Kevin Holden, Pink Noise

 

mica

that would a
creek drank
or certainly through
& objects contracting
vertices of xs
a hardwood to shower
his
rippling
& tender that would be
& go up the cliff
lone pine atop  it
that would be a lilac bush
him running past you
turning into lilacs

And so opens Pink Noise (New York NY: Nightboat Books, 2024), the latest full-length poetry collection by Cambridge, Massachusetts-based poet and translator Kevin Holden. Following a half-dozen books and chapbooks including Alpine (White Queen, 2007), Glinting (Zeta Function, 2008), Identity (Cannibal Books, 2009), Sublimation (Little Red Leaves, 2015), Birch (Ahsahta Press, 2015) and Solar (Fence Books, 2016), Pink Noise is composed as a cluster of accumulated long poems and suites with opening salvo, “mica,” followed by the expansive “riot,” “grit,” “tunnel,” twenty poem cluster “polytopes,” “parhelion,” “grid,” “tunnel” and “glinting.” Holden has a gift for attending to the lyric document, providing articulation and commentary on events from the inside, as they occur, and allowing the reader into the experience. Writing a queer lyric from a queer body (as suggests Brian Teare’s back cover quote), Holden writes of seeking and searching out love in an environment too often hostile, writing the conflicting elements of violence and intimacy, comfort and so much noise. “the gauge is high / we might climb up,” the opening section offers, “and over endless mesh and identities / strung in deep sound or hope / and/or / long talk at empire’s close [.]”

“the streets at night,” opens the accumulative “riot,” “& is a circle or queer sapphire ringing plastic / o young man fabulous muscles star & it / is a dark shadow flowing over pines / a store nearby showering grey sparks / I found you in a club circling in air [.]” Centred around the mantra “so cold today” as a kind of echo, or tether, the poem moves ever outward, returning back to that point, while detailing police brutality, and resistance, wrapped as a kind of unfolding, unfurling and swirling sequence of fragments and short bursts that cohere into something spectacular.

that then caused queer flowering in pink
lattices shouldering up a bunch of them fighting to the street holding
an intersection
tear gas cascading in rainbows across their bleary eyes

 

you want to fight a city
zigzagging heap lightyear in a dark function and any kind of rhythm,
damn you, we wanted to bust them open talking about money and they
clear cut the whole thing