Rennie Ament, Mechanical Bull

 

HOW TO MAKE MILK

Coat the cow in calm.
Sing it a song

with blossoms. Where a girl
who smells like vinegar

sells violets. Pick
your version: make her die or find

Wild mind by the side of the road.
Give her a lover.

They touch each other
like a goat and toddler

at the petting zoo.
Toddler calls the great pony.

Goat could use a strawberry
to rub its head against.

It took a while to get to, but I’m finally working my way through Maine poet Rennie Ament’s full-length debut, Mechanical Bull (Cleveland OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2023), a collection of short, sharp lyrics of sly humour, observational oddness, language play and smooth clarity. For much of the collection, Ament’s poems offer a straightforward lyric of subtle turns, with echoes of what could be seen as correlations with those sly Canadian surrealists Alice Burdick or Jaime Forsythe. “Someone told me, take a left at the next light.” Ament writes, to open the poem ““PERFECPTION IS REAL AND THE TRUTH IS NOT”,” “Her name was Imelda Marcos. She  sat like a window / festooned in blue silk. Her son Bongbong still a baby boy / in the backseat. I swung / on as instructed.” Elsewhere, Ament’s language play is more overt, allowing collisions of sound and meaning as the spark of the poem emerges from and across those breaks. Listen, for example, to the poem “RENATA S AMENT,” a short poem on her own name that begins: “Me. / A name. / An enema / as atman. Tart / as a manatee’s teat.” Ament’s poems offer a delightful sense of play but one still very sly, almost covert, and provide effects slightly disorienting. “Remember me knee-deep.” the poem “HE THEN PLEDGED” begins, “Remember me kelp-bedecked. / Remember me wet, / legs pretzeled, sex-melted  /yet spleen-tempered. Best egg / esteem the verve, never / defer me.”

These poems really are delightful, thoughtful, and compact. The collection is structured in two sections--halved, one might say—of short poems that play with a variety of line-lengths and form, each offering their own variation on that central core of compact observation, but one slightly turned, twirled or twisted. “Mother and father were nude models.” she writes, to open the poem ““DISCLOSE THE SHADY LOCATION IN WHICH YOU LURK”,” “Neither of them ever hit me. Once // I bit my mother so she bopped me, / which is different. I had crossed the street // wrong.” What a lovely book. What a lovely debut.