Anvil and Rose 11
If This is the Age We End Discovery by Rosebud Ben-Oni. Alice James Books, 2021 ($17.95)
It’s rare to use delight to describe a new work of poetry in this touchy, faux optimistic age. Yet that’s exactly what this on-target, off-kilter collection, equal parts playground and burial ground, offers. Who else writes a title like “Poet Wrestling with Bunnicula in the Challenger Deep,” and follows it with a wicked combination of space and ocean exploration as colonial decimation, and sci-fi animal love poem? “Entwining on ocean floor/where they think all there’s to suck/are rotting whale bones. & molten/core. Unreached. Is what presses/my neck. To your teeth.” Then there’s one based on the cartoon travelers Rick and Morty, understanding the show’s loopy link of stupid, childish animation to depth and wit, even philosophy. “I’ve wed/my own body vermillion./Blushing and brickish electric-/plush,/these organs. Make my spleen a shrine/to excess.” Daft punctuation makes us skitter through this relentless poet-wrestling biosphere, infinite in time-space but structured by the poet’s savvy sense of line, a book given to keeping thematic grasp out of easy reach. It’s hard to co-opt a toon-tome like this, one that eludes categorization into any of the prevailing facile categories, those that force us all to be an inconvenient sociological fact.
Dēmos by Benjamín Naka-Hasebe Kingsley. Milkweed Editions, 2021 ($16)
Sometimes you want ever so much for a book to live up to its best moments. You read between scintillation and disappointment, wondering how it all got between the same covers. At its worst, this volume employs the harping phrase “my people,” and settles for worked-over tropes of police and genocide — newsworthy, in a topical sense, but having become exhausted in a poetic sense. The collection, in these places, brings no new insight to the concatenation of brutal media images that are blunting compassion, rather than sharpening it. That said, this book dazzles as a personal exploration of identity, living on the boundary between self and social. In one poem, the poet shows odd compassion for delinquents spotted outside his apartment window, vandalizing the speaker’s beater Mercedes. “Attempt after:/Attempt/to pry the ornament/from hood, paint-peeled…/a real sword in the stone scenario:/I lay back down/in bed and hope/within an anvil of a heart/that one boy will/free the silver:/And to him/it will be/Excalibur.” Genocide, military excess, scalping, as well as river salmon, a hard-ass father, and trash-talking on the pickup basketball blacktop, all get careful treatment, in an eclectic book bound by the author’s poetic force.
The Vault by Andres Cerpa. Alice James Books, 2021 ($17.95)
Two long poems, all lower case, double spaces between lines. Predictable line breaks, punctuation exactly where expected. All that remains is to put the text in cursive font. The bland title of the first poem is “Join Me.” I did, only to be faced with a series of letter poems to Julia, lamenting the depressive nature of love. First line: “my proclivity toward ruin has only increased with my distance from it.” “I became so used to the unrequited life…that I strain to sing in love.” e.e. cummings passes as avant-garde by comparison. There are poetic phenomena that are transient for a reason, yet the residue somehow hangs around, like a yearbook from 1978 that keeps getting reprinted every year, substituting names but not big-hair photos. It begs the question of what motivates a celebrated publisher of often challenging titles to put this on its list. Occasionally a phrase wells up, such as “the book of the dead,” and that’s the book I hope I’ll begin reading. This writer speaks reverently of “the space between language.” Language is a count noun, if you are speaking of, say, foreign languages. Otherwise, as an abstract noun, there is no in-between. In the case of The Vault, scant language registers as emptiness, a parenthesis without a sentence to enfold it.
A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure by Hoa Nguyen. Wave Books, 2021 ($18)
Suffused with sense remembrance, discreet and playful imagery, personal and lightly worn, this cape of a book is one Proust would have cloaked himself in could he have winnowed his words down to 118 sparely populated pages. “Tryouts for the Flying Motorist Artist Team” captures the rapture of a young woman using her bike to qualify. “Push and pedal / Climb high banked sides / to try again and fall / to try again / and fall / (running blood) / They said: ok, stop, / enough, you’re in!” An exuberant black and white paper photo of three such members, riding with no hands in the countryside, is included, falling out of the book and into your hand. There is an entire section of racing photos at the back devoted to the all-female troupe, as they and their motorbikes leap almost into the arms of the upper-deck spectators. Sound play slides through this volume. In “Spoken through the Cracked Eye”: “Drink from the stars / womb-woven song / silt-sift / silt gift / slit mouth pulled open / and grain pours out.” There is napalm and there are bar girls and mass graves, in discreet allusions to the political reality of this Vietnamese-American poet’s birthplace. Yet they are not dwelt on. Lust for life is stronger here, in a treasure that is lost and lost, only to be gained again and again.
The Sunflower Cast A Spell To Save Us From The Void by Jackie Wang. Nightboat Books, 2021 ($16.95)
“Cunt River.” “Without Tongue.” “Instead of Thickening My Skin I Buy a Neon Balaclava.” “The Sewer Rat Counter-Haunts the Prison by Nesting in Society’s Collapsing Aorta.” “Preliminary Notes on the Marxist White Boy Recognition System.” If ever a book could leap off the shelves on the basis of its sheer titles, this is that book. Coupled with disturbingly black childish drawings like those of John Callahan or Gahan Wilson, this collection delivers on its promise, not on sparkling knowledge of form, but as an exercise in sustained voice, salty with wit and wisecracks. “He is not like the hysterical hordes who plot to kill me by cutting my brakes and slipping arsenic into my porridge.” One might say her erudition is worn lightly, like a garbage bag raincoat on a gifted schizophrenic. “Clara killed herself by starvation for reasons not like Simone Weil. For love. Out of love for you.” I cannot help but enjoy non-stanzas, in or out of context, such as “We celebrate the release of Deathnotes 3 at the editor’s apartment, as a fight breaks out between the autonomists, who are of the Italian tradition, and those affiliated with French ultra-leftists such as Tiqqun.” These pages offer sobriety as well. In “Masochism of the Knees,” “Who is the girl forced to kneel on dried chickpeas to atone for the sin of being alive?” At any given moment, the poet descends swiftly, producing instant relevance.
The initial publication of this set of reviews included one of Andrew Levy’s Artifice in the Calm Damages in place of Hoa Nguyen’s A Thousand Times You Lose Your Treasure. The author decided after publication to begin work on a more elaborate review of Levy’s book and so it has been withdrawn here.