Anvil and Rose 6
Oxota: A Short Russian Novel, by Lyn Hejinian. Wesleyan University Press, 2020. ($18.95)
Not quite short (long for poetry, at almost 300 pages, but shorter than War and Peace) or Russian (though it’s about Hejinian’s visits to Russia) or a novel (it’s a series of Hejinian “sonnets” called “chapters”). First published in 1981, now republished with the author’s edits and revisions, the book offers a glimpse back at how adventurous Hejinian was and at how intriguing the book remains. The sonnets don’t follow a linear logic, but “occur in different fields of time,” to quote Chapter 119, and yet cohere. Or maybe the reader who rides along doesn’t care about such petty issues as linear movement through time and space. “Oxota” means “huntress” or “hunt” or “desire” in Russian, and the reader witnesses language desiring language to hunt for the essence of Hejinian’s Russian experience, or perhaps her Russian experience desiring that language hunt for us to desire this “literature of context.” Where else could you encounter “A radish exploded” and “The moon takes the butter” and “A woman had been struck in a zebra and killed”? Not a book to read on a speeding train, but one that will encourage you to step off a speeding train.
Soft Targets by Deborah Landau. Copper Canyon Press, 2020. ($16.00)
Both louche and alarmed, Soft Target offers critics and readers the chance to say (along with the anonymous back cover blurber), “These are vital, necessary poems for our present moment.” Because no poet has ever written about humans as “soft targets”? That excludes a hell of a lot of post-9/11 poetry. Or is it because of Landau’s ability to say things like “Existence is killing us” alongside “Let’s be giddy, maybe,” while in Paris, in a “seraphic cocktail haze.” Are we supposed to imagine Landau as a 21st century Baudelaire under a “bloated moon” with champagne and “pipes”? But this not-quite-decadent-enough Baudelaire is bored — “O you who want to slaughter us, we’ll be dead soon enough what’s the rush” — and an environmentalist — “and this our only world.” After hearing “soft” again and again in these poems, it leads to the inevitable question: How many dozens of times can this word be recited before the reader inevitably calls this book, yes, soft?
Wild Milk by Sabrina Orah Mark. Dorothy, A Publishing Project, 2018. ($16.00)
OK, these are short stories, but when prose is this hallucinatory — think Leonora Carrington and Russell Edson drinking a milkshake made by Rimbaud, or is it Rambo? — you want to toss the next acclaimed book of award-winning poetry into the blender. Here are some opening lines in this darkly funny collection: “When the taxman comes for Father’s heart, Father is on the phone,” “Francine Prose, who is my mother, calls to inform me there has been an error, and now she is fairly certain she is not my mother, but someone else’s mother,” “Louis C.K., my husband piles all my seahorses in the middle of our king-sized bed and starts shouting.” Why, you may ask, is poetry so lacking, so imagination-challenged, so bound to the autobiographical ego? The inspector will leave that question to those with more learnèd mouths. Luckily, we have these surrealistic stories while we wait for the poets to catch up to the wildness of Wild Milk.
Medusa Beach and Other Poems by Melissa Monroe. NYRB, 2020. ($16.00)
If prose can sometimes be poetry in disguise, can poetry sometimes be prose in disguise? That question is put to the test with many of the poems in this book. Take “Frequently Asked Questions About Spirit Photography,” which opens with this question: “IS THERE A SCIENTIFIC EXPLANATION FOR WHAT WE CALL ‘GHOSTS’?” The first stanza replies: “Not yet, but we are getting very close. While some researchers / are studying the language of the gene, learning how we become / the complicated physical creatures we currently are, / others are investigating our post-corporeal forms, / and may soon be able to answer the age-old questions . . . .” And it goes on, and on, like this, in neatly bundled stanzas of seven lines, for 21 and a half pages. If that’s not enough for you, “Medusa Beach” awaits, with over 47 pages of those lovely seven-lined stanzas of prose. The poem poses this question to the reader: “Why am I stuck in the doldrums?” Perhaps because this poem has compressed the reader’s brain into a pulverized jellyfish?
44 Poems for You by Sarah Ruhl. Copper Canyon Press, 2020. ($16.00)
Who exactly is that “You” in the title? Ruhl opens the book with a long quotation from Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” manifesto, closing with: “The poem is . . . between two persons instead of two pages.” So the reader is you, dear reader? Yes, but in the “Afterword,” Ruhl tells us that “I long for the specificity of the dedication, the notion of: I wrote this for you, because of you.” And indeed many of the poems bear a specific dedication: “for Sister Linda,” “for Tony,” “for Yangzom,” “for Max Ritvo,” etc. Others have no dedication but address an unspecified “you” known to the author: “What do I wear in the morning / for the afternoon when you will die.” To their credit, these poems often move beyond that identified or unidentified person who is addressed, yet they too often close with an easy, feel-good ending. In a poem for Max Ritvo, a poet who died of cancer at a young age, she concludes: “We all become poems / in the end.” And then there are the rhyming poems: “I envy men with hemorrhoids / and men with balding heads. / I envy men with bad toupees / who wish that they were dead.” Ruhl is a fine playwright, but this collection feels like someone pulled together 44 occasional poems and called it a book. In other words, Copper Canyon, would you have published this book if not for the name “SARAH RUHL,” which you feature on the cover in bold caps, the exact font size of the book title?