“Am I capturing all of history in this gesture?” Am I the Hamlet of Miami to Havana’s Hemingway? Am I “covering” my parents like a bottlecap twisted tight or like an ambivalent independent journalist? Am I writing a “manifesto” of two minds? To have and have not a memory box of matrilineal sonnets. To be or not to be on the right side of geopolitical hindsight. Forgive me for not following. Leslie’s mission is to rescue the FOX News generation from their proxy state’s proxy wars. She does and she doesn’t have the stomach for it. She’ll get shitfaced and reflect “poorly.” She’ll provide perspective on what it means to “defect.” She’ll claim her place at the table, share meals and tell stories, but also be able to negotiate family business. Feminize the cemeteries. Declare fidelity to oregano. Give a climate context to regime change. Conjugate sea dreams and threat displays. Wear a many-colored beret. Have You Been Long Enough at Table by Leslie Sainz (Tin House, 2023).
WAIL SONG
This year, I swear, I’m gonna wear my body camera at Sea World to see Pip jump ship (and all of the consecutive sequels that’ll inevitably perpetuate through God’s internet). This year, I’m gonna spit off the witness stand, switch the “p”s and “q”s in Pequod, confuse prepositions and conjunctions, jam Susan Howe and Amiri Baraka, be even slipperier speaking, face fear-ward, go ontologically overboard. Can you fathom being sentient contraband fallen to the bottom of this mysterious energy drink or the most existentially tenuous ink bottle? Can you even begin to begin to scratch the surface of your swallowed Ouroboros tongue? Or draw from your weakened lungs any mutinous iteration of a future tense, not-capitalist, not-racist, Atlantis? We’re here at the tail end of our land-lubbering, ailing and wallowing, wailing and blubbering. Hey wailers, says Chaun, dip in your tears. Sink into thinking, trouble the water, follow the wake. Wail Song by Chaun Webster (Black Ocean, 2023).
FUDGE
What do I mean by “intelligent life”? Wrong answers only. Educated guesses re: the word sessility. Eliot’s “hollow men” scrolling through their group chat. Trees liquidating lumber. Doing numbers at a spelling bee. Simping for Whole Foods. Whimpering lint. A line of wriggling spleens on a dingdong debate stage. Like when that fly landed on Mike Pence’s stupid helmet head. Anti-maskers with long COVID. Finding a habitable Planet Fitness. Pedestrian fretting. Psychobabble. Paying attention. Spraying cats with a spritz bottle. Splitting hairs. Watching basketball “in the bubble.” Playing basketball “in the zone.” Sisyphus sitting in city traffic – twenty years after 9/11 – texting poems into his cellphone. Always having a fresh supply of hotel notepads. Being able to differentiate Fridays from Fridays. Sludging through the language. Branding the pandemic. Seeing inside a stranger’s ear. Saying, hey, all you can do is use agave. Penning a few haiku. Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead (Publishing Genius, 2023).
Toska
Gesturing at… everything. Like Stevie Nicks singing “Wicked Game” or “Chelsea Hotel #2” to the Decadent Friends of Poetry. Alina’s GGG, but for the incessant precarity and lingering ennui, feeling her way through early 20th century cafes with early 21st century lighting. Third eye-black, tight leather jacket, half-wolf, half-glittering, spits out, tits out, kicking her boot-heels heaven-ward. The word “untethered” on her lips. She shares anecdotes about daily dings, failed tenderings, grotesque debt, insatiable doubt. Mosh pits and situationships. Brute experiential truths. She satellites from the trapeze like a cosmic bath bomb lobbed into a tub-full of crabs. Subject to objectification, or worse, spiritually-draining jobs. Alina on an abject train. Alina in the Russian rain. Alina in a tattered rom-com. Alina in a pom pom hat. Here’s a toast, to “Toska,” to revving the narrative engine, to going on your nerve, to abundant, ruinous, love. Toska by Alina Pleskova (Deep Vellum, 2023).
Harm Eden
Like a monk in the matrix. On the virtues of virtuality. Some classic couplets before the Fall. The quantum art historian whistles past the forest, click-clicks on a grainy wood mouse, lassos the perimeter, close-ups into its disintegrating pores. Fine print. Poison words. We are at the mercy of our overlords, i.e. ourselves, destroyers of worlds. Clumsy Omegas with myth-algorithms and all of these imperfect allegories. Art is commerce, Main Street’s a sculpture garden, the skyline’s four-dimensional, and nature sinlessly mediated. Jesus is a sim! Satan is a category! Me? I was vaccinated at the mall in a hollowed-out Lord & Taylor. No skin off my knee. Just cost an arm and a leg. Harm Eden? She’s in her HazMat house, wearing a mask of abstraction, letting politics disrupt philosophy. State-sanctioned murder. Infinite Infowars. There’s a bear loose in O’Hare. The Tower of Babel has broadband. Hey, good pandemic. Thanks for asking. Harm Eden by Jennifer Nelson (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2021).
Outside Voices, Please
Dictators gonna dictate. Tone police gonna police tone. “Tell a soul” is usually preceded by the words “didn’t” or “don’t.” I say, politely, bite the hand that feeds you these placating, sedating, bullshit tidbits. Chew it up, spit it out, yell for help, and continue yelling for the righteous slaying of history’s holy hellbent death cult. Pretty please. Use your voice or lose your voice, Valerie slurs. The mouth on her. In spiteful, pernicious, American English, she confronts the players of Disney’s High School Musical while running through a collection of mean mugs for the keyboard trolls. Dialectic of dialects and unredacted reenactments. Truth or dare, Valerie swears. Save the drama for your mama’s homophonically-translated generational trauma. Centuries of snakes pitted meek against meeker. So the speaker of this poem’s (scared, but brave) kicking over gravestones, unburying the perpetrators, and putting ‘em on record. outside voices, please by Valerie Hsiung (Cleveland State Poetry Center, 2021).
Path of Totality
Paint it black. The devil’s been known to darken a door. I’ve been alone like a rat carcass in a crowd of crows. Illegible to the morning sun. Heavier than the word “forlorn.” We're minimalist mammals with puny fucking headlamps, editing “through the night” and “after the fact,” along the pin-thin balance beam of the present’s underbelly. Rafting down a steady stream of piss. Swerving around the yellow line in the center of I-90. It’s aesthetic desolation. Old Testament shit. The universe’s so, so, cold, and luck be a stray bolt of lightning. Like they say. There ain’t no telling. To want to live is to be vivisected, and we allow ourselves vivisecting, nonetheless. Writers and readers, like algae blooms congregating on the blank page, like a self help meeting for melancholic human centipedes. The poem is a safe place to confess, to process, to proclaim, to hone the fleeting, flaming, moment, however tragic, into a monument of necessary ash. Path of Totality by Niina Pollari (Soft Skull Press, 2022).
I Can Focus If I Try
Myopic rhymes with biopic. I’m Emerson’s eyeball looking down at my cellphone and calling it the Cellph. A little teardrop of transcendental philosophy: “Anyone who’s ever seen anything has never seen anything really.” That’s Flatt’s futile freaking attempt to destabilize the attention economy. He’s like Tron materializing into the system to turn the comments off. Mute them dishonorable mentions. Because our babies bottle online, our parents play death like it’s Tetris, and y’all past the horizon of being able to hear your own thoughts. Too much on the to-watch list. Shit, not enough memory for memories. Touch—screen; face—surface; time—line; space—single. The darkroom of the developing mind has the dimensionality of an office park. So he’s kidnapped me for an interval, trapped me in a glass jewel case, and snapped a few dimes in his Euclid jukebox. Tapping on the keys like the last deer in a cemetery. I appreciate him for trying. I Can Focus If I Try by Michael Flatt (Kinfe Fork Book, 2023).
Loner Forensics
Autofiction as autopsy: autopsy as a Paul Auster novel. Like Sin City meets Inside Out. Or Disappeared on Discovery ID, but every episode of the series is about a separate Thea gone missing. She got wise, if misanthropic. Same diff. One second, at a standing desk, exhausting adjunct possibilities, sensory deprived. The next second, simultaneously live-streaming her doppelgangers and dissolving into existential defunctitude. This is how the project became a “procedural,” and the reader a deputized detective. Fully justified like Raylan Givens in the new City Primeval. Okay no. I’m more that conspiracy meme from Always Sunny. As the days go by, me with my fake nose-mustache-glasses and mood ring, interviewing a whole tarot deck of suspects. Collecting perspectives from the polis ventriloquists and the sad ass expats, the starlings in the polluted atmosphere and the centaur in the sewer. The evidence leads to a doorway: the doorway leads you to a shadow. Loner Forensics by Thea Brown (Northwestern University Press, 2023).
Losing Music
“There’s no such thing as a pure word.” There’s some hard-won satori for you, my friend, the underlying unsurety, as you’re searching for the stories within the story. Lurching along that well-traveled road, the self, through those exploding otoliths, to the roar inside your head. Notes almost drowning in an ocean of mean ol’ meaning. Take, for instance, the word “fathom” and coincide it, infinitely, with “I can’t.” Or consider how the body-soul goes on mysteriously conundrumming. Alack! We’re always-already in error, and the world is vertiginously contingent. Here’s our young hero now, reciting Shakespeare through a migraine, shedding snakeskin, down the drain. And here’s the libertine from way back when, sifting shibboleths, learning to better interpret his “fits of giddiness.” In the intermissions, he’s turned a little Swifty (as in, stan of Jonathan Swift) and more magnanimous (as in, compassionate to the mishmash of many Johns to come). Losing Music by John Cotter (Milkweed Editions, 2023).
SHARE THE WEALTH
This week, a bunny was massacred at the end of our driveway. My wife cleaned up the gutsack and put it out with the trash. Compared to that mess, I’m a Bezosian bon vivant eating decently in the animal kingdom. Compared to the Odyssey, though, my time passes like a Greek Salad. “What’s the lesson again?” Something about bliss inequality. Something about kissing the windshield. Something about the miracle of a Polaroid or the lifespan of a goldfish in the grand ol’ fishbowl. Share the Wealth falls down the stairs like a Nude Descending into the political void. Maureen and Co. (i.e. barretted grandpa, coven of literature lovers, Un-Nerudan Mainers, Calvin and Hobbes) put on a masterclass in uselessness with a prize-winning pear pinned to their blessed blazers. She’s a woman-child sluicing Wild Turkey with her “who knows?” and “what nows?” and wanton wheatgrass mustache. She’s a lazy modernist, lousy with poems, talking back to God. Share the Wealth by Maureen Thorson (Veliz Books, 2022).
The Animal of Existence
The word “impending” deadends. The word “doom” looms. Immemorial memorial. A crow lands on a mannequin’s headstone. An albatross assumes a new name – Emo Gnostic – to document “the long pilgrimage to nowhere.” He (the human) reads ritually by nightlight in limitless space and tries to write the most monolithic nocturne for the nothingness. Then wakes up crying in some European Existentialist’s twentieth century apartment to every one of his sentences undone. Totally. Same, bro. This is, what it is, to exist, to exit, into the busy city, part tread-milling flâneur, part trench-coated wraith, your mind racing, but filled with asbestos and fogged with wreaths of melancholy lint. The “I” has a perpetually mournful hangdog visage. We’re first-person players born to take a sickle to the psyche and a scythe to the language. Like a writhing rotary. As the one hand “neithers,” the other hand “nors.” The Animal of Existence by Jared Daniel Fagen (Black Square Editions, 2022).
Fugue and Strike
Pick a scab, strike a match, write your shit, see what sticks. Joe and I are stomach-bugged of hearing Blue Lives Matter in the fugging Buffalo News. Toilet flush. Night shift. We’re poets in an Erie County holding pattern crushing books and suffering from cereal consumption. We’re looking for the word “common” buried somewhere in the word “economy.” We’re secretly locating “weak points in capitalism’s metabolism,” but then pumping more contaminated content back into “the burning manifold.” We’re coworkers dumping our excess text on pharmaceutical execs and selling the runoff as running commentary. The group chat is in ruins. They’re headquartered in an excavated Taco Bell, rolling around in eggshells, coffee grounds, and packing peanuts. Because that’s “the job”: being force-fed to oblivion by polymer deities, purging listicles in purgatory, and when Joe’s prose gets pristine, rise like an army of the dead. Fugue and Strike by Joe Hall (Black Ocean, 2023).
Bird/Diz
Pop in a Bebop cassette. Press “fast and solo.” My eyes rolling back in a trance. Older Matthew (my high school girlfriend’s brother) telling younger Matthew (me) to read Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and listen to Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie’s “Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts, Salt Peanuts.” Now, I’m actually a poet on the road, with Warren, who says, “Miles’ smiles will cut you.” To be virtuosos of non-violent masculinity, word wizzes, we scan the American scene for racial markers while whetting our ancestral Sharpies. Postmodernity, afterhours, playing Blackout poetry on a blues harp in the Playboy Mansion. As they say, players gonna play. Half a century later, tap-tap-tapping the keyboard keys, re-arranging hand-me-downs, banging out jazz puns and jazz metaphors for an audience of white clappers. Sounds like, sounds like, found money. But he’s chord-changing, now, contrapuntally, between the one who died of righteous anger, and the one who lived with righteous joy. Bird/Diz by Warren C. Longmire (BUNNY, an imprint of Fonograf Editions, 2022).
A Horse at Night
Cain’s contained in Calvino’s desert diary. Klane’s resting under a blanket screen-staring at his blank Etch-A-Sketch. Amina and I, et al., among the coyotes, setting our intention to sit-with-it, that is, the vast question, what is the self unburdened from personality? An only child poly-locating further and further into the word “pasture.” A slimmer and slimmer hologram swimming in a vat of nature’s miso soup. The lingering, tingling, residue when you’ve been utterly immersed, but then ease out of the greatest grassiest bath. A roll call of solitary women, always en medias res, in various states of couch-lolling, their various pets napping on their various laps, while they look through each other’s books and catfish each other’s characters. Not a plot. Not a pure presence. Not a mother nor daughter. Not the sentence’s author. We read her beach-reading Borges and then see ourselves beach-reading “a sense of something else” entirely. A Horse at Night by Amina Cain (Dorothy, 2022).
All the Ordinariness
I just cannot with this national nothingness. The work-before-work, at my desk, at dusk, tracking empty packages in a gratitude journal. The work-after-work, cracking open your numbskull, scratching off lotto tickets with your unluckiest penny, bedraggledly busking, for the betterment of all words. In the middle, keep on keeping on, catching heartbreaks, licking wounds, picking skin, enduring the necessary 10,000 paper cuts. Tony takes Maggie Smith’s “Good Bones” to the home woodshop and gives it that Waldrop-y choppiness. Tony parses his personally-customized clusterfuck like he has a smart Clark Coolidge app. The colloquial is littered with booby-traps, Scooby Snacks, border walls, and cached trash. It’s ordinary to have no clue what’s happening wherefore. As an alternative, the poems broker a controlled generality. Their mantra: to compromise, to be compromised. Ask Jack Derrida if it does or it doesn’t make a difference. All the Ordinariness by Tony Mancus (The Magnificent Field, 2022).
Quietly Between
A gray April morning filtered through dirty-ass Microsoft windows. It’s a great day to orient the paper “landscape” and reflect upon my relationship to my relationship to nature. So I sspprriinngg outside these pandemically-ossified turtleshell parentheticals and tell myself to tell myself: “Alas!” And then: “Take a picture, it’ll last longer!” Get blasted with some classically grandiose feels and then face-planted with a little humble pie. Let’s connect to the elements like Larry Eigner in a windbreaker pondering the Heideggerian fourfold. Or wander about Olson’s open field with Rebecca Solnit as your long-lost spirit guide. We pause, draw straws, and then are sent off to explore the postcard-able textures of our state quarter. Look up: a summons into infinite space. Look down: a summons into sacred burial grounds. Look beyond the horizon line: a summons to take the doggone geological perspective. Make a book of swan songs and hope they become fossils. Quietly Between by Megan Kaminski, Brad Vogler, Lori Anderson Moseman, and Sarah Green (A Viewing Space, 2022).
For the Shrew
Overheard: Does the sun still shine if everyone is living in a bunker underground? Translation is a process whereby words generate and decay. Me and my furry friends, anonymous plants and animals, purely penpals, are non-communicative readers communing with Lyn Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure.” We’re caterpillaring spelunkers spending precious final days, hours, minutes, seconds, close listening to Anna via Alex dipping their wormwood-tipped pine needles in vegetable matter. Ears to the permafrost, hairs standing on end, hard-of-hearing, but this is hard to hear, and not for our ears, anyway. The ecosystem echoes their clandestine spylines. At high noon, they sneak into the pores of your skin and trip a sequence of sequences i.e. consequences. I now want to recognize (pre-cognize?) the Speaker of the House, distinguished member of the true shrew family, leader of the tiniest avant-garde, first mouse on the moon. For the Shrew by Anna Glazova trans. Alex Niemi (Zephyr Books, 2022).
Voice Notes
Adam’s at the altar telling tall tales. I am awash in this inky atmosphere, strands of wistful mystery, a rhapsody of revision as it happens. He has a wizard’s earworm, famous mouthfeel, and his sights set on the apple fell from that dead tree. Can you see him: twenty-something, counting syllables in bed, biting on bottomless coffee, skywriting behind wired eyelids. Now: handsome and charming in Cambridge, mussed with a crush, crisscrossing the country, amidst our mythical American ampersands, on a morning commute through mountainous emptiness, conjuring a family from the whirling ephemera of the world’s memory. There are lyrics to commemorate meals, seal purchases, capture love, offer prophecies. Letter sounds stretch from the heart-of-the-matter to the farthest satellite electron and then are accordion squeezed into an impenetrable Parmenidean One. It’s all a blur, obscure, gone in th’blink’v’a’twinkling’i. Voice Notes by Adam Golaski (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023).
I Feel Fine
Line! Life is a miracle and/or a mirage. A random thought balloon makes a fake moon landing in meat space. My ears popping over the bathroom sink, I think therefore I suck, I suck, I suck. You should’ve seen your face… seeing your face… seeing your face… comic book versions of yourself, a bunch of scrunchy-looking motherfuckers, on a futile mission to retrieve the exactly right words from wherever they’ve been saved… stored… stuck. Writing towards the disordered world. “How’s the patient today?” Properly medicated, nonetheless a little punchy. I stay with her and her inner editor. We play guessing games, feeling for the misplaced caesuras, copying the choppy rhythms of social interaction, naming that actor, naming that film, without even searching IMDB. Olivia Newton John. Steven Spielberg’s E.T. Whitesnake’s “Here I Go Again.” When the wheels can’t stop spinning, remember, we’ll be there, your ideal readers. Pinky swear. I Feel Fine by Olivia Muenz (Switchback Books, 2023).
