Amanda Monti, Mycelial Person

 

The man’s gaze and someone’s shriek mating cry violently impressed onto me. I went outside and began taking notes. I had always hoped to write sentences so sad they could free me.

I wrote of the morning when we drove to the sea – the wind tore at the water and there was an impressive limestone arch that towered over the Atlantic Ocean. The power of the waves had eroded this rock and forged a hole through the middle, forming a natural threshold. Everyone seemed very happy on this side of the cliff. We should have been very happy, too. But I didn’t see the sea that day, only a bunch of people looking at a portal, completely unmoving, while I longed to swim through it, to transform in it, entirely whole. (“Part I: the Mycelial Person”)

A “cross-disciplinary poet and translator born in Rome, raised in Vienna and based in Queens,” Amanda Monti’s full-length poetry debut is Mycelial Person (Milwaukee WI: Vegetarian Alcoholic Poetry, 2021). Mycelial Person is an assemblage of accumulated fragments and short bursts of lyric and prose that slowly move out into photographs and visual text, to craft a long poem around, as Christian Hawkey’s blurb offers, “gender, ecology, cohabitation, story, and collaborative survival.”

Every few years, it would seem, a poet emerges with a book composed around mushrooms (or, really, utilizing the idea of the mushroom as concept or framing), reminiscent of my own personal favourite, Toronto poet Jay MillAr’s Mycological Studies (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2002). What is it about mushrooms that prompt such attention? Perhaps it is the fact of ecological concern, interconnectedness or ideas of climate change (or all of the above, perhaps).

As Monti writes, early on in the first section: “Where a mushroom ends or begins is hard to tell. Is it in the trees, the fruiting body, or the underground webs? And how easily it can seep into the soil and pores and make them mushroom-like, too! It is something so many humans try to forget, the fact of our porosity.”

Set in a trilogy of sections—“Part I: the Mycelial Person,” “Part II: Florae filling w/ holes” and “Part III: the Weedy Tender”—there are certainly some interesting moments and observations here; elements of flow in a lyric that moves easily between poetry and prose, but one that occasionally could do with some tightening, or even reshaping. On the whole, this book-length poem is interesting, and whole stretches are quite strong; but in moments, there are places that drag or meander, and distract away from the poem’s strength. As the second section opens: “I spent seven days navigating the city led by its weeds. I amplified each encountered wee with street chalk. I made an entry into my logbook, made poems from these notes, made friends from these encounters. / In this context I understand weeds as unwanted plans in a ‘human controlled’ environment. I understand weeds as complicated kin.” Their work here is good, but it has the potential to be great, and this book does offer glimpses of that. I would be curious to see where Monti’s work goes next.