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.
Kathleen Graber’s The River Twice troubles the distinction between past and present. Rather than eschew the idea of time altogether, Graber’s collection reimagines time—perhaps as a cyclical rather than linear motion, but more likely as an all-encompassing surrounding material, like air or water.
In its contradictions and awareness of those contradictions, in its ability to project back a vision of the world in which it occurs while holding it just far enough away that it might be possible to love ourselves in it, Earth astonishes.
Refusing to be confined by the limits of narrative genre and form, she nevertheless exploits the advantages thereby offered to tell her story of how she manages (or at times perhaps fails) to find her way to writing poetry: “above your head that would be great witches would talk to you without anybody pleased all gold explaining it fit so well I had to destroy the double precious eliminate all the space around a poem so it doesn’t seem great but it is.” The result makes for a challenging yet nonetheless quite inviting reading experience. This is writing where anything might happen.
While these poems share approaches, their larger effect is to sketch the history of civilization that is buried in language.