Katy Lederer, The Engineers: Poems

 

MUTATIONS I

We had been organisms mostly, as we slung our legs across the plain.
Observed, we were observable. Before we saw, we closed our eyes.
Before we could become ourselves, we had to name the animals;
successive in our shortening, unable to extend our lives.

Observed we were observable. Before we knocked, we closed our eyes.
Late-acting, deleterious, we saw by death we would be had.
Successful in our shortening, unable to extend our lives.
Contemplative without our tails, we knew we’d say what could be said.

Lactating, deleterious, we saw by death we would be had.
What seeking unobtainable, pursuing prey, we closed right in.
Contemplative without our tales, we knew we’d say what could be said.
What knowing was unknowable, without our eyes we might have seen.

What seeking inexplicable, pursuing prey, we closed right in.
Before we could control ourselves, we had to name the animals.
What showing was un-showable, without our eyes we might have seen.
As organisms mostly, we would sling our lives across the pain.

For a while now I’ve been anticipating New York poet Katy Lederer’s latest collection, The Engineers: Poems (Ardmore PA: Saturnalia Books, 2023), a collection that incorporates several poems from her chapbook The Children (above/ground press, 2017). “Sometimes, in the middle / of the night,” opens the first poem in the collection, “FETUS PAPYRACEUS,” “our children will / insist that we tell them a story. / In the story, after heavy / rhyme and insistent inculcation / of our customary ways, / our children will look down / at our apparent missing limbs, / which remind them / that they should not touch, / and, if they do decide to touch, / that absence will feel presence.” The author of a memoir, Poker Face: A Girlhood Among Gamblers (Crown, 2003), as well as three prior full-length poetry collections—Winter Sex (Verse/Wave Books, 2004), The Heaven-Sent Leaf (BOA Editions, 2008) [see my review of such here] and The bright red horse—and the blue— (Atelos, 2017) [see my review of such here]—the poems of The Engineers: Poems offer lyric narratives that wrap and coil around and through rhythm and repetition, offering an examination of the history of the human body, running the gamut from the abstract to the deeply and immediately intimate. “We can look into the tissue,” she writes, as part of the poem “INFLAMMATION,” “can examine the fine gradient. // We can speak in foreign languages, the language of the internet, / or maybe in the language of cell death. // Have we reached the site of injury? / We have been injurious. // Have we served well on our jury? / We have juried. We have jured and jured. // We are sad. / Sad as a parent.” One might suggest this a book entirely set through and around the body, a book-length suite of poems offering insight and commentary into physical limitations and requirements. I’m intrigued at how her poems echo, even loop back into each other, playing with repetition and shadow, curling back across a collection of poems interconnected at a rather deep and subtle level. Is there a better word to describe any part of this collection, whether in part or whole, as sublime?