GENEVIEVE KAPLAN Reviews
Fiddle is Flood by Lauren Gordon
(Blood Pudding Press, 2015)
a gunless tea by Marco Giovenale
(Dusie, 2007)
The Goddess can be Recognized by her
Step by Sarah Mangold
(Dusie, 2014)
Tracks by Logan Ryan Smith
(Ypolita 2009)
1. Lauren Gordon, Fiddle is Flood (Blood Pudding Press,
2015)
Fiddle is Flood begins almost earnestly,
referring to images of “prairie grass” and “Pa’s fiddle,” but as we read on we
realize Gordon isn’t just reminding us of old-fashioned country life, she is
specifically evoking Laura Ingalls Wilder. Readers of the Little House series will be pleased to find “pretty strawberry /
leaf molds,” “Ellen’s calf,” “Lazy Lousy Liza Jane,” “a doll made out of a corn
cob,” and “blackbirds, baked in a pie”
in Gordon’s volume. In the 22 poems in Fiddle
is Flood Gordon does more than merely reference Wilder’s life and writings
– speaking through a newly-voiced Laura, Gordon reframes and contemporizes her
source material: “Almanzo all man / wants to know me,” she writes, and “my
spirit grass / laid flatter than Minnie Driver’s chest.”
Those
who have followed the Little House
books and Ingalls family history will be aware of the deep losses sustained by
the family on the prairie, and Gordon certainly doesn’t skirt over these
sadnesses. In the first poem in the collection we learn that “Baby Freddie”
“straightened out his little // body and was dead,” and later we are reminded
that sister Mary “has stupid eyes, too.” We read about miscarriages, “tiny
graves in cellars,” and Gordon adds new perspectives, emphasizing that “the old
Indian” “has a name had a name
once.” Even idolized Pa can’t escape this less-sanitized version of Laura’s
life: “Pa was a butcher / and a judge / and a saint / and a boy,” and
importantly, all these things simultaneously.
Gordon’s
ability to make new and compelling poetry out of such a well-known prose series,
adding her voice alongside Laura Ingalls Wilder’s, is impressive, and
well-worth our consideration.
2. Marco Giovenale, a gunless tea (Dusie 2007)
Subtitled
“[23 drafts from an undrained radon prosimetron trap],” we know from the title
page that Giovenale’s text is going to be a little weird. Continuing through
the chapbook, we find there is no “tea” in a
gunless tea, but there are “ice cubes” and “a bowl of onions.” The “guns”
are actually “knights Templar,” terrorism (“ahmed bush
plotted to kill ahmed”), and “tyranny.” Additional themes
include money, buying power, and foods; there is also technical language: “[complete]
333243 tpb web search,” Giovenale writes, “object. nonsubject [of t(f)].” And,
there is quite a bit of nonsense, though this doesn’t mean the poems are not
refined. In “naïve oven,” a prose poem in six parts, we see an attention to
form, evidenced through innovative use of colons: “: you sure it will work?
dude : sure : catch the triangle grapes : don’t use words any longer.” Too, the
series “to the real defence of socrates” begins with a lettered and numbered
poem:
01
n | the memorabilia that socrates might have been acquitted of
02
a | with me: this confounded socrates, they say; this villainous
03
b | hermogenes, the friend of socrates, that he had no wish to
04
c | a defence, and also that socrates himself declared this to
05
r | accustomed manner’ in which socrates spoke in ‘the agora and
The list of ideas progresses in an
unaccustomed way, lacking subjects and objects, offering end quotes though a
quotation—as far as we know—has never actually begun. In this poem Giovenale’s
ordering form of letters and numbers calls attention to the constructedness of
the lines that follow; the language included feels cut and pasted, assembled
rather than necessarily written. Giovenale’s experiments throughout a gunless tea cumulate in what is
essentially “a growing zen effect” of paradoxical language, repetition,
variation, and contrast.
3. Sarah Mangold. The Goddess can be Recognized by her Step
(Dusie 2014)
The Goddess can be Recognized by
her Step consists of a single long poem which begins by introducing
concepts borne out later in the book: “diorama / intimacy from artifice,”
“peephole nostalgia,” and
“Arrested moments of social relations.” The poem continues on to belie a
preoccupation with animals, reproduction, “pregnancy and gestation / the
promises of monster” but explored through “intense scientific work,”
“memories,” and “symbolic transgressions.” Mangold reminds us that monsters are
sympathetic creatures: “I do / not think of the monster / as without an
unconscious.”
Mangold’s work is never predictable, and her
poem unfolds through a number of images – “x-ray like vision / furs her
landscape,” “trailing with frail young feet,” “separate sorts of plants / stand
out before your eyes,” and “Gold-dust and rum” – that are punctuated by italicized
sections. Lines like “Quotation marks
verify the existence / of words in
another reality” draw attention to their artifice through both the font
style and the content expressed. We realize that one set of italicized lines, “Goodall and her mother made / 2000 spam sandwiches for // fleeing Belgians…,”
comes directly from Donna Haraway’s essay “The Promises of
Monsters: A Regenerative Politics for Inappropriate/d Others” (read it at Scribd). Recognizing this source
text reminds us that, as Mangold writes, “Any monster is the absorption and transformation of
another.” Even as the speaker of the poem protests to diminish her role – “I
was only a beetle / and fetish hunter” –, it turns out that the “Goddess” “recognized by her step” in the title and the recurring monster
within the poem, have much in common: Mangold continually insists that transformation
and absorption make way for a new being and this slim volume becomes a
beautiful sort of new being – a “companion monster” – in itself.
4. Tracks. Logan Ryan Smith. (Ypolita 2009)
The “tracks” in Smith’s chapbook are
literal; the poems here describe “a station,” the “breath of exhaled air/
from…the tunnel / arriving / before each train,” the “tunnel glowing red…under
the red earth,” “the INBOUND / and the OUTBOUND.” But the trains in Tracks are neither picturesque nor idealized,
and it turns out that “on the tracks / the wheels crush the rat’s head.” We
read how “the lights and mirrored / windows [reflect] my / loose jaw and dumb
tongue / vibrating ceaselessly.” Smith does not let us turn away from the
danger and horror that can happen underground, writing “Today / a woman was pushed into the tunnel.” The trains on
Smith’s tracks are filled not only with “lepers draped in shrouds” but also
populated by characters including Apollo and Hermes and Echo and Pan, who
interact with and confront the narrator. “I DO NOT TRUST / THE LEPERS AND GODS
/ SURROUNDING ME,” the narrator shouts.
Smith’s
content is bold, and Tracks is filled
with many tragedies, many dreams, and many voices. More than the disturbing subject
matter, though, what makes this chapbook worth reading are some of the author’s
phrases, which linger in our heads. Lines like “bodies / trapped / in a light /
flicker,” “all the lepers // glimmer,” or “my head, my neck, / the dark / and the light /
dissolve” set an ominous mood, while
showing attention to both sound and scene.
*****
Genevieve Kaplan is
the author of In the ice house
(Red Hen Press, 2011), winner of the A Room
of Her Own Foundation's poetry publication prize, and settings for
these scenes (Convulsive Editions, 2013), a chapbook of
continual erasures. She lives in southern California and edits the Toad Press
International chapbook series, publishing contemporary translations of poetry
and prose.
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