Anne Cecelia Holmes, The Jitters

ODE

None of this concerns you but

sometimes it’s better to pretend closeness

than live in fear of rejection. Things I know:

car sickness, the Mall of America, all-night

murder dreams. Childhood was a joke.

Slinging imaginary rifles over my shoulder,

falling out of trees for negative attention.

Now I talk to you like I have nothing

to lose, no grip whatsoever. I sneak into

the neighbor’s basement just to be the criminal.

I call you in the middle of the night to say

I’m not a ghost yet. It’s funny because

in Chicago I have a real brother but what

a boring story. Things I don’t know:

portion control, easing depression,

the optimal gesture.

Nothing I say will make you love me

and there’s real honor in that.

The author of two poetry chapbooks, Massachusetts poet Anne Cecelia Holmes’ first trade collection is The Jitters (Grand Rapids MI: Horse Less Press, 2015). Built as a collection of compact lyrics, the poems in The Jitters are fearless, vulnerable and razor-sharp. These poems revel in even the smallest miracles, attempt to comprehend the darkness, and take no shit from anyone. As she writes to open the poem “WORLD’S TINEST EARTHQUAKE,” “I’d like to say what’s been said / and say it better. Break // accountability exactly open. / When faced with an ultimatum // I choose the most destructive force, / haul everyone onto the lawn just // to get tough. Please trust me.” These are poems born of a quick, dry wit, composed as a series of observations, critiques and direct statements that take no prisoners. “When nothing changes I finally love myself,” she writes, in the poem “MEMORY BRICKS.”

SOME RELICS

All of this hurts the facial expression.

I’m sick of watching you fall over

the television like you’re the one

inside it, and more than ever

I feel like a tugboat in that scene.

Don’t blame me for your

bad cartography. I can’t be

an acrobat because

my heart isn’t ripe.

You said this trampoline

makes you dream of chairs

but to me the backyard

is a butcher shop.

Bring me a bag of rocks

and I’ll carpet you in them.

I’m going to be

an admiral in all this.

I’ve been increasingly aware over the past few years of a particular strain of American poetry: poets, predominantly female poets, composing very striking lyric poems that combine savage wit, subversion, distraction and use of the straight phrase, blending lightness against dark subject matter. If I were to attempt any kind of list of examples, it would include Matthea Harvey, Natalie Lyalin, Dorothea Lasky, Amy Lawless, Sommer Browning, Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Emily Kendal Frey, Anne Boyer and the late Hillary Gravendyk, and now, Anne Cecilia Holmes. What connects the writers on this list is the way they each compose tight lyric bursts that slightly unsettle, managing to utilize both light and dark humour, and push to shake at the core of expectation, discomfort and the otherwise-unspoken. There is something about how each of these authors, including Holmes, have embraced elements of the confessional mode through a compact lyric that can be used to voice flashes of anger, annoyance, frustrations, loneliness and violence, and even conversations on evil, as Holmes writes in the final poem in the collection:

POEM FOR WHAT I’M NOT ALLOWED

Ode to the murderer I imagine

in every band of trees. To

my blood cells, to well-ordered systems,

to my head absolutely thick

with disease. Ode to the dress I slept in

and wore the next day, to the cilantro

I planted in all the wrong weather.

Ode to the fucking cosmos. Ode to my face

against your face, to poems that want to

like us but don’t. Ode to being

the bloodless one, the neurotic one,

the one ignoring your spiritual journey.

To your clothes in my basement

covered in ink. To I wore this when

we first met, to I want to hurt you like this

and then like this. Ode to quitting my job

to stay excited, to exposing myself

to my neighbors, to embedding so many

rocks in my chest. Ode to Tulsa.

Ode to the 900-foot Jesus, to keeping

my hands in my pockets most of the time.

To my brothers and sisters, to all my

enemies, to imagining every way

to die in every possible scenario.

Ode to crying when I can’t find my shoes,

to feeling like god will punish me for

sins I don’t believe in. Ode to taking

pictures in front of strangers’ houses.

Ode to my jacket covered in yellow.

Ode to how I wish you were built

out of wood panels. Ode to staring

out the window in the worst

of the house. Ode to your age,

to my age, to how I react improperly

when reenacting your fate. Ode to

so few phenomenons. Ode to

absolving myself of everything.

To singing what I’m doing, to arguing

what counts as “artifact” and “alive.”

Ode to my wandering pacemaker.

Ode to my big fat heart. Ode to

pretending I’ve never been where

I used to live. Ode to hoping you’re

a goner. Ode to grieving nothing

each time a villain is born.

Emily Kendal Frey, Sorrow Arrow

My short review of Emily Kendal Frey's Sorrow Arrow (Octopus Books, 2014) is now up at The Small Press Book Review.

Sommer Browning, Backup Singers

I saw many many clocks, the clockman said of his first day. As the butcher cuts meat, the architect hides the sun; hesitancy blooms urge. Tonight, there is a horse in the painting above your bed. Tonight, a mole on the back of your love’s hand. At day’s end, the grocer pulls shutters across the glass complicating the thief’s anonymity.

There is an enormous amount of joy that comes with the announcement of a new work by Denver, Colorado poet and illustrator Sommer Browning, and the recent AWP in Seattle saw the release of Browning’s second trade poetry collection, Backup Singers (Birds, LLC, 2014). Given the amount of her quirky and hilarious comics were utilized as part of her first poetry collection, Either Way I’m Celebrating (Birds, LLC, 2011) [see my review of such here], I must say that a book by Sommer Browning without comics is unexpected (and even slightly disappointing). Still, there aren’t many contemporary poets with her penchant for tight lines and terrible jokes (Montreal poet David McGimpsey is a rare exception), and the results are absolutely stunning. Constructed in four sections, the first two sections are striking for the fact that they each contain groupings of single-page, untitled prose lyrics, collected in such a way that they could be read singularly, or as a narrative of accumulation, each poem acting and reacting against the ones that sit prior. One could say that her individual poems are also built accumulatively, each phrase and line pushing and piled, allowing for the oddest connections to exist in the reader’s imaginations. The rush of her prose also makes one wonder just how these poems might be heard, most likely as striking as how they appear. 

Goodbye fast-forward, goodbye alphabetical order, so long curlicue of the g’s tail looping on and on into each o and so on, icy line prismed into meaning: Varda on the absolute voyeurism of a door or the way the last drop releases the bottle into peaceful vacancy. Cassette tape roadkilled the DOT. On and on until the bun in the oven explodes golden over the Thanksgiving table, on and on stormy celluloid, on Donner and Blitzen, ontologically beautiful portmanteau Juneteenth, this most personal ecstasy drawing a monster from mythology.

There is a joyful, lively energy to her poems, one that can’t be diminished even through poems that might appear cranky, discordant or just damned odd; instead of wading through the dark, even her poems that work through some darker subject matter or references are radiant with energy (with some poems that rush at a near-manic level of urgency), one that is utterly intoxicating and impossible not to get caught up in. As one poem opens: “I told you he spanked me before work, how weird it was, how nearly non-sexy. Where did you go when I went to work?”

How long does it take to get to a funeral? The windshield wipers crazy across the window, out of pace so one runs over the other until the other careens so far to the left it hooks itself onto the edge of the car, the pathetic machine-sound of it straining to do its job. We pull into the Walgreens’ parking lot to search for tools. Since my first car needed pliers to open the window, I’ve always kept tools in the car. The bandage over the cure. Before this, we were received at an Irish pub by Sarah and her family and friends to celebrate the death of Sarah’s mother. Is celebrate the right word? I convince you to drive us back to New York so I could take another pill at the funeral. In the language of death, I want to say thank you.

Sommer Browning is one of a small number of contemporary American poets composing tight, observational lyrics on how to live in the world, all of whom utilize subversion, distraction, discomfort comfort and use of the straight phrase, and a blending of lightness against such very heavy dark subject matter. And when I suggest a list of such poets, I would include: Emily Pettit, Bianca Stone, Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyk and Emily Kendal Frey. Browning uses terrible jokes more than most (far more subtle here than in her previous collection), but often as a distraction against more serious topics. In my mind, these are a grouping of poets who manage to say an enormous amount through allusion to far darker things; and when they do speak of such plainly, it can catch a reader off-guard, and nearly be missed.

Information

There is a reason

division is an operation.

A reason I know

the math behind the body.

It’s a girl

and the wires she needs

open her hands

before they’re fists.

The third section of Backup Singers is made up of the forty-one part sequence “Multifarious Array,” a space in which she’s able to stretch out and display her talent for composing, point by point by point, across a wide canvas. Part of what appeals about Browning’s writing (and comics) is in the way her unusual perspective and humour allows her incredible insight and observations, as “Multifarious Array” opens with: “A broken Xerox machine dominates the corner. It doesn’t reproduce mistakes, doesn’t allow gradual fade, it’s broken because it forces vividness.” The sequence even allows a perspective into Browning’s own work, existing as an extended lyric essay on the work of an unnamed poet, as Browning writes:

Her poems live between intimacy and devastation. After I read them, I marvel that within each, a feeling welled and filled me, then receded.

Conjured at a different angle, the worn memory becomes the missing piece.

Black Warrior Review 40.1

HEAT

A row of little ovens waits on the cliff.

I can’t wait to get inside.

Mother me, dry heat.

Bake me into a baby. (Emily Kendal Frey)

While in Florida, we wandered through the occasional bookstore, and I managed to pick up a copy of the most recent issue of Black Warrior Review (fall/winter 2013; 40.1). There are so many American journals I’ve only heard of, and haven’t managed to yet see, a constant frustration of the international border between us One thing I didn’t know about the journal, as the colophon reads: “Black Warrior Review is named after the river that borders the campus of The University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa. The city, river, and journal derive their names from the sixteenth-century Indian chief Tuscaloosa, whose name comes from two words of Creek or Choctaw origin—tusca (warrior) and lusa (black).” I’m struck by a number of the selections in this issue—writing from such familiar names as Emily Kendal Frey, Bianca Stone and Julia Cohen—as well as some names I hadn’t previously been familiar with, including Wendy Xu, John Zackel or Adam Atkinson, for his “jacket copy” series, three of which are included in the issue. Atkinson’s three pieces are strange, and strangely compelling and entertaining, even if every element in each poem might not work. They’re certainly worth the trip, and certainly intrigue; I wonder how far he’s planning on taking this suite of unusual poems?

Jacket Copy for The Cop Followed Frank Into the Diner

The definite article in this book’s title is to be eyed suspiciously. This poet highlights many and any cops, Franks, diners, and followings into. For instance: “The cop frankly dined on / the fellow.” Or: “It follows that Frank copped a feel.” Or: “Diner: 3 A.M. / Cops from the vice squad / with weary sadistic eyes / spotting fairies.” At times, it plays like bathroom humor, if the bathroom was at Stonewall Inn and stuffed full with lubricated bodies: “The cop’s forearm followed his fist / into Frank’s asshole. A fist appeared through a portal twenty years from now and nailed / a cop in the kisser.”

What really struck in the issue included some of the prose, far more lyric than what I’ve encountered in most literary journals these days, from John Zackel’s short story, “The Potential Energy of Mr. English,” to Ben Roberts’ “Snapshots from the Wedding,” which includes:

There were those who arrived in the early morning hours before the Wedding. Others had waited in that place some thirty and three years. Here is the appointed hour: three in the Post Meridian. No one who came even a minute after was admitted. The Wedding waited on no one but the Bride and the Groom. For it is written, ‘No one shall arrive late to the Wedding.’ It is as if you had not come at all.

Given how particular I am about prose these days, I’m intrigued in the flavour of the prose in the pages of this journal, most of which is far more interesting stylistically than most of the far-too-straight examples of prose I see in literary journals. A further highlight was Julia Cohen’s “I Cannot Name It, It Lives,” listed under non-fiction. Cohen’s piece begins:

You are the splintered cloud of wood. Hum of halogen, a stutter strikes your microcosm’s sharp connector thorn. Home & the uncut call?

The density of a word, its cellular level I poke intricately awake. Indigenous to repetition. A girl drains an object. Your full sink & floating asparagus tips.

Object painted with asthma attacks. Object between relationships. Frozen object taken out of the freezer.

Bianca Stone, Someone Else’s Wedding Vows

What It’s Like

I cannot love like a ninepin. Not

like the lane. Not like the blue shoe.

I can love like a farmhouse, or a grief-

chimney that funnels from the ovens

of my earlier unpopular period. This

is a pond where thousands

of black tadpoles loiter at the rocks.

This is a wooden raft being tipped

by an assembly of teenagers.

And there are no clouds in the sky.

No airplanes. There isn’t even

a sky. And there isn’t even a sky behind that.

Given how long I’ve been aware of her name and her work, it seems amazing somehow that Brooklyn poet and illustrator Bianca Stone’s new Someone Else’s Wedding Vows (Portland OR/Brooklyn NY: Octopus Books/Tin House, 2014) is only her first trade poetry collection. If you’ve seen the recent Anne Carson collection, Antigonick (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 2012), you’ve already seen some of Stone’s artwork, and one of the only frustrations that I can see with this collection of her poems is the fact that only a single image of hers, gracing the cover, is included. The poems in this collection, organized in three untitled sections, are lyrics of exploration and clarification, constantly seeking out what might otherwise be never understood. Some of the flavour of Stone’s striking straight lines are reminiscent slightly of the work of contemporary American poets such as Hailey Higdon, Hillary Gravendyck, Emily Kendal Frey and Emily Pettit for their subversion, discomfort comfort and use of the straight phrase. As she writes in the middle of the single-stanza three-page poem “Outpost”:

The ancient clouds move

over the alcoholic sky.

I have seen the grey beards

of Northern Florida,

swum with the sea cow.

I have listened to the brief

troubles of the old, black cat.

I saw my mother flume

toward the abyss and draw back.

And I, who was half asleep

for my one earthquake,

now merely a fragment

looking for the center of the earth.

There is such a sadness resting behind so many of these poems, coupled with a particular kind of fantastic observation that couldn’t be achieved any other way, akin to light shining through a deep dark. Hers are long passages that accumulate strikes and quirky lines and the collision of emotional highs and lows. There is a distinctive and oddball charm to these poems, whether the poem “Because You Love You Come Apart,” that opens with “Your hair is wonderful today. / This is a microscopic caress at a party.” or the poem “Elegy,” subtitled “with Judy Garland & refrigerator,” with lines some of which strike as hard and deep as a punch: “I take out my collection / of tissue and listen to Judy Garland / sing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, / her voice like some wildflower / absorbing into the crimped human mind / an infinite medium of grief— / this human brain that cannot assume / the trust position.” How does anyone manage such forceful writing from a first trade collection? Perhaps as the daughter of poet Abigail Stone and granddaughter of poet Ruth Stone, she had the advantage of a particular kind of education, or perhaps her innate attention to detail and the line was all she required. And there is a deep attention here, to a life as it is lived, and to the quirky thoughts that so often quickly pass, and those dark places we aren’t meant to visit, let alone attempt to understand.

Isn’t it hard, monsieur, to speak

of anything except the moon anymore?

Like the room we just now

are leaving

like our mothers

refusing to blow a single fragment

off the ground

only when we look away

things flutter (“Monsieur”)