In this compact yet expansive collection of poems, Laura Read places herself on a chair across from inhabitants of her past and present. She has risen to the occasion to reflect lyrically and with kindness upon the shadows that have hovered over her, shadows thrown by little boxes of stories and place that continue to impact her adulthood as a woman, wife, mother, poet and teacher.
What’s more, Brown’s development of the “duplex”—a sonnet-like repetitive form, whose name recalls apartment-style housing—showcases an adept talent for eloquent lyricism. Perhaps what sets it apart, however, is Brown’s penchant for optimism, rooted in an appraisal of physicality and the beauty of particulars.
Hong’s literary landscape is the sonnet. All but three poems riff on this form. Hong’s sonnet disrupts this male-dominated box, this literary container, yet retains its echoes—especially via her stanzas corresponding to a given sonnet’s structure, quatrains followed by couplet or by two tercets (a sestet).
Ultimately, we are left with an existence, the poet seems to suggest, that hovers between the present moment and the promise—or disappointment, depending on one’s perspective—of perpetual return, if not quite renewal. We ask but don’t always receive.
The body knows, can achieve this knowledge through mythic journeys and discipline, but there’s a kind of inevitable transformation into an unrecognizable world, in part through the narrating of such violence into a mythology to be consumed instead of heeded. Webster navigates such delicate language and tonal work throughout these poems, using figures like Deborah and Tiresias (once transformed into a woman) to navigate the particular ways that female bodies register such sight and violence.
Instead, lines, and the rhetoric that they contain, shuffle forward and back, make progress and contradict themselves through a series of non-sequiturs, leaps, and half-finished aphorisms. The poems feel deliberately cobbled together, as if crafted by lumping randomly associated thoughts and overheard phrases. At times, the collection’s aesthetic resembles that of John Ashbery, who sweeps together scraps and leftover bits of unrelated language in his poems.
For Clevidence, the world is not too much with us; we ourselves are simply too much. The spasmodic leap of life made into the human was all out of proportion—consciousness was just an extended error message.
The move, of course, is a standard one within left-oriented postcolonial poetics, letting oppressed languages and peoples ostensibly speak back to or disrupt official discourse.
Most successfully, fractured syntax, lush imagery, and the implicit silence of spatial interruption create pleasurable verbal texture and complicate the events of the poems.
Malech’s constraints are a departure from her earlier work, but she also uses the page to great effect, a tool she hasn’t used much previously. Poems sprawl into white space readily, gaps opening up between words, allowing the tight structures more room to breathe.