Strand
Craig Dworkin
Roof Books, $12.95 (paper)

Of the five pieces in Strand, Craig Dworkin did not write the third—Starke R. Hathaway and J.C. McKinley did in 1942. They are the authors of The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, a series of true–false statements still frequently used by mental-health professionals. Dworkin reproduces these statements as unindented prose: “I enjoy stories of adventure. Sometimes I feel as if I must injure either myself or someone else. I read the Bible several times a week. . . .” Dworkin didn’t quite write Strand’s first piece either: “Shift” is a chapter from an undisclosed geology textbook with keywords transplanted from a linguistics textbook, also undisclosed. The fourth piece is a procedural form “based on the mesositic of John Cage and Louis Mink,” wherein an unspecified translation of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty is given the treatment. The fifth piece, “Dure,” is 28 pages long and uses about six pages of citations identified in the “Sources” section at the end of the book. Only the second piece, “Ar,” seems wholly imagined and arranged by Dworkin. Strand therefore asks the reader to reconsider if not abandon the notion of authorship as both the imagining of the words and of their arrangement, as Dworkin mostly only does the second in this book. Some readers will find this a cop-out; others will find it interesting, or else irrelevant—all language is borrowed to some extent, and Dworkin’s only more so, etc. That said, Dworkin’s shifting of words from their original, intended contexts sometimes generates intensely layered, fine-tuned effects but sometimes seems less artfully deployed, especially in “Legion”: is the language of psychological diagnostics being mocked, demonized (Mark 5:9, “My name is Legion”), or merely recycled? This ambiguity of intent stems from the fact that Dworkin lets other voices speak through him, but we don’t hear much from Dworkin himself, aside from a vivid absence that raises more questions, such as when does arrangement alone involve enough risk, enough commitment, enough writing?

—James Wagner

*  *  *

Folding Ruler Star
Aaron Kunin
Fence Books, $12 (paper)

“If God is dead, then everything is permitted,” reads a popular refrigerator-magnet catchphrase often misattributed to Dostoevsky. If only that were the case in Aaron Kunin’s new book, Folding Ruler Star. Conceived as a Paradise Lost situated outside of ethics, Kunin’s poems are devoted to investigating shame—a kind of naturalized shame, psycho-physical and gut-wrenchingly embodied. This sense of shame not only makes itself known overtly through the poems’ subject matter but through their formal elements as well: chained to a five-syllable, staccato line confined in turn to three-line stanzas and punctuated only by parentheticals, each of the poems is compelled to face its own funhouse reflection—a poem which, while bearing the same title, is a distortion of the original, occasionally humorous but more often warped, painful, berserk. For example, in the first incarnation of the poem “Under the Lampshade,” the lampshade appears first as a simile: “(her slicker / gave the effect of / a lampshade).” Set in a kitchen, the poem has the air of a troubled domestic scene: “(every time she does / something to hurt him / she cries no stop you’re / hurting me).” In the poem en face, everything gets reversed: “he punishes them / because he believes / he should be punished / (categorical / imperative) he / seems to be wearing / a lampshade in place / of a raincoat.” Not only are the pronouns’ roles reversed, but the hypothetical lampshade in the first instance appears to have shifted into the literal while the poem itself has switched from a concrete scene to an abstract grouping of desires. Coupled with the constant reiteration of pain, guilt and punishment, the effect of such dynamic reversals is one of swinging over an open flame, suspended by a thread of spidersilk. And while there may not be a gray-bearded Puritan god to mete out fate in Folding Ruler Star, Kunin’s carefully crafted verses keep the reader tantalizingly close to the point of getting burned.

—Nicholas Bredie

*  *  *

My Kafka Country
Arielle Greenberg
Action Books, $12

Classic fairy tales are almost always cautionary, but they offer scant solace: even if you avoid getting eaten by the witch, you will still be living in a black forest filled with witches and worse. Arielle Greenberg’s My Kafka Century bristles with similarly grim threats and matter-of-fact strangeness. In “Me and Peter Lorre Down by the Schoolyard,” she writes in the voice of a pair of pederasts, detailing the garish excess of their methodology: “Know us, our terrible noses, our clown makeup: / we have no papers. We crawled out of the rat-hole.” As the title of the poem indicates, Greenberg is often as funny as she is frightening, and while she regularly references the tropes of folkloric horror, she is equally willing to add contemporary details and diction to her infernal potions. In “Shirley Temple, Black,” the poet receives a photo-portrait of the child star in which she “looked a little spooked,” and on which someone has written in script “that was supposed to be like a kid’s / but was more like a psychopath’s.” From there the speaker notes, “And I knew then that she was an ambassador to cannibals, / the entertainment director on my losingest cruise, / the shutters of my eyes banging on their ruffled hinges.” Greenberg’s poems often begin in whimsy and conclude in anxiety or terror, two tones she manages to induce with a preternatural calm, which in turn exacerbates rather than soothes the reader’s nerves. My Kafka Century is also as thick with the fog of Old Europe and the fate of its Jews, as the title would suggest—at one point the poet mentions how “the hole in my heart will gasp a song of old world violins”—but Greenberg expands upon this history to achieve a mastery of the dynamics of dread not limited to a single place or age. In “Honey,” she writes of being suffused “with time, / as another god passing through the many perfect / crypts and ambers I house beneath my skin.” It is in time, in these “crypts and ambers,” that Greenberg keeps treasures to inspire pleasure and nightmare both.

—Raymond McDaniel

*  *  *

Quipu
Arthur Sze
Copper Canyon Press, $15 (paper)

“Only when the poem is free of false emotion and confusion will the passions come into perspective.” That’s Lu Chi on refinement. “Revelation never comes as a fern uncoiling / a frond in mist; it comes when I trip.” That’s Arthur Sze on the same. Despite the centuries between them, what Quipu shares with Lu Chi’s Wen Fu—an emphasis on craftsmanship, poise, and correct placement and timing of the perfect gesture—supplies a necessary counterbalance to its obsession with simultaneity and chaos, the fact that “though things are not yet in their places / the truth sears his fingertips.” Thus Quipu reads as a meditation on equanimity when events past and present threaten “the balance of a life.” The quipu, an assemblage of “colored, knotted strings” that “hang off a primary cord,” served as a system of accounting and data storage for the Incas and in ancient Asian cultures; here it serves Sze as metaphor for lyric composition: “the mind ties knots, and I / follow a series of short strings to a loose end.” Sze’s list-laden sequences capture the world’s manifold facts one by one, then through discursive commentary exact from them a sense not only of aesthetic order but of universal cause and effect: “because a circle opens in all directions // blossoming yellow forsythia is the form and pressure of the hour.” And if the poems enact a system of accounting, if “these synapsed words are not the things / themselves but, sizzling, point the way,” that the passions precede the poems makes them no less poignant. Sze’s mode of arrangement ensures that readers see deliberation in artfulness and thus experience such arrangements as mindful practice. Given that “A single loss can ravel the mind with grief / and—meteor shower—hours days minutes seconds— / make us reach for white narcissi by the window,” the poems’ dilating and contracting spatiotemporal scales render the world dizzying, a difficult site from which to write beauty, which is to say how moving Quipu’s elegance really is: “it leopards the body.”

—Brian Teare

*  *  *

In the Middle Distance
Linda Gregg
Graywolf Press, $14

In the Middle Distance, Linda Gregg’s seventh collection of poems, turns its attention to a memory-occupied ground somewhere between the past and the present. “Real things” seen on evening walks on desert roads, the pale Aegean just before dark, or blackened logs from childhood beach bonfires—all these show up in Gregg’s book in a temporal middle distance, allowing the poet to make the very scope of memory her subject. Through memory, Gregg wonders how lost love can yield fresh meaning, especially in the poems that seem to recall her marriage to the poet Jack Gilbert. “It’s strange,” Gregg writes in “Arriving Again and Again Without Noticing,” “that my heart is as full / now as my desire was then.” But while memories of romantic, familial, and friendly relationships seem to fascinate Gregg with their continuing resonance, she apologizes bluntly for attending to the past, as in these lines from “The Other Excitement”: “If I go back into memory it’s not / because I like it, but because / that’s where the hard things are.” It’s this constant consideration of time that gives Gregg’s volume its remarkable beauty. The poet seems aware that being somewhere in body or mind always comes at the expense of not being somewhere else, and that this is life’s choice, always chosen but rarely acknowledged, and here beautifully suggested. These are hearts-of-poems, pared down to eight or 13 or 20 lines, given in direct hearts-of-sentences: “She decided to walk there . . .”; “No one really dies in the myths . . .” Gregg relies on fragments and abstract statements of fact to suggest the primacy of experience and to express her own reticence about communicating it. In the gorgeous and conflicted middle distance of Gregg’s poems, “the sun . . . is always going down,” and the speaker is walking and thinking of love and solitude and silence, leaving the reader to lavish in the charged intimacies of the moment.

—Dargie Anderson

Originally published in the July/August 2006 issue of Boston Review