Carl Watts reviews my Mansfield Press poetry title, A halt, which is empty (2019) for Canadian Literature

I am incredibly grateful for Carl Watts’ attention recently, after he reviewed my Mansfield Press poetry title, A halt, which is empty (2019) alongside Mark Laba’s The Inflatable Life (Anvil Press, 2019) over at Canadian Literature. Thanks so much!

This is actually the fifth review of the book (which makes me feel even luckier, honestly), after Kim Fahner discussed same for Arc Poetry Magazine, Jessica Drake-Thomas reviewed it over at her site, Jonathan Ball reviewed it in the Winnipeg Free Press, and Mary Kasimor reviewed the same at Otoliths. You can see the original review here.

There are certainly options for you to order directly from the publisher, or through whichever of your local bookstores are doing delivery, I'm sure, although I can mail you a signed one, if ever such appeals ($19 Canadian / add $2 for US orders; add $5 for international orders; send me an email: rob_mclennan (at) hotmail.com).

As Watts' review of the collection reads:

Fixtures in a poetry community, even those who are notably prolific, can sometimes be accounted for without much trouble. But figures whose writings span multiple genres, which may come from the smallest of small presses or in otherwise ephemeral formats, can be harder to get a handle on. Any attempt to make sense of such writers, especially in a brief review, seems preposterous.

And yet, a reviewer taking on a new book by rob mclennan may note that his sprawling body of work has been shifting toward producing a somewhat less conventional form of lyric. A halt, which is empty bears out this development; its title comes from a passage by Claude Royet-Journoud that associates writing with the perception of movement. The opening poem’s first section is caught up in this crudely physical act of stopping and noticing; it relies on short “sentences,” frequently of two words (“Uninterrupted, swallow. Machines, recirculate. Relieve. We watch for symptoms, shallow”), distilling into particles everyday processes that clunk with their materiality.

But passages like “[a] mass of modern bus and antiquated streetcar. The power of an average. Slanting, ruin” are also typical mclennan in their alternately clattering and airy impressions of Ottawa. Much of the book strikes this balance between experimental conceit and familiar authorial voice. The epigraph to “Corporation of snow” disputes the colonial “Eskimo words for snow” myth; it asks whether any writing can be truly novel—“[p]articles, we designate. A show of hands. More sentiment / than sediment”—while again simplifying and physicalizing its conceit.

“Birthday poem for Gwendolyn Guth” combines the above techniques with apostrophe: “You turn, you turn, // remark, refrain.” Such moments depict a group of creative people working in loose association with one another, creating a picture of mclennan as publisher of broadsides and of work by possible up-and-comers—a writer’s writer’s writer whose network defines his past and pervades his present as he brings others into the fold, his poetics embodied as they dilate within recognizable limits.

Sarah Dowling, Entering Sappho

Mythological personages supplement lively
post offices. What they most resemble is a pan-
theon of hungry dogs. What they most resemble
is an advanced stage of a bacterial culture. What

we most resemble is the end of the world.
We are conspicuous, we pluck the strings
of historical association and make another
exclusion. We are a winnowing, a slow tick

of the intellectual pacemaker, a growing edge.
Wait till they get up close. This movement
happened in more than one hundred cities:
Agricola, Bovina, Pomona, Marathon, Akron,

Ajax, Salix, and others extending in a long line
below the wet cloud blanket. (“THIS WORD: I WANT”)

Toronto poet and critic Sarah Dowling’s long-awaited fourth full-length poetry collection is Entering Sappho (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2020), following Security Posture (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2010), Birds & Bees (Troll Thread, 2012) and Down (Coach House Books, 2014). The book-length suite of poems that make up Entering Sappho play off naming, from the community of Sappho in Clallum County, Washington, to the ancient Greek poet, utilizing the Greek moniker upon American soil as a way to open up a conversation around indigenous considerations, erasure and colonialism. What is the impact of one name attempting to overwrite another? As the back cover offers: “Driving along the Pacific Coast highway, you come to a read sign: Entering Sappho. Nothing remains of the town, just trash at the side of the highway and thick, wet bush. Can Sappho’s breathless eroticism tell us anything about settlement – about why we’re here in front of this sign?” The play between this seemingly-incompatible and ancient naming is a curious structure to frame the collection, akin to Toronto writer Margaret Christakos referring to the town of Alexandria, but the one in Glengarry County, Ontario, and not the infamous and ancient Egyptian city, via the title and title sequence of her own debut collection, Not Egypt (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1989). It is as though Dowling works to construct an engagement and conversation around Sappho, Washington with all its contradictions and confusions, writing the ghost of a town named after a long-dead Greek poet, but wrapping her conversation intricately around queer identity, naming and Sappho’s few remaining fragments. 

Well did they have the hotel at the same
time as they had the store? Yes, it was all

built together. All built together, and the
hall too. What did they use the hall for,

other than dances? Well, in the wintertime
they used to use it to dry clothes, mostly.

It had a big mangle up there, a drying
mangle, they used to mangle the clothes

and sheets and everything. You mangle
them – now, you didn’t have electricity?

No. just rolls about that big around and
about that long. (“ORAL HISTORY”)

Dowling’s Entering Sappho fragments into sections and subsections—“Possession Sound” that includes “Clip,” “Entering Sappho” that includes “Oral History” and “Soft Memory,” “Neoclassical Place Names of North America” that includes “This Word: I Want” and “US,” and “Leucadian Leap,” that includes “Ornament,” “These Things Now For My Companion / I Shall Sing Beautifully”—as well as a prose afterward or coda of sorts, “White Columns.” The shapes of Dowling’s lyrics shift and shimmy, denoting a particular precision of the line and line-break, attempting a large canvas in portions, from archival materials, oral histories and blended mythologies. “You may forget that one day with my little red / girl in my pretty red boots when they came // by mail from Tacoma. I had been cruising out / of my claim. I had been promised roses of Lesbos,” she writes, as part of the poem “US,” “I had turned a pallid pink.” Dowling explores our past and potential future relationships to colonialism and local acknowledgment, even as she writes out Sappho, Washington in all its former glory, ghost-town appeal and queer associations. As her afterword, “White Columns,” begins:

Entering Sappho is a portal into history – the bits that are meant to be meaningful to a person like me, as well as those that are repugnant. Entering Sappho is taking on a series of voices, versions of the ancient poetess and traces of the town. Entering Sappho is addressing history and its daughter colony, the present.
            Entering Sappho is a silly ritual. When you’re driving to the coast on Highway 101, you come to the sign, stop, and take a picture. Entering Sappho is how you pay tribute to the original lesbian and to the generations of queers who’ve also passed here to photograph themselves. Entering Sappho is a moment of gleeful excitement. Cars zoom past, going much faster than seems possible. It’s a little scary, but entering Sappho is also hilarious. Picture the hand gestures, how people pose, decade after decade, in front of this unwitting monument.

Back to School : a stay-at-home story,

first day of forest school, September 15, 2020

We’re in the midst of back-to-school, although a far different one than we’d been expecting. On Friday, both our young ladies sat at laptops for 9am zoom sessions of e-learning. Aoife began junior kindergarten, and Rose started grade two. (Oh, but wasn’t this the year Aoife was going to start school full-time, thus returning my days to writing after all these years home with the wee children? Oh, yes, no. We aren’t talking about that.)

Given Christine is high risk, utilizing our sunroom as her refurbished home office (a corner office by the window, I’ll have you know), and I’m home either way, we are keeping our young ladies home from school. (with the hopes that, minimum, next September will include a return to normal schooling). I also think they’re too young to have to worry about masks and distancing and the potential stress of such an environment (we know folk with older kids, and that just feels different). I know we’re lucky to even have the option to keep them home, as this isn’t possible for so many other families, even if they wished to do so. With Christine’s health as a factor (last year’s meningitis and stroke and her ongoing asthma, but mostly her now-underlying heart condition that may even be an issue of a compromised immune system), it really doesn’t seem worth it to do anything else. Also, we are soon-bubbling with mother-in-law, and her age is a factor as well (we don’t talk about that, either). And if the e-learning becomes too problematic, we’re prepared to pull them out entirely and homeschool them, but we’re going to see how this e-learning stuff goes, first (and homeschooling wouldn't be nearly as effective for the French Immersion elements). So far, it does actually seem to be going well, despite all the last-minute updates and teachers scrambling (all of which I’m willing to blame on the province for not bothering to roll out any sort of proper, actual plan until well into August).

Aoife on a laptop in our living room, and Rose a few feet away on another laptop in our dining room. It also means I’m not in my office working, but at the kitchen peninsula (not an island, as it connects to the wall), listening in for whatever they might need (I addressed and packaged an above/ground press mailing during today’s schooling sessions). Rose needed to figure out a screen, or Aoife not knowing how to unmute herself. At one point Aoife accidentally left her meeting. Rose continually pushed buttons that knocked her into another tab, thus losing her visual.

They’re doing daily three-hour sessions, which will be broken up, allowing for lunch time and free play. Aoife’s is broken up a bit more than Rose’s, but they were engaged and responding far better than I might have suspected. Aoife requests a turn directing the class in "Simon dit" (French class' "Simon says," obviously) and giggles at how the whole class responds to her requests. "Simon says twirl!" she says, and she laughs at them twirling. What a great word! her teachers say. She never gets around to telling them to stop (perhaps this is deliberate). Aoife is freed for an hour and wanders off to their room, happily playing, as Rose continues her class. Rose is freed for lunch, and immediately wants to run outside to the swingset we had put in the yard last week.

Perhaps six months in the house means they’re more open to this sort of thing, despite whatever clunks or hiccups might occur. I couldn’t figure out a link at one point, or who to what with the whoosis. I had to call Christine for technical assistance at least once.

At least from how the first day went, I was quite impressed with all the teachers, and their ability to keep their attentions. The classes don’t appear to be overly large, which most likely helps. We shall see what develops once homework assignments are thrown into the mix.

For this first day of e-schooling, Christine doing a rare day at her lab, solo (once or twice a week, I think). Her building is otherwise empty, as everyone is home. A schedule for her lab-mates where they each take turns, attending and working empty-building days, doing those bits of work they can’t actually do from their living rooms or apartments. Over here, I am between machines, whether theirs or mine, answering why this won’t work and where did everyone go and then off to check in on my own emails. Clearly, I will have to learn how to work differently, around this. Perhaps further time working and writing at our kitchen peninsula.

Rose and Aoife are getting at least some small elements of physical socializing. Christine signed them up for forest school: every Tuesday afternoon the two of them will be off in the bush in Blackburn Hamlet with a small handful of other children, something they began last week (thus the official ‘first day of school’ photo from our front step). They’ll be outside the whole time, and of course, we will see how this goes. Every Tuesday for the next three months. Presuming it goes well (they’re in the same group, as this is Aoife’s first time; Rose attended these all through both years of kindergarten), in the New Year, when the next session begins, Rose might switch to a weekly full-day class, and Aoife in another half-day. They will learn about leaves and bugs and look at frogs and all sorts of things. Rose absolutely loves it, and it seemed safe enough, we thought. For now.

Might this be a long winter, despite all of this? Oh, my. Yes. I would say so. Yes.

 

J’Lyn Chapman, To Limn / Lying In: essays

I begin to ask, what on this earth does not exist because of the transformation of language? And couldn’t the same be said for light? could light be responsible for the writing of light and, therefore, also its transformation? (“To Limn”)

I am slowly moving through Colorado writer J’Lyn Chapman’s collection To Limn / Lying In : essays ([PANK] Books, 2020), a title I might not have been aware of had Heather Sweeney not been good enough to provide a review of same for periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. As the back cover attests: “Taking its inspiration from the artist Uta Barth’s photographs of the sun as it enters her home and the poet Francis Ponge’s notebooks kept during the German occupation of France, this collection of lyric essays contemplates light as seen through the domestic space and its occupants, predominantly the author’s young children. Meditations on how through light the external world enters into and transforms the private spaces of self and home inextricably link to the author’s writing on life, or the giving of life.” Through ten lyric essays—“Firmament: Postpartum Fugue,” “To Limn,” “Lying In,” “The Wound of Light,” “Dark Grove, Shining,” “Day and Night, Night and Day,” “Consenting to the Emergency / the Emergency as Consensuality,” “Everything That Is Illuminated Becomes a Light,” “Light Upon” and “Nothing Solid Is Really Happening”—Chapman approaches the subject and idea of light the way Anne Carson approaches, say, sleep, albeit with a more intimate eye, writing lyric threads through Ponge, through the light coming in the window, and the interactions with her small children. “As when my body made another body, my body expelled that body, and my body fed that body. And while my body was feeding the new body, my body began to make another body. I continued to watch the light. the world continued to be suffused by it.” Through parenthood, one’s perspective and attentions can’t help but shift, relearning the world from the ground up, laying on the floor with an infant, or simply watching the movement of sunlight through the window. These essays exist in tandem, almost akin to separate chapters or sequence in a book-length articulation around light, small children and beauty, thinking around how and why one records and records what, through the journal, the lyric essay or photography. These essays, this book-length meditation, is deeply moving, deeply intimate and remarkably clear and complex. I might just need to read this a few more times.

Francis Ponge also wanted to describe the light, or something like the light: the sky. Not only the sky, but also the impression of the sky. As well as the urns and statues of cherubs, the bus by which he moved through the landscape, memory. There was also a war, but he doesn’t mention it. All of this, together, even the absence, composed the impression—“the daylight of death, the daylight of eternity”—because the firmament is not divisive, despite the seventh verse of Genesis, and it contains in it everything and every impression, and it gives us life. It is difficult to know when to stop talking about it once you’ve started. (“To Limn”)

12 or 20 (second series) questions with Monica Ong

Monica Ong [image © 2020 by Maler Photography] is the author of Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry. A Kundiman poetry fellow and MFA graduate in Digital Media at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ong has been awarded residencies most recently at the Studios at MassMoCA, Millay Colony, and Yaddo. You can find her work featured in Petrichor: A Journal of Image+Text, Redivider, ctrl+v, Waxwing Magazine, and anthologized in Poesia Visual 5. Based in Connecticut, she currently serves as the User Experience Designer at the Yale Digital Humanities Lab.

1 - How did your first book change your life? How does your most recent work compare to your previous? How does it feel different? Silent Anatomies (2015), selected by Joy Harjo as winner of the Kore Press First Book Award in poetry, was a debut collection that came from a series of art installations I’d been making for several years. It was really rewarding to open up my creative practice to both visual and literary audiences. I also got to meet writers interested in multi-modal practices and experimentation. I learned that while genre is a tool to place and market work to specific audiences, it does not have to restrict how we shape our practice. My recent work is even more playful and experimental, but still remains deeply informed by the beautiful intensity of science and the power struggles that ensue in the stories of astronomy. While the first book focused on the microcosm of the body and personal lineage, I’ve shifted to considering cosmic bodies and stories we might leave for the future.

2 - How did you come to poetry first, as opposed to, say, fiction or non-fiction? I came to poetry through painting, as poetry is the closest literary form to painting. While I was in art school studying Digital Media at RISD, I had the immense fortune of encountering the poet Wendy S. Walters who happened to be my seminar professor at the time. She gave me permission to embrace the poet in me who just happened to have a visual and multi-modal practice, and not get too caught up in what certain disciplines are supposed to look like. Embracing hybridity allowed me to consider my art installations that followed as potentially being a book, which is how Silent Anatomies came to be.

3 - How long does it take to start any particular writing project? Does your writing initially come quickly, or is it a slow process? Do first drafts appear looking close to their final shape, or does your work come out of copious notes?  I often create a series of work towards small periodic exhibitions. This allows me to focus on a set of ideas and to work iteratively with attention to time and finding interesting forms for these ideas. It allows me to try a set of poems as a series of small objects, letterpress broadsides, or immersive audio. (See https://www.monicaong.com/gallery) By now, I have a sense of how long it takes to complete certain types of work so I try to keep 2 projects moving simultaneously. My recent constellation poems for letterpress have required massive amounts of time to draw, design, write, do pre-press preparation, and oversee production for. One broadside took me over a year to complete because I also had to raise the money to afford printing it in gold and silver foil. So sometimes in order to stay sane, I work on smaller poetry pieces in between production phases to keep a sense of play and possibility in my writing.

4 - Where does a poem usually begin for you? Are you an author of short pieces that end up combining into a larger project, or are you working on a "book" from the very beginning? (See #3)

5 - Are public readings part of or counter to your creative process? Are you the sort of writer who enjoys doing readings? I try to think of readings a opportunities to bring communities together across culture and discipline. When Silent Anatomies came out, I enjoyed doing panels with writers AND medical humanities folks, as well as doctors who work on culture competence in health care. I did readings in academic libraries, but also in local Chinese and Latino cultural centers, at public health classes, and in art galleries. My book used poetry as a vehicle to create dialogue about cultural silences that make it socially difficult for communities to address taboo subjects like mental health and domestic violence. Likewise in my new work, I hope the astronomy-inspired collection will be welcomed not only in literary but also science and visual art venues as well. I'd love to participate in readings where I can amplify non-western star stories and women in science, while also conversing with other astronomers and other scientists. Generally, I am an introverted person, but as long as I make enough time between events to recharge, I do enjoy being able to connect with readers and fellow creatives alike.

6 - Do you have any theoretical concerns behind your writing? What kinds of questions are you trying to answer with your work? What do you even think the current questions are? I make work with a few questions in mind: What hidden stories need to be told?  What new narratives or paradigms can I model? What is the creative risk I am taking? What am I contributing to the conversation that can create value for those I’m in dialogue with?

7 – What do you see the current role of the writer being in larger culture? Does s/he even have one? What do you think the role of the writer should be? For Silent Anatomies, I really saw poetry as one way to create a safe space to generate dialogue in local communities about cultural silences and to address stigma and trauma. I can’t tell you how many times people come up to me after a reading and tell me their web of family secrets woven around illness, and how literature made it ok to finally talk about these issues. When it comes to cultural gaps of understanding in community healthcare, poetry is one compass and resource that I also think healthcare workers can turn to in order to better understand and familiarize themselves with communities they want to reach out to but maybe have little exposure to. If the publishing industry is willing to invest more money and resources in amplifying voices that don’t get to be heard, I think there is an opportunity to bring people closer to each other. But I say this with the huge grain of salt that literature is just a starting point and in no way a substitute for cultivating a substantive relationships with people across boundaries. To me great writing creates empathy in both the writer and the reader, which I see as a currency of hope.

8 - Do you find the process of working with an outside editor difficult or essential (or both)? (I don’t usually work with one so I don’t have a useful answer for this question.)

9 - What is the best piece of advice you've heard (not necessarily given to you directly)? I recently took a writing workshop with Rick Barot, whose writing is stunning and his kind intellectual generosity even more so. He encouraged me to make writing experiments without leaning on my usual strategies, even purposely avoiding them, as an exercise in seeing what one can come up with when one hand is tied behind one’s back. Embracing discomfort to see what reserves of ingenuity lie in such constraints is really valuable and something it’s good to be reminded of so that I can come back to my beginner’s spirit, which is more adventurous.

10 - What kind of writing routine do you tend to keep, or do you even have one? How does a typical day (for you) begin? I live in pandemic blur so, so I do planning on Mondays to prioritize time among my full-time job, my writing, and overseeing my kid’s camp and activities, as well as participating in creative and local communities. I make lots of lists but I’m also practicing self-acceptance when things go to mush because there’s no point in beating ourselves up when society is so up-ended as it is right now. To me it’s more about consistently taking small steps. I use The Most Dangerous Writing App to generate free writing several times a week and then when I’m composing a visual text, I print and put all the texts in front of me and pull the best fragments out of them to make the final piece. This gives me the flexibility to spread out little steps across time and not overwhelm myself. It’s also important to give oneself permission to say NO when needed in order to protect my time, and also to not romanticize what a writer’s life “should” look like because it’s so unique for each person. If writing is happening in the parking lot, the bathtub, or on the phone in the grocery line, then let’s create value from where we’re at.

11 - When your writing gets stalled, where do you turn or return for (for lack of a better word) inspiration? I watch modern dance because of the way choreographers take the syntax of movement to create brand new visual and visceral compositions that bewilder and astound me. Particularly, when this is brought together with cinematography, it allows reminds me to bring tactility and images together with syntactical strategy to make something that is intentional yet can also be improvisational and primal. Films like Pina on Pina Bausch and the newer film Cunningham about Merce Cunningham really delight me.

12 - What fragrance reminds you of home? The scent of sampaguitas, which is the tagalog word for jasmine flowers, which is the national flower of the Philippines. My mother grew these at home and she gave me one when I moved into my own so that we can keep our grandmother with us.

13 - David W. McFadden once said that books come from books, but are there any other forms that influence your work, whether nature, music, science or visual art? Books helped me to develop an ear for what resonates with me lyrically, but I am very much a maker with a visual art training, who leverages quite heavily from science, information design, and typography. Sonic arts and installations with found objects also figure into the way I strategize about constructing immersive poetry installations. For example, when I was writing about medicine, I made poems with x-ray light boxes and medicine bottles. Now that I’m creating work based on the aesthetics of astronomy, I’ve been collaborating with letterpress studios to make constellation poems, as well as building poems as light boxes in the spirit of Joseph Cornell and Betye Saar with found vintage objects.

14 - What other writers or writings are important for your work, or simply your life outside of your work? I look up to creatives who practice experimental and hybrid approaches that surprise me yet also lyrically invite readers somewhere deeply personal. They are often writers whose lives are also informed by an artistic practice such as Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Cecilia Vicuña, Douglas Kearney, Claudia Rankine, Anne Carson, Etel Adnan, Diana Khoi Nguyen. Poets like Rick Barot, Victoria Chang, Ada Limón, and Mary Ruefle inspire me just as much with particular attention to the magic of syntax, literary form and image.

I was an art school kid so the work of artists and designers who intersect with text have had an unquestionable impact in my making: Xu Bing, Shirin Neshat, Maya Lin, Betye Saar, Janet Cardiff, Barbara Kruger, and Jenny Holzer for sure. At the same time, I’ve been a graphic designer for two decades and nowadays spending more time in data visualization and data science spaces, so information design plays a big role in honing my sensibilities around the functional and aesthetic relationship between text and image. In terms of information design, often turn to books by Edward Tufte, Manuel Lima, Giorgia Lupi, and Stefanie Posavec.

15 - What would you like to do that you haven't yet done? I want to make poetry that is more experiential and interactive. During the pandemic, I’ve been making more audio poems to explore poetry’s immersive possibilities. At some point, I’d like to design an interactive book that can exist on multiple platforms.

16 - If you could pick any other occupation to attempt, what would it be? Or, alternately, what do you think you would have ended up doing had you not been a writer? I love being both a writer and visual designer. But if I were to try another occupation, I’d definitely love to be a modern dancer.

17 - What made you write, as opposed to doing something else? I grew up creatively but with my parents’ pragmatism. I knew design and writing was quite portable and frankly, I wasn’t athletic enough to be a dancer.

18 - What was the last great book you read? What was the last great film? I’m currently reading All Heathens by Marianne Chan (http://www.sarabandebooks.org/titles-20192039/all-heathens-marianne-chan) and just finished watching Ad Astra as sci-fi movies are the only films my family and I can actually agree on watching together while we’re all at home.

19 - What are you currently working on? My current work explores the intersection of poetry and astronomy, considering the sky and its histories from the female gaze. I’ve been remixing vintage astronomy diagrams with prose poems, making letterpress broadsides based on non-western constellations, and also delighting about women in science. You can see some of these experiments here:
http://www.redividerjournal.com/2020/04/monica-ong-jupiters-family-of-comets/
https://petrichormag.com/15-monica-ong/
http://waxwingmag.org/items/issue14/27_Ong-Syzygy.php

12 or 20 (second series) questions;

Catherine Wagner, Of Course

Poverty, when defined by income.

Creates only one solution:

working for someone else. So

change the form of the for

for animals and problem-solving

plants. I have borrowed

for the inside of my life

the inside-out of

enslaved people and workers

who made the seen.

What are you going to do without your

underclass, where you going

to go, what are you

going to

do without your

woman.

If a nail is unison

entering into unison is violent.

Thus will I cheat

the rich out of my life.

I’m always very excited to see new work from Cincinnati poet Catherine Wagner, which now includes the poetry collection Of Course (Hudson NY: FENCE Books, 2020). The author of Miss America (Fence Books, 2001), Macular Hole (Fence Books, 2004), My New Job (Fence Books, 2009) and Nervous Device (San Francisco CA: City Lights Publishers, 2012), hers is a lyric that can turn on a dime, from sound-driven description to the long pause, from meditation to anxiety to bursts of exposition, from the shaky precision of memory to the precise action of a single word. “The moon has a head but no body,” she writes, to open “The moon has a body,” “So why assume [she] / Is cold why not / Assume drunk / ‘Legless’ / She can keep up pretty good though / With my car in the rural night / Fantasy in which / I am a passenger [.]” Wagner’s work is rife with serious play regarding narrative and expectation, flailing and precise measure, such as in the poem “My Hair Is Getting a Free Blow Dry in the Win,” that includes: “When I dictate   data flies up to satellite // and is instantly returned bioprocess inappropriate / to the size of my body // or making nonsense of the idea that anything is / appropriate or inappropriate to the size of my body // it feels good to have the / satellite bounce words   by a process [.]”

Of Course appears to be a book of poems around the complexities of the body, from depictions of the body to considerations of the body; from the body of a golf course to the reproductive possibilities of jellyfish, from the intimate, human body to those protections and offerings our physical and emotional selves require: sexy and passionate, flawed and vulnerable. “Signs of aging on my human body / are live gifs of the Age.” she writes, as part of the sequence “Impersonal lubricant,” a poem that writes, further on:

Live jellies have no brains,

float blindly

but they can fall asleep, can shed

nerve toxins to defend the colony

and triggered by light

at dawn or dusk

their see-thru pump-domes

simulcast eggs and sperm

into tolerant solution.

Sexual jellies. Some jellyfish

invisible by day

do phosphoresce in darkness.

They could [be] hurt [you]

if you mined them

for the phosphorus

that burns the skin in war.

In a recent piece for LitHub, “On Exploiting the Labor of a Dear Friend, Who is Also a Poet,” Wagner’s friend Rebecca Wolff (the editor/publisher of FENCE Books) offers her own take on Wagner’s work, including this new collection:

In one long poem the city has sex with everything, as in an old Playboy letter producing an exhausted, grateful polis. In one poem Wagner likens herself to the Amazon River after a rain storm, “Piranhas climb up your pee stream / when you pee into it.” This is not the flaccid 90s move of indeterminate lyric self-definition, for Wagner is in relation and recognizing the relations of power, material conditions, and bodies within. She also recognizes language traditions, and subverts them too, not in received subversion but in a specific bodied formal vocabulary of presence in minutia, her close reading of the labor of reading the garden, reading and writing the leaving of the garden to trespass on the golf course, for example.