Rainer Diana Hamilton, Lilacs

 

When something is sensed, it repeats
in the sensor’s body, helping them remember
it: the iconic (fleeting images), the echoic, 

the haptic, the proprioceptive. Sometimes the repetition
lingers longer than it ought – a sound keeps ringing – or appears
    before
it should be sensible – anticipatory nipple pain – or as it shouldn’t –
a person sees a friend whom others insist is imaginary – but
sense memory is mostly timely. In Keat’s Odes:
A Lover’s Discourse, Anahid Nersessian introduces 

the poet as sensitive, and this vulnerability
to sensory experience as a source of suffering:
his “senses always strain, are always under stress.” (“SENSES LILAC”)

The latest from Brooklyn-based writer and critic Rainer Diana Hamilton, and the first I’ve seen, is Lilacs (Krupskaya, 2025), a book-length lyric suite that explodes wonderfully from a single point, and spends the remaining space expanding ever outward in lyric prose, perpetually forward and ever wider with such a lovely and consistent and engaged propulsive exploration. I hadn’t heard of Hamilton prior to this, and they are also the author of Okay, Okay (Truck Books 2012), The Awful Truth (Golias Books 2017) and God Was Right (Ugly Duckling Presse 2018), as well as the forthcoming This Reasonable Habit (Spunk, 2026), a collaboration with Violet Spurlock, so I’m clearly behind on what they’ve been doing, for some time now.

We have some obligation to notice

and to remember what we noticed.

Hamilton’s Lilacs, naturally, begins with lilacs, begins with memory; begins with the scent of memory and lilacs, moving ever out, riffing and extending, in a book that reveals itself as a book focused on attention. What do you know, and what can you see, what can you remember? There’s something impactful about Hamilton’s focus on attention, hinting at the consideration that we are not only an accumulation of our experiences, but what experiences, including sensory, we can actually recall. “And this route from story to smell could be,” they write, early on in the collection, “again, reversed: on the last night of my illness, desperate for cinnamon’s return, I layered perfumes before sleep, knowing that, despite being unable to sense them, I’d be comforted by the certainty it would be wild if I could: first, on the sternum, a sample from Le Labo that, in the store, had the complexity of sitting fire side with someone you’re trying to get the nerve to kiss but then, at home, seemed like a cheap McCormick’s spice blend, […].” Hamilton moves through lilacs from a litany of literary references, including Anne Rice, T.S. Eliot, John Berger, Walt Whitman and Kenneth Koch. Hamilton finds lilacs across Elizabeth Willis, Zuzanna Ginczanka, John Wieners, Maria Sledmere, Amy De’Ath, William Carlos Williams, Bernadette Mayer and Lorine Niedecker. A blend of lyric prose, prose poem and lyric essay, the book tendrils through lilacs and memory, in a work highly engaged and readable, thick with possibility. There are some incredible passages here, all of which accumulate into a kind of thesis. There’s something of this collection that could have appeared as a prose title through Essay Press just as easily, I would say, although the titles lately through Krupskaya [see my reviews of further recent titles by the press by Jennifer Soong, Noah Ross and Stacy Szymaszek] hold to a clear interest by the press: book-length suites incorporating prose and poetry across a cohesive lyric. As well, I am quite taken with the end-note by the author, articulating how this title was prompted, and came to be, ideas I’m tempted to echo and possibly attempt as well, at some point. As Hamilton writes:

A “Lilac” is a poem written, prosaically, in an artificially-induced trance-like state, for the purposes of remembering something sensual.

In December of 2019, charles theonia told me they’d been assigned, by Mónica de la Torre, to write an essay in a trance, and I decided to do their homework, myself: I listened to Donna Summer on repeat, visualized my block, and wrote down every image I could remember.

That month, I had been plagued by a strange amnesia; I kept turning down the wrong street on my way home. I titled the poem “Trance Essay for Remembering Images,” since I had set out to document the few visual details of the surrounding area I could remember in order to facilitate better remembering in the future. At the time, I had also wanted to write ‘poetic images’ that were as straightforward as possible. I had been reading a lot of H.D., and while I couldn’t muster a ‘Sea Rose,’ I thought I could conjure the common lilac.