In the Bee Latitudes, ‘Annah Sobelman

The Mess

and yes it was spreading our legs to

heart ‘ s desire , I was sure ,—

A year of one idea ,   toward spring –

A casual

insomnia .

But an  underbrush exploded .

 You open  its   year-long window   it doesn ‘ t  show much –

Some humans ! drown and

 alternately sleep –   you drown ,   toward spring ,   you sleep

That ‘ s  the  thing ,      your  neck stretched  way past your  body

lethal     , the stretch –

It ‘ s all  happening  without  witness .

Mothers  around the world

   complain .

Fathers  in the  economy cafe  drink  pink cocktails

      past noon .

Your computer ‘ s always breaking . You duct-

tape  it .

The landscape   doesn ‘ t show

itself  to you .

There is such a magnificent spacing in the poems of American poet ‘Annah Sobelman, in her second trade poetry collection, In the Bee Latitudes (Berkeley CA: University of California Press, 2012). Sobelman uses punctuation nearly as visual cues, altering a lexicon what of punctuation often is to what it could actually be. Who else would use two commas at the end of a line? Marvellous, really. It’s as though she is aware of punctuation in poetry as a medium unto itself, the space and the sparse and the parse of spacing. One only hopes she reads with the same breaks and spacings her texts display. 

In her In the Bee Latitudes, Sobelman utilizes a series of insect-like smallnesses, incorporating sentence and word fragments nearly to the point of collage, reminiscent of Toronto poet a. rawlings’ Wide Slumber for Lepidopterists (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2006), or even Toronto poet/publisher Jay MillAr’s magnificent chapbook, Sporadic Growth:being a third season of 26 fungal threads (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2006). One wonders, what do these fragments work to achieve in their accumulations? Sobelman composes an expansive exploration towards understanding bees, bats and other subjects that she manages to shift into lavish abstracts disguised as poem-essays. Or is it the other way around?

After Awhile

         what      breaks      into

sentence  structure

  joins   friends

  the  bitterness  this  morning

             singing

sing    the  childless

  heart-stopping       ,    stop    .

what         your   depression

  felt    like     ,

  your     drowned

            tower

suddenly

above      water      .

i  can  tell  you  what     it     is

 not –