like the nightlife is tops in Oilywood.

It’s not like there’s tons of jobs here,

or so much stimulation.

                        We have—

the fifth issue of seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics is now online!

seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics
    edited by rob mclennan
        designed by mdesnoyers
            issue 5 ; fall 2012

Joel Chase
    from itsstory

Sarah Lang
    from “Home”

Christine Leclerc
    An interview: Angela Rawlings records water, poetry
    Interview: Christine Leclerc at the border, documenting

Andrew McEwan
    from Closure from Matter : two spacial essays

Barry McKinnon
    When
    When I left the stage
        (originally presented at VERSeFest 2012)

Deborah Poe
    from “House”

Stephen Ross Smith
    Why keep fluttering

The Capilano Review 3.16: ecologies

In my opening pages, the identity

of the characters is contested as

a forgery of imagery bound up

with the claims and dispositions

of country. It seems in order

to sustain power in all this,

the city upholds an illusion of

authority over the north, so that

the influential with the most is

a problem to which I return.

But cultures are cumbersome,

each with acquired tastes, and

what is this blur about belonging?

By the time I came along in the

literature, the land was exhausted

and the local I knew was fading. (Ken Belford, “Potential”)

I’m intrigued by the length and the breadth of the definition this new issue of The Capilano Review brings to the theme of “ecologies,” running the stretch of what might be called “eco-poetry” and “pastoral” and further, into less-described territories. This new issue features new writing by Liz Howard, Eleni Sikelianos, Christian Bök, Ken Belford, Jacqueline Turner, Larissa Lai, A. Rawlings, Lary Timewell, Adam Dickinson and plenty of others. What might fall under the umbrella of “ecologies”? 

As a whole cloth, this is a spectacular issue that tackles a wide array of political, social, physical, poetic, social and economic ethos and effects of a variety of ecologies, including globalization, the effects of natural disaster and climate change. By itself, the sequence by Calgary poet Christian Bök, for example, is absolutely breathtaking. 

One of the anchors to the issue as a whole is the piece “’Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow’: On Poetry and the Environmental Crisis,” featuring Joanne Arnott, Michael Blackstock, Peter Culley, Roger Farr, Christine Leclerc and Rita Wong. As Farr writes, “This discussion took place on September 18, 2011, on a private “Ecologies” blog set up for the occasion.”

RF: I’m curious about how poetics informs the activist work some of you are doing: Christine’s work against the Enbridge project, for example. Do people active as poets bring anything unique to the movement for environmental protection and defense?

CL: I like the way the question is framed, as I usually think about my activist work informing my poetics. Actually, I participated in poetic community before activism. But obviously, the crews aren’t mutually exclusive, and in a way, the more involved I became in activist work, the more I got to know poets involved in serving their non-poetic communities, and who are engaged in struggles for justice. That said, poetics does inform the activism that surrounds The Enpipe Line poetry project, as The Enpipe Line is fairly non-hierarchical. The contributions that make up the long line of this poem are selected by the poets who come forward with work and resistance to Enbridge’s proposed Northern Gateway Pipelines, and not a panel of editors. And the poem’s editors work on a volunteer basis. It may seem strange to describe the power focus on it because I think it is an essential feature of the work and an important part of what the poem ultimately has to convey.

[…]

Can poets intervene in the corporate and political manoeuvring that allows unwanted projects to move forward? I’m very curious about this question, but don’t yet have a clear answer.

Vancouver poets Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s “DECOMP: Selected Readings from the Bunchgrass Zone,” for example, worked a collaborative project of photographs and text on the subject of decay that I would very much like to see more of, writing:

In the summer of 2009 we traveled to five distinct BC ecosystems and communities: the coastal rainforest (on Vancouver Island’s west coast), the Gulf Islands (in the rain shadow of Vancouver Island), the Nicola Valley desert, the Columbia Mountains, and the sub-boreal North. In each ecosystem an identical copy of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species was placed in a remote outdoor location, and left there for one year. A GPS reading was taken. In the summer of 2010 we returned to each site and located the specimens. As we hoped, each ecosystem had something different to say about Darwin’s text.

Toronto writer Liz Howard has two poems from her work-in-progress “OF HEREAFTER SONG,” with a note that reads:

Longfellow’s epic poem, “The Song of Hiawatha,” was an attempt to assimilate indigenous, specifically Ojibway, oral tradition into Western textual, metric verse. My own government-imposed identity as a non-status aboriginal person and the trauma and silence surrounding this identity (as in the internment of my great-grandfather in a residential school and estrangement from my native family members) became an emergent theme in my writing. As a mixed-race person, not even quite a “half-breed;” as a subject under a continual process of erasure; as the ideal end-product of assimilative programs such as the residential school system; and as a scientist, employing empiricism as the so-called paramount of Western inquiry into the natural or into how we come to utilitarian truth—how could I even write about this? There was something similar, suspicious, neighbourly between Longfellow’s situation and my own. He was a white settler trying to filter indigenous narrative through the framework of the Western epic and I was trying to reconcile a being at odds with itself. I began to read and un-write his work. The result is a long or sequential work in which I intervene upon the text using several procedures—an overarching process of random sampling (which is the norm in scientific research), as well as homolinguistic translation, intertextual recombination, misappropriation, and cyborgian disruption.

A particular highlight has to be new work by Lary Timewell (also known as Lary Bremner, inventor of Tsunami Editions and more recent obvious epiphanies), who, but a few short weeks ago, returned to Vancouver after a hiatus of some twenty-plus years. As his bio writes, “He spent roughly the past 20 years in Fukushima-ken, Japan, where he survived the physical but not economic fallout of the March 11^th Higashi Nihon Daishinsai; he currently lives in North Vancouver.” Given his experiences with the tsunami hitting his home city in Japan (the city with the disaster-affected nuclear reactors), it allows him a unique and terrifying perspective on the subject of “ecologies.” Here is a fragment of his poem “escape,” from a suite titled “offshore”:

At Yahiko Shrine the raindrops are opaque, an invisible display. No one is so anthropomorphic as to think Nature is apologizing for the moment past. That is to say, any one of us born. There is this world & there is the cessation of suffering, even under shifting fault-line that obliterates time. A veil of birds passing is once again an abstraction forming on the forehead.

The ghosts were torn from the buildings; the apparatus of moonlight unlocked. There are no words for counting the days. Behind door #3, the hell-wraith of mental & material streams, but here in Niigata my nearest neighbor is the weather. The mountain appears as a particle deluge, the rain constructed amorously of retinal seraphs.

My wife & son are safe in Tokyo. CNN is on anabolic steroids; the static the frayed experience raise cilia-hairs on the forearms of hope. Habitué flock to convenience stores reciting nuclear eclogues formed in the precise matrices of chrysanthemums painted on the side of a wall.

Language tastes better with the tang of wasabi, the cool of daikon. That kid with a diamond-encrusted tricycle is sunlight itself. The ululating somnambulistic of media dissipates like an involuntary communion along the auditory canal. Wooly moon through fog forms fissures on sheets, on ceiling.

12 or 20 questions: with Christine Leclerc

Photo (by Sarah Race Photography) attached and here's a bio: Christine Leclerc is originally from Montreal and now lives in Vancouver. She is an MFA in Creative Writing student at the University of British Columbia. Her work has appeared in 42opus, Dig, FRONT, FU, Interim, Memewar, OCHO, Pistola, subTerrain, terry, and the Worksound gallery. Leclerc is the author of Counterfeit, a book of poetry published by CUE in 2008. She teaches Creative Writing at Langara College Continuing Studies.

1 - How did your first book change your life?

Well, I do more readings and I've had more opportunity to teach as a result.

How does your most recent work compare to your previous?

It's totally different process-wise. I approached the previous work with my eyes closed, trying to capture images, ideas, and characters as they cycled through my mind. Recently I approach with eyes open because I am working with digital images and refer to them constantly.

How does it feel different?

The previous work felt satisfying to write and read back later, whereas the new work is frustrating. I also feel that I'm asking a lot of readers and/or listeners. With the current work, if the gesture behind the language is not detected, the pieces fail. I'm very aware of this. But I also find the current projects compelling enough to see them through even though it's like pumping gas in pointe shoes.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction?

Strangely, I came to fiction first. Or maybe that's not strange. The first thing I ever wrote that made me want to keep writing was a short story. After a few stories, I wrote some vignettes, and then some poems. I initially saw the early poems as scripts for illustrated children's books and after a while I began writing what I considered poems, which often starred my grandmother making jam.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project?

They're all very different. Like working with the digital images. It took a while to start because I had to figure out that sitting around with my eyes closed wasn't going to cut it. I also had to concede that it was possible for me to write first drafts with a computer. Then I had to get past the idea that writing should be fun, because I knew it wasn't going to be fun to write these poems. So there was a lot of resistance to get beyond.

Does your writing intitially come quickly, or is it a slow process?

Again, it depends on the project, or where I'm at with it. I always try write what I feel most compelled (or least uncompelled) to write on a given day because it goes faster and takes less effort.

Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape?

Not at all.

or does your work come out of copious notes?

I take notes, but usually my work comes out of "sketching," followed by revision and fleshing things out (then more revision). I take/make/use notes at all stages, but usually on how to revise, not to generate material.

Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings?

Yes. I mean, I often get nervous beforehand, but enjoy trying to get a sense of where the audience is at. It's the only venue I can think of where raw feedback is up for grabs: the people in the audience usually don't know me and don't have to respond, as opposed to workshops where coming up with a response is the audience's job.

What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work?

A couple are:
Who gets to be a person?
Do I have to respond in such-and-such a way to such-and-such a discourse?

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)?

I've worked with several editors and have found the experience enjoyable pretty much across the board, mostly because learning about how others are respond to my work is always interesting to me. But I have a thick skin.

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)?

"Don't just think about working. Work." I'd read this sort of thing a million times, but then someone said it to me. I can't remember who said it to me, but they said it with seriousness and a bit anger. I guess I managed to take it personally.

12 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration?

My neighborhood. When I get stuck, I go for a walk or run an errand. Usually the neighborhood gets me unstuck.

13 - If there was a fire, what's the first thing you'd grab?

The first thing that comes to mind is a hairbrush. Not that I have much hair. It's my grandmother's brush. And, wait a second--she didn't have much hair either! Hmm... The brush evokes memories of visiting my grandparents as a child. It evokes the room the brush was always in. It evokes my grandmother's vanity--which she never used. And it also my grandfather's radio, which is a foot away. The radio plays all night every night. These details a are big part of my family story, they lead to more and more details, until I find I've unpacked an understanding (which differs every time). I see taking the brush as an effort to save something that helps unpack the past, because if there is no house/home to ground in, there can still be story.

14 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art?

Yes! Music, images, experiments, office memos, events, movies, relationships, marketing debris, conversations, people, maps, videos, models (in the many senses of the word).

15 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work?

When I was younger, I LOVED Huxley, Lessing, Robertson, Calvino, and Beckett. These days, love's not the right word for my attraction to works though. In a weird way, all works are important to me now because I try to read as though I'm entering an installation. I'm trying to pay attention to the strategies used in all kinds of texts, especially the "non-literary." I do still learn from and enjoy specific authors though. Some recent favorites are: Sphar, Rilke, LeCarré, and Harvey. Also, important for work: descriptionaries and visual dictionaries.

16 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done?

Scale a building.

17 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be?

Well, I do some design work and have attempted arts admin, but if I were to attempt something else, it would be botany.

19 - What was the last great book you read?

The Body Artist

What was the last great film?

Synechdoche, New York

20 - What are you currently working on?

A series of poems based on online images and videos, and an eco-thriller.

12 or 20 questions archive (second series);

Counterfeit by Christine Leclerc

Love like flash light in a subway tunnel
where the train ain’t gonna go no more.

One of the first books published by Vancouver’s CUE Books (Capilano University Editions) is Vancouver poet Christine Leclerc’s first trade collection, Counterfeit (2008). A compelling collection with some very interesting moments, Counterfeit works elements of theatre-script dabbled through the text, between poems of (deceptively) straight statements. LeClerc’s poems move in so many directions while managing to stand still, and seem to move so quickly that they remain fixed in place, but shimmer.

The Swimmer’s Office

The shivers run like train tracks
into your—

Metal fillings were used to build this—
monster.

A toy poodle pretends to urinate as it calculates
The perimeter of your office.

Your mother had a real dog.
Another note on the windowsill…

It…
Someone…

Your theory is that someone
put it there.

Sometimes the note says:
copper confuses.

At others: You seem coherent.

Or: Are you reading this upside down?

You’re pretty sure it was the same note. And the same mother all along.
The same town and summer. You swam front crawl,
better and better. But swam it slow.

It is raining at the pool now,
above and below.
I don’t know which I hate more,
words or water.

Her Counterfeit might feel less like a book-length entity than a collection made out of a range of disparate pieces, but one that has a number of strong individual pieces that shine through, and I very much like how she manages to work the line of direct statement into something about as indirect as one can manage. If these straightforward lines are simply that, then there is no such thing. If contemporary writing works its way to filter the world into, through or even against meaning, Leclerc’s Counterfeit manages in its sly way to present an argument for the range of all three. These are good poems that are good and sometimes even great, sly in their approach, humble in their expectation and formidable in their quest for and between meaning.

When I Left

When I left, the house was quiet.

No more talking or cutting strips
of paper into strip malls
or factory direct liquidation centers.

When I left, the body had a ponytail, and a pony-tail-making mother.

I left, but there were still teeth to brush, pages to turn, curlers to set, and
photos to pose for. There was much blood to pump, and many years for a
body to move through.

Sometimes the body sat looking out onto the desert, alley, snowdrift;
on a chair, blanket, bed, stoop, couch, bike, curb, boat, back,
grassy—overlooking.

Thoughts rarely came.

When I left, I saw myself seldom and longing
became longing with nothing to long for.