Carrie Hunter, The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself

 

The light patched up later, after the fact.
The conversational you, interjected.

Bright, snazzy, fabulous slownesses, fantasticality.
Skipping a comma just to throw you.
The center disappears in the middle.
The furniture, what we walk around,
                            use’s communication
                came to be seen, comes, to seam.

If you view yourself from within the ecoterritory,
and no separate from,
there is no need to replicate the self. (““Finally, the Memory Became an Object””)

I’m very pleased to see a new poetry title by San Francisco poet, editor and chapbook publisher Carrie Hunter, The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself (New York NY: Roof Books, 2025), following The Incompossible (Black Radish Books, 2011), Orphan Machines (Black Radish Books, 2015) and Vibratory Milieu (Brooklyn NY: Nightboat Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. Composed in four sections of poems—“Richly Flows Contingency,” “All Gabled Roofs Will Fall,” “Poetry’s Anti-Monument” and “The Flow of the Poem’s Display of Itself”—the accumulated poems read akin to a thesis, offering a book of poems on and around poetic structure. “I’ve heard that the subject matter is on its way.” begins the poem ““Glamour and Chrystoprase”,” “No saying exactly creates a space to pull meaning out of / vs                a specificity which is useless. // Memories mixed up, only recognized as such through changing pronouns.” These poems are nimble, punch-smart and quick, stretching out across a wealth of literary reference and citation, as Hunter offers a book on lyric and poetic form, even arguing poetic form as inadequate through those very structures. As she writes in the poem ““Gravity Isn’t About to Save Us””: “The difference between disintegration and return. / Awareness as a scientific measurement.”

Denise Newman’s anti-paradise, Dana Teen Lomax’s guilt.

Model of possibility, “your” possible situation.
An old “chromo” on the wall, innocent as a “lintel.”

Hate-filled cubicle jobs
             and how that leads to an explanation
                                           of what Osiris would do.

How snow is truth and how you show truth.
Against reinvention and for becoming more and more the self.
Votive angel gatekeeper’s actions at the gate. (““The Saga of the Sheepgirl and Her Friend / the Pelican Merchant””)