Laynie Browne, Everyone and Her Resemblances

 

She’s so free she has the form of the page but it keeps reversing itself, pouring. I stop with a period then go on. Or begin missing. You. Not punctuation, but stopping is a form of checking one’s place-pulse. She’s so limpid she never checks. She-limpet. Ctenophore, her see or sea. Her sea-saw is transparent or even absent. You don’t pronounce her “see.” She wouldn’t call herself a seer, but what can you say, about her see-through signatures, her waving apparatus, her ability to breathe below water? What would you say about rushing, allowing all of the words to enter? But they aren’t words, they are living entities, water, and something else, crushed enamel, shells, sails. No. White muslin, perfectly wrinkled or pressed, like a palette, a face. Her complexion is pure dahlias and the dark petals stick out ridgelike, on her cheeks. (“Coxbomb Seeress”)

The latest from Pennsylvania poet Laynie Browne is the wonderfully expansive Everyone and Her Resemblances (Pamenar Press, 2024), following more than a dozen poetry titles including You Envelop Me (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2017) [see my review of such here], Translation of the lilies back into lists (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2022) [see my review of such here], Letters Inscribed in Snow (Tinderbox Editions, 2023), Practice Has No Sequel (Pamenar Press, 2023) and Intaglio Daughters (Ornithopter Press, 2023) [see my review of this particular trio here]. Furthering what appear to be a sequence of book-length response-texts dedicated to and for and through other poets—In Garments Worn By Lindens, for example, which works from and through the lyrics of a particular volume by American poet Rosmarie Waldrop—Browne’s Everyone and Her Resemblances works through the epic structures and purposes of American poet Alice Notley [see my review of her latest here]. “What will you call this book of reservations?” Browne writes, early on in the collection. “Who are we       speaking this?” Notley has long utilized the epic as a space through which to explore voice, character and large questions, and Browne’s epic ripples with echoes of Notley’s structures, offering her own book-length epic of questions, hesitations and explorations; a sequence of monologues and dialogues more concerned with seeking out than landing particular conclusions. “Is there a way to walk     to where I was never lonely,” the poem “Tasks Which Sever Bound Senses” begins, “without going / under    pass    lanterns made of cities we never visit [.]”

Her narratives are gestural, sweeping out as constellation, and as comfortable, perhaps, upon the stage as on the page. Browne employs large stretches of stitched phrases and fragments across a wide canvas, writing a language dreamed and spoken. “We might even                       deliberately obscure                                 the best / or only    vantages       alive,” she writes, to close the poem “Different Names or No Names at All.” Or, as the poem “When Seeing Was Invisible” writes:

This theme of everyone losing in mid-midnight-middling

euphemisms being mid-kiss-mid-death-mid-light

is losing as in, she ran away to a farmlet

one big primal bed

once you’ve failed you start talking about failure as inevitable

in the middle of

anyplace in the ocean is still in the ocean

how I miss you who you were

muddled middle of us of yes of permission

where you were inside

a premonition that later became us

a word I can’t say on the radio

so I’m going to leave a blank