Lily Brown, BLADE WORK

 

 

I heard the voice of reason
swerve boneward as it mouthed
the high hills of Art.
I know both sides:
the violence of artifact
and the living tree,
airy branches full of weeds.
Once a sitting thing in a thing
that stuck me back, I walk
straight out in heavy rain,
trying not to aim,
his lungs gum-thick,
each word towed out with a chain
pulled simultaneously back.
I make another motion,
send a jagged gift. (“Venus Transit”)

I’ve been an admirer of the work of American poet Lily Brown, a poet and writing teacher currently based in Maine [see her 12 or 20 questions here] ever since discovering her work through the chapbook Being One (Brave Men, 2011) [see my review of such here]. That particular title was soon followed by her full-length debut, Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011) [see my review of such here] as well as a further handful of chapbooks, including The Haptic Cold (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013) [see my review of such here]. Her latest collection, her second full-length, is BLADE WORK (Anderson SC: Parlor Press, 2025), produced as Winner of the New Measure Poetry Prize, as selected by Carl Phillips. I’m amazed at the carved sharpness and meditative distances travelled across her purposeful, tactful lyrics. Through Brown, every word, line and step is deliberately and carefully set, but with such a cadence of ease, composing poems of disruption, description and a hint of surrealism, set in pure stone. “The horse gallops / fog under its chin,” she writes, to open the poem “After Susan Rothenberg’s Untitled Drawing, No. 41, 1977,” “behind a hind leg, / haze in parts erased. / The smudge in the body’s / portioned air. Darwin / threw lizards / by the tail / into the ocean / to find out if they swim.” There’s such a clarity, a density, to her poems, one that allows for stunning moments, the narratives of her poems accumulating with such force into perfect phrases, perfect landings. As the second half of her short poem “Transparency” offers: “All day I splinter leaves / with my feet, conduct them // in, singed flags. / I think I see you in the back window, // waving there, your show moving / west then east. // Torso turns to see // how great a distance / I earned to make.” The underplayed power of her poems are enormous, landing her endings with incredible grace, the click of a latch to know that door is now closed. “Give some back to the mapland.” She writes, to open “The Complete Poems,” a piece composed “after Elizabeth Bishop.” “Material qualities, stammering / repetition. More interested / in atmosphere, leaf and cloud, / than clock-like architecture’s alarms.”

Lily Brown, The Haptic Cold

TAXONOMIC

I saw the bird throat

like a toad

billow out; thought

to take a picture

and send it.

I swallowed the doorjamb’s

shine. The threshold

breaks off as I use it.

The water has a breeze

says the dog-eared lady

who owns both.

The ripples

sit down flat upon the pond.

It’s been a couple of years since I discovered the work of Massachusetts poet Lily Brown [see her 12 or 20 questions here], author of a small handful of chapbooks, including The Renaissance Sheet (Octopus Books, 2007), Old With You (Kitchen Press, 2009) and Being One (Brave Men, 2011) [see my review of such here], and the trade collection Rust or Go Missing (2011) [see my review of such here]. New from Ugly Duckling Presse comes The Haptic Cold (Brooklyn NY: Ugly Duckling Presse, 2013), hand-sewn with lovely letterpress covers in an edition of five hundred copies. Upon reading the poems in The Haptic Cold, fourteen short pieces in total, one is immediately struck by the combination of lyric flow, the slight hint of surrealism and the striking imagery, blended together and tightly packed in such a deceptively uncomplicated way. Nearly ghazal-like in scope, Brown’s lines strike a fine balance between thrust and open space, allowing the lines to breathe amid her fine couplets while expanding small moments impossibly out. From the Greek, “haptic” refers to any form of non-verbal communication involving touch, and Brown manages to articulate the non-verbal, sketching out a kind of descriptive internal monologue akin to a series of perfect silences.

HOUSE HOME

If something outside the mind

makes the mind—

I’d rather a ceiling wet with river,

the elemental basement,

cement’s slick grit.

Up on the gusty terrace,

experimental glass takes yellow

light down into

its purple middle and

fits it in cellar grey.

At the bottom stair,

I play the alchemical fan

and its petals

wing the composite up.

Andrea Rexilius, Half of What They Carried Flew Away

What they wanted most was to see things they had never seen before. When they were people they felt relief. They were on a new sexual continent willing to proclaim anything. They couldn’t sleep. It was impossible for them to choose whether or not to be savage. They felt something.

They indulge as a result of repeated colonization. They make armies. They decide they are as small as ants. It happens on the cellular level. It happens as a result of frustration. Like daffodils in the middle of the Pacific.

It was already happening, like the sun in this place, their lungs helped them to arrive.

American poet Andrea Rexilius follows up her first trade poetry collection, To Be Human Is To Be A Conversation (Rescue Press, 2011) with a second, Half of What They Carried Flew Away (Tuscon AZ/Denver CO: Letter Machine Editions, 2012). Predominantly a text of perpetual lyric movement and continued arrival, Halfof What They Carried Flew Away explores a series of prose-poems that accumulate into a semi-narrative around echoes of immigration. What makes lyric prose so much more prevalent in American poetry than in Canadian writing? Somehow we still seem entirely too attached to metaphor-driven verse, yet this currently generation of American poets are apparently lining up to produce books of lyric prose-poetry, including Lily Brown, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Eric Baus, Kate Schapira, Noah Eli Gordon, Paige Ackerson-Kiely, Richard Froude and so many, many more.

There are two worlds inside them: the world and the sky. One living organism, a marriage of space and inner catastrophe. They are referring to negation, to the deepest blue. But it’s hard to get the blue of this sky, they say. Is it the same blue as that blue over there? It is true, they think, to question the language the blue has given them. Their eyes can only reach so far, even hooked together. They cannot bring that blue next to this blue. What is this blue called, they wonder. What is that blue.

Broken down into five sections—“First Residence: Desire,” “Second Residence: Water,” “Third Residence: Emanation,” “Fourth Residence: Weather” and “Fifth Residence: Territory”—the collection also uses a thread of sub-titles, including “This is the interview of their first crossing,” “This is the answer of their first crossing,” “What is the emanation of the image?” and “This is the song of their second crossing.” The lyric collage of Rexilius’ Half of What They Carried Flew Away both creates and deflects a narrative, composing and sliding around speculation, describing a voyage that is often less described than entirely conceptual. “Human space is a cohabitation with fog.” she writes, somewhere in the second section. Further into the collection, she writes: “They are from the early 1870s. / They move from house to house like windows.” Even the ideas themselves remain slippery. This is a staggering collection, and one that requires deep, repeated readings. One must possibly drown within.

I do not know the limits of my own distinctions.

Transition is not easy to define.

We are teeming with bees, boll-weevils, locusts. Brimming

    with maidservants and mistresses.

 This is what we have learned from imagery.

A cruel second nature, but what happened to the first, what

    will the next reveal?

Lower animals tell us more about ourselves.

Lost in a laboratory maze, the woodcock reasons, feels,

    communicates across the centuries.

He lives in the cultural field. On the plains.

To what extent can he trust his eyes? Who is his animal double?

I am an amoeba by sympathy. We could answer to each other.

We could trade pictures we’ve drawn on stones.

We are plants and people. Our rituals dance.

We respect the sky with ease.

Lily Brown, Rust or Go Missing

With Music

I work to my eye. Bird body

to my right.

Creaky-winged white pelican—change

my life, live fossil,

plaster mower with music.

A woman tells a pregnant woman

she dreams her stomach’s

ripped out.

what the kid listens to in there.

Mother, don’t worry about the missing

phone calls. You’re worth more than

vacillation, all I’ve heard.

The singer said he hears the city

with no alarms or cars.

The song unreal

and true. Pigeons shit on anything.

One August, an hour out of the city,

the light lost it.

What was an electric

keyboard is a horn.

After recently pointing out that Athens, Georgia poet Lily Brown [see her 12 or 20 questions here] really should have a trade book published [see my review where I say such, here], I was corrected by the author herself, who pointed out the recent publication of her first trade poetry collection, Rust or Go Missing (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011). With a small handful of chapbooks under her belt, it is good to finally read something larger, a collection of measured, considered poems by a poet who, despite years of publishing, seems wise enough not to be in any particular hurry. I’m impressed by the precision of her language, and the sharp turns she is capable of, incredible and smart and sudden. A collection of physical and textured lyrics, Rust or Go Missing is a collection of reminiscences, a collection of memories that disappear, even as they are being recorded, as the title and title poem suggest; do one or the other, perhaps.

First Position

In the library, as much quiet

as you can fit in your head.

I walked across a giant stone and

bloodied my knees on the way up.

There’s another giant stone, one I

can’t climb. I take the sleeper train

through an old-fashioned intersection

near the Florida-Georgia border.

Everyone waves to me. White book

with blue circles. Blue book with white

circles. Paper pile bound in black.

Hands emboss the library’s walls.

It’s dark again, in the between-finger

spaces. I’m done and the thoughts are

gone. This isn’t the greatest time.

All around me voices sell their sinkables.

I separate the one from the one.