Microreviews
Poetry Microreviews The Book of a Hundred
Hands
Cole Swensen
University of Iowa Press, $16 (paper)
If half of contemporary poetry’s readership is of the opinion that book-length works on a specific theme, such as Bryan Dietrich’s Krypton Nights (a treatment of the Superman mythos) or Dan Beachy-Quick’s Spell (a reimagining of Moby-Dick), tend to exhaust their possibilities somewhere around page 20, it might be fair to assume that the other half considers these “projects” to be the very portal through which an artist makes her way to great art. In The Book of a Hundred Hands, the ever-investigatory Cole Swensen considers the human hand and delivers no fewer than 100 takes on it, from its prehistory to its depiction in contemporary painting. But as a wheel’s spokes might be thought of as arriving at the hub as well as departing from it, so for Swensen understanding the hand is equal to forgetting what habit has always told her is true. She therefore asks seemingly obvious questions about aspects of the hand more commonly understood in practice (how it appears, how it moves, and what its functions are) instead of only seeking out the rare and esoteric. Swensen recovers the counterintuitive impulse to detach herself from her own experience with the hand, suspending her belief that she is never physically severed from it so that she may marvel at its beauty and its function: “Begin by sweeping the hand around from the back / in a wide arc; you can, in this way, imply everything in sight.” One cannot help but do the same with this book. It not only illuminates the hand per se but also serves to illustrate the hand’s necessary relevance to countless other objects and ideas, a relational dynamic not unfamiliar to the lecturer Alphonso Lingis, from whose work Swensen has drawn. Lingus suggests that the world is made up of numerous self-contained and mutually external levels to which humans must adjust their perceptions and ideas, an approach Swensen follows here with characteristic perfection and dazzling effect.
—Rob Schlegel
The Pitch
Tom Thompson
Alice James Books, $14.95 (paper)
“Were we looking for a pure icon of the senses?” asks the speaker in Tom Thompson’s “Stoplights Are Gaping with Cold (My Observers).” “No, we were looking for you, Tom Thompson,” the speaker continues, “False image composed of fresh motion.” This last phrase could define the essence of The Pitch, the follow-up to Thompson’s debut, Live Feed. Readers of these poems will find themselves accepting any number of fabricated images due in part to the strange velocities at which they are encountered, but even more so because of the salesmanship with which they are presented. Selling is the mode in which this collection operates, and what is offered includes “an amazement of corner offices,” “roof gardens / blown open stem,” and “water towers . . . shivering like egg sacs.” What becomes clear as Thompson’s speeches accrue is that this is a salesman who gives you no reason to be afraid to get in your new car and drive off the lot. The Pitch is not a con game, not even a satire, but a celebration, as in the title poem: “See how this view enacts you? Everything impending, / as I said, where vision ladles a wicked pastoral / across the conference table, where deals are swapped / with delicate packets of parakeet breath, / where the silence between contraries is infused / entirely with pleasure.” And once Thompson establishes our trust in his method, he varies the product, delivering cooler, reflective moments, such as “It was country then / or went by its name. Is it I think or remember? Not both,” or sometimes something stranger, like the exclamation “The police set about their work so tenderly!” that begins “A Fillip. A Fandango.” Ultimately, if one asks what The Pitch is a pitch for, the answer seems to be the same as the reason for crowd in “Crowds Surround Us”: “The crowd’s object, its point, / is always vanishing into its own mass.” Or, in other words, The Pitch sells itself.
—Samuel Amadon
Marabou
Jane Yeh
Carcanet, $11.95 (paper)
“A natural / Craver of attention” and “A professional moaner,” Jane Yeh announces herself as a bold, seductively moody practitioner of the dramatic monologue in Marabou, her impressive first book. Yeh’s poetic acumen ensures that these poems—abounding with historical and imaginary characters, from Anne of Austria to a teen spy and rare ceramics—focus not on the eccentricity of their subject matter but on the dilemma of creating a voice. The self-described “disappearing girl” of “The Pre-Raphaelites” asks “Why am I, why am I caught / In the hinge of this world . . .?” while a shoemaker coyly explains himself, “if I am, on occasion, a touch / Temperamental it might be because I was kitted-out / For frivolity.” Readers will experience something akin to vertigo in Yeh’s audacious enjambments, which, in their sudden swerving, adds another jolt to her verbal intensity. What becomes clear in Marabou is that artifice, linguistic or otherwise, appears at first to shape identity but in the end reveals it to be radically mutable. This has insidious consequences, as is evident in the ambitious “Substitution,” which charts the uneasy transference of power from master to slave. Yeh balances cleverness (“the Usurper’s signature scent, Hypnosis”) with the unsettling: “Eventually I could not be distinguished from the Usurper. The way to tell us apart // Is that she is evil and smiles only at her slaves. Also the way to tell us apart // Is that she is controller of the slaves, which is what I should rightfully be.” Throughout Marabou Yeh’s speakers resist who they “should rightfully be” and slyly acknowledge that the poetic I is more limitless than limiting. But if Yeh’s masterful ventriloquism often suggests the liberty and thrill of inhabiting multiple identities, “Substitution” coolly reminds us that the differencing work of impersonation might ultimately highlight the fungibility of identities, an idea exploited by those who seek simultaneously to reinforce identity and to render difference and particularity irrelevant.
—Jennifer Chang
Embryoyo
Dean Young
Believer Books, $14 (paper)
Toward the end of Embryoyo, Dean Young writes that “Poetry is an art of beginnings and ends. You want middles, read novels. You want happy endings, read cookbooks.” Adding to Young’s oeuvre of zany, electric discontinuities, these cluttered, cacophonous, often delightful poems—which doff their hat to Kenneth Koch and Marianne Moore—ricochet like pinballs with their own eclectic brand of kinesis. They’re obsessed with metamorphosis, and as they unspool inside their own labyrinths, they are filled with “a sense of the fragility of all life / and the persistence of styrofoam.” Their dominant strategy is to gather specimens of lyric “ephemeroptera”—the title and subject of one poem—and arrange them, as he says later, “primarily by zigzags.” The result is an “ornery fritillary” of “hello-goodbye,” inexhaustible marginalia rattling at breakneck speed. Greeting parts of the world only to bid them farewell, these poems enact an unsettled dialogue with transience, which Young uses as an engine for event. Some of Young’s lines read like skewed koans: “From the practical point of view / the law of conservation of matter is a joke” (from “Paradise Poem”). Others deal in wordplay: “A cactus has less in common with static / than a thistle with a kestrel” (from “Bunny Tract”). Still others operate on skewed premises: “I’ll never drink tequila / until I can fly again.” And a few cut with the melancholy of what all this passing can add up to: “The puppy is gone and in its place a dog / then the dog is gone. Friendship / on a deadline, suntans, milk. / The daughter helps her mother up the stairs” (from “Deadline”). Regardless of their rhetorical pitch, these poems offer a biting homage to the shuffle and baffle of a time-lapse world.
—Tess Taylor
Why Speak?
Nathaniel Bellows
W.W. Norton, $13.95 (cloth)
Nathaniel Bellows’s poetic debut opens with a return to pastoral childhood haunts, where the idyllic is tinged with violence, where “the air was sharp with blood and howls and struggle.” Bellows, who has a novelist’s ear for sturdy, rhythmic lines, writes with wide-eyed candor of both the marvelous and the grotesque. In “Removal,” a bathtub is lowered out of an old house, “dangling like a weighing calf. // We all cheered as it floated above us, cupping our hands / as the tiny feet came to rest in our palms.” Later, the three lost fisherman of “Plum Island” “wash up dyed blue as eggs, the rings // around their salted eyes, the moons beneath their nails / wear the deep bruise of sweet pitted fruit.” Carefully stitched together, sometimes with visible effort, these poems begin to ask if the past can ever be stable, since we are perpetually reconstituting our memories from the evidence at hand, be it art or music or the natural world. Bellows’s recollections are just as likely to be inspired by the paintings of Howard Pyle or Winslow Homer as by a drive into the countryside; across these found and created spaces the poet sketches a never-quite-coherent personal history punctuated by piano lessons and funerals and encounters with the human and animal form. For Bellows, the activity of memory is a bit like playing the piano blindfolded, as the speaker does in “Music Lessons”: “The notes, like swarms of bees I would pluck / from the air, replacing each in its comb, / my fingers thin and careful, piecing together the hive.” Something is always missing—a fact, an explanation, a person—so the search for past similarities and present echoes has no choice but to forage a way around the inexplicable.
—Kathryn Crim
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