Elena Karina Byrne, If This Makes You Nervous

 

IF CONTENTS IN / JOSEPH CORNELL’S BOX

                                                                                    I won’t give way
to false teeth left in a champagne glass after a fight
nor fall from the shadow box into the boxer’s black gloves
smoke your pipe in the tortoise north darkness
                                                                                    between stars
deranged on the moon’s Geographique map of your face rising like
one scrap planet    one startled bluing childhood doll head that calls for
recriminating light    Cassiopeia’s soul over another lover’s bent knee
I can’t find a contagion of wanderlust    the plumage-distance in a red
bird’s body    now aviary-flown because we knew how long it would
take an apothecary’s colors to come bottling home
                                                                                    You underestimate
me    my family’s inheritance of feeling    its open airless universe &
you pay the color white a visit    you    startled    deadout-you    collecting
keys & coin    are afflicted by newsprint flesh    waiting for stacks of
matches to strike light under the skirt’s twirl & heat’s abyss
                                                I can’t for this, be contained!

Los Angeles, California poet and editor Elena Karina Byrne’s fifth poetry collection (and the first I’ve seen), following The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press, 2002), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), Squander (Omnidawn, 2016) and If No Don’t (What Books Press, 2020), is If This Makes You Nervous (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), a book composed and curated as an art gallery within the bounds of a poetry collection. Set in three sections—“Rock,” “Paper” and “Scissors”—Byrne composes each of her lyrics focusing on and across a particular visual artist and their work, writing as celebration, description and critique, as well as weaving in layerings of the author’s own responses. As she writes towards the end of the poem “FAREWELL FACE & ONE OF PICASSO’S”: “Picasso knew so well what he had in front of him: women neither / affirmed or denied belonging. That’s why his painting could destroy them.” Byrne layers her own details in through each lyric, offering how these particular artworks and aritsts may have impacted her own thinking and life, allowing certain works to burrow deep, as the best kind of art hopes to do. “But who will witness / an error in these repetitions,” she offers, as part of the poem “INSTEAD, THE HEAD: LORNA SIMPSON,” “in all circles as you fall square, feel your / body parts, feel the ground sliding from under you like the very last part / of your photo skin wishing itself forward & away, its last text turned / film-back through US history’s hate still smelling like your burnt hair of / chip cookies & baby milk.”

Comparable to George Bowering’s infamous Curious (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1973), in which he composed poems for and around individual poets, Byrne’s poems write on and around each of her chosen subjects, and she moves through artists such as Andrew Wyeth, Laurie Anderson, Francis Bacon, Salvatore Dali, Diane Arbus, Caitlin Berrigan, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman and multiple others—sixty-six poems in total—across a space widely populated by an array of artists contemporary and historic. Each poem is thick with resonance and language twists, evocative with rhythm and sound across a visually descriptive narrative measure. As her powerful poem “STYLE OF IMPRISONMENT: DIANE ARBUS / PREDICTED THIS VIRUS” ends: “Even Jane Mansfield’s hair bow & my doctor’s Venice / bird mask hung for one cousin plague are not alone. It’s her / best shot at showing freaks alike where nature mirrors // our bathroom life & sets fire to itself in the heat.” [misspelling of “Jayne Mansfield” exists in the original text].

There are numerous questions and prompts that flow through these poems, questions and reactions that shift around parents, parenting, childhood, friends and losses, as well as a curious thread on mothering that works through the collection, as the poem “MOTHERWELL BLACK” ends: “Because maternal love is meant / to be echo-endless, something you want to throw yourself down into. / Because I’d throw myself in front of a revolver for them, dropping coins / like pulled fingernails or the memory of scars, still holding hands in / Spanish Franco’s frozen streets                        just to see black.”