At another point, she asserts, “The question is who to be writing this.” Writer, mother, farmer, teacher, wife, student, reader, traveler: Fishman is at one time or another all of these throughout this book. But first and foremost she is the poet the work has chosen her to be.
Photo by Dave Grubb My family asks me to try to deepen my voice, sitting at the dinner table, my sexuality a tapestry they are coming close to unthreading. I look down at my plate, moving fishbones with my fork, and beneath the mess of food, a print of hunters in red coats chasing the […]
Photo by Biodiversity Heritage Library In the end what I know about earth is what was sold to me. What I know about myself is what I wouldn’t buy. One man sold eels. They hung oddly muscular from the stand’s brow or just beveled on ice. It stands to reason an eel could meet the […]
We delight in the distractions of the circus, though we understand its wonders are illusions, our voyeurism and demand for entertainment perhaps culpable in the continued othering of those outside the sanctioned norm. And though we begin to see where the line between reality and dream have been laid, begin to see the structures that fix that line and by extension the barriers it creates, the us and the them, we choose to follow it.
Rather than this dissipating energy, however, Stobb uses the material to perform serious, nearly Buddhist thinking. Infused with elegiac hope, the poems hover on the cusp of an enlightened release of all worldly things—and a deep reluctance to give them up.
The book’s title, the Buddhist circle, is shaped by the first and last poems which echo one another, asserting selfhood and agency: “Devotion” ends with “this token / I held back for myself” while the title poem concludes “in the contours of hand-drawn waves / you start to pull your own story.”
Despite being caught in the eddies of loss, returning in memory and emotion to past personal or collective horrors like domestic abuse, a bloody battleground’s dead, or a lost pregnancy, we can move forward.
The strength of these impossible-to-summarize poems and the disorder of any narrative is in the invitation they extend to the reader to step out of the demands of the moment to enjoin in conversation for a while.
The collection is wonderfully complex in its work towards uncovering un-simplified truths within the near-constant framework of landscape and colonialism: “fantasies of Spanish stucco and red tile nod to / European slaughter over transsubstantive mysteries.”
Leading by example, Sauer shows that not only can our stories can be messy, hard to pin down, transcendent, painful, healing, and provoking—the form in which we tell them can be too.