Sink Review

Wesleyan University Press, 2010

How many books is Seven Controlled Vocabularies and Obituary 2004. The Joy of Cooking? And what date shall we affix to it? The cover seems to reference 2004, 2009, 2007 and 1995—though we must decide how to read “11.07 / 22.95” which could reference an archival system or denuded price points just as well (or in an equally unstable manner) as dates. We also might think about how Laura Riding Jackson, who died in 1991, is responsible for the foreword, as the back cover and title page suggest. Later, we might think about how the foreword that finally arrives in the third quarter relates to this particular book (suggestion, via William Carlos Williams’ “The Desert Music”: because it’s there).

More questions arrive. How do we read a book that insists “It should never be necessary to turn a page when reading”? Or: “Reading is the most pleasing of surfaces and no text shall be designed to please”?

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Sand Paper Press, 2012

“The bone of communication is hollow.”
— Lyn Hejinian

It is a convention in Judaism that prayer books, when they are ready for replacement (and as they may never be destroyed) are buried with the dead. There is something tender in this, what it shows of the connection between language and the feelings of a religious community, and between the book and the body. And there is also, especially because of the proscription against the artificial preservation of dead people, something deeply icky, or maybe lovely, about the mutual intercomposition of these two degrading things, never complete and nonetheless whole.

I thought of this a lot as I read The Last Books of Héctor Viel Temperley, Sand Paper Press’s recent presentation of the two long poems that concluded that poet’s life in a devoted and rich new English translation by Stuart Krimko. It’s rare to read anything that so totally perceives the book and body as recipes for each other, the connection between the serial and the infinite as so intimate.

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Action Books, 2010

Raúl Zurita’s Song for his Disappeared Love, originally published in Spanish in 1985, is a resounding response and a testament to humanity that etches out its survival by accepting life amid atrocity and depravation. Written under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, Zurita recounts his arrest and imprisonment during the 1973 military overthrow as General Pinochet came to power in Chile. In an interview conducted by the translator, Daniel Borzutzky, Zurita articulates his attempt for the book-length poem as a “[response] to the terror with a poetry that was just as powerful as the pain being delivered by the state.”

The formal structure of Song for his Disappeared Love captures the chaos of Pinochet’s overthrow. Some stanzas are grouped side by side into block paragraphs, forcing the eye to decide whether to read horizontally across the page or vertically down the rows. Others effectively use dashes to give the sense of short bursts of static and chaos, resulting in an unsettling reading experience. Yet, instead of opening the book with an image of violence or formal rupture that characterizes the rest of the book, Zurita begins with such simplicity that the clarity stuns,

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Sarabande Books, 2010

When words have double meanings, each one chases the other like a shadow. No matter the usage, the word can never be completely rid of the secondary definition or even which one is the secondary definition. For me, one of the loveliest characters in Chinese is the character 疼, which can be used to mean “hurts” or “aches,” usually physically, such as “I have a headache.” It can also be used as “to love dearly,” with an almost unconditional tenderness and poignancy: “One sees how dearly her father loves her through the sacrifices he makes.” The two meanings merge into each other and surface through until it becomes impossible to tell which is the ghost of which, reading as immeasurably truthful to living and loving, both physical and emotional, both sad and hopeful.

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Action Books, 2011

Early in Peter Richards’ Helsinki, a persistent question forms: where—or what—is Helsinki? Helsinki is clearly more than a city in Finland here, to state the obvious. But the actual meaning with which Richards endows the name is harder to pin down. Helsinki is a liminal space where all these poems occur seemingly simultaneously. Each poem, untitled and comprised of a run-on sentence, flows into another other like ectoplasm. These poems walk through walls. And if they are indeed ghosts, whose spirits are they? These poems are the final haunting of a life remembered, a life slowly pieced together, poem by poem.

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The Song Cave, 2011

Starting at Broadway Bridge and winding down all the way to the Staten Island Ferry Terminal, Andy Fitch’s Island is a 240+ block walk through Manhattan. Much longer than the sixty minute, sixty sentence walks that make up his previous book Ten Walks / Two Talks (with Jon Cotner, out last year from Ugly Duckling Presse), this walk fits perfectly into a smaller format and, as such, is the fifteenth release from The Song Cave. This Massachusetts-based press publishes chapbooks from an eclectic range of poets in small signed and numbered editions with simple yet uniform covers. The Song Cave’s focus is, refreshingly, on self-contained, chapbook-length projects presented in a non-decorative, work-first manner. Fittingly, Fitch presents this particular walk in a stripped down, real-time style, with a series of paragraphed fragments transcribed from the tape recording of his thoughts and observations during the trek through the city.

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Cleveland State University Press, 2011

Grief and public grieving is often associated with human weakness and morbidity. It is not elegant to go weeping through the streets, nor do people in our country dress in black for any longer than the length of a wake or funeral. We are expected to remain solemn while grieving. However, here arrives a poet who has turned these emotions around to face their grievers. Emily Kendal Frey’s The Grief Performance treads through morbidity with love, poise, and bravery. Perhaps what Frey’s poems know that we do not know: “Today is the anniversary/of every other day. Insofar as/no one knows/anything new/about love.” Grief has an opposite and also a true match: love. Frey’s often sparsely-written poems tell us this—that grief and love have more in common than we typically acknowledge.

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Octopus Books, 2009

In The Difficult Farm, Heather Christle creates a parallel universe where the everyday weaves into the fantastical, where the things we don’t understand are magnified and elevated (“Yesterday, looking at a cinderblock’s/ reflection—lightest grey on golden floor—/ I finally understood painting. I was irate!”). This is a world of absurd magical realism; a world where men have “phantom antlers” which they try to groom, but end up grooming air; where relatives are (not represented by, but are) the “small green dots” on maps that glow and “move around”; and unmade birthday cakes resemble schoolmates we never met. The poems delight in oddities, inviting us to celebrate life as a collection of oddities. There is something beautiful and brave in the way The Difficult Farm embraces the small, strange things we are, exclaiming: see, everything may be weird, but everything is ours.

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Birds, LLC

The language in Chris Tonelli’s The Trees Around is sparse and direct, creating via the act of seeing. This landscape is a permeable one where poems merge together with image-rooted narrative: trees, birds, and loneliness. The prose poems’ melancholy is imperceptible yet organically rigged, posing a question to the reader: should they run after the heavenly or be content with the here and now? Within the poems contained in the rather shockingly pink exterior, we find the speaker in their physical condition, ruminating over the more real than real and looking beyond it, pushing forward from the circumstances that attempt to keep them contained within the mind’s island. It is by seeing through the material landscape that the reader finds the immaterial “I.” In “Lament W/Starling” Tonelli writes:

“Maybe if you stare at the Common a little longer,”
one of my friends says, “it’ll fucking bloom.
Let’s go.” Maybe if you’d
stare at the Common, I thought to myself,
you’d bloom.

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Action Books, 2010

(I Heard That) Lonesome Whistle Blow

Abraham Smith surveyed the poetic landscape and noticed a gaping hole left by the tragic-hero musician, Hank Williams. But how to capture the man’s contradictions? Eleven number one hits between 1948 and 1953, and yet could not proficiently read or write music? How to capture the biography of a broken man who left a legacy of failed marriages and tales mired in drugs and alcohol? How to capture a man famous for singing, “I’ve never seen a night so long/ When time goes crawling by/ The moon just went behind the clouds/ To hide its face and cry?” In Hank, Smith wisely avoids the temptation to rewrite a Hank Williams biography and instead goes for something much closer to the bone. Smith’s Hank oozes the essence of the joys and heartbreaks of the man found dead at 29.

While Williams sang he never saw a “night so long” with “time crawling by” Smith’s book reads like a torrent of days and nights caught up in the rage of an unstoppable flash flood. The book is 129 pages of pure lyrical gush and rush. Every paged packed with images and narratives piling onto top of each other and seemingly spinning out of control. Yet this “out of control” is the charm of Smith’s book. There a rawness that Smith captures by giving his poems freedom to roam, freedom to digress. In Three Poems, Ashbery decides a “truer” way is to leave everything out, Smith’s book is a valid argument for putting everything in. To qualify “everything” that is every off-note, every failed song, every whistle on a country road with the sun setting the sky orange, but everything is not necessarily “the facts.”

The book, at first glance, looks like one long continuous poem, however Smith separates the poems with what he refers to as “gibberish cuss.” Here’s the way the book begins,

	//(@(@(

	call him pile
	of crushed oysters before
	the road crew drags
	it’s slick kid and flat and hard
	on the eyes it’s like it’s glazed
	with rock salt penny candy
	and the stuff that breaks new neighs
	from knackered oldies
	and sweat from rapt fear

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