In the Still of the Night by Dara Wier (Wave Books, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem) See here this is all it means to be dead-- to be no longer living and to be both never and always as never before and after. From “That’s What the Dead Do” At first glance, in so many cases, a poetry that sits on the page looking still and unmoving also appears quick and fleeting. There is the act of the poetic disappearance. Poems that have short lines appear exquisite and completed with ease, ready to acknowledge and push off. The poem that is visibly minimal is disguised in our notions of access and maneuverability. These qualities may or may not be grounded in truth. Some poetry that spools down, appears as a cascade of text in short but impactful drips and smears, is designed to do this. Our notions of this flight, this passing of time through the poem's form, are occasionally satisfied. Yet no further from this quality of quickness, this quality of passage, is Dara Wier’s In the Still of the Night. In her recent collection, the poetry is as dense and protected as a series of stone glyphs. It is as enduring as a caustic wound. It is the silence of the active world before, during, and beyond a single, enticing sigh. The lines are short, but they resonate, reverberate, and stick around for an endured presence. Wier’s work in this book is exciting and challenging. It is the quixotic beyond the glossy surface. It is the essence of fullness within the stillness alluded to in the book’s title. It is a seducing mixture of the mental and the emotional, grounded in a seeking of the stated truth, the analytical. There is cunning in this book, which contends with the process of the poems themselves, slickly cut into the pages. This process creates a slow, ambient crawl for the readers who seek to energetically read through the poems to the revelatory core gently sitting beneath. There is exhaustion here, an imposition from the poet through the poet’s own process. Process is the thoughts and feelings that allow us to live, that lead us through reflection and autonomy to greater choice and elevated existence. I say there’s confetti floating from my mouth and I have to pause a little to admire how good confetti can be as it floats out gently on waves of air From “The Dream” Books like In the Still of the Night are often pulled together through obvious themes. The ideas that compose this book are radically elastic, stretching across mind states and incredible experiences. There is a broad brush of image cast within the book that leads the poems to cover ecstatic differences in environments, characters, objects, and moments. And yet the book maintains its course as one that has been designed with the weight (and wait) of inquiry. There is a striking juxtaposition between profession and prophecy within Wier’s writing that feels homely and yet also educational. These poems are positioned into intimacy but also contain a language of modeling, sketching, advising. The core of representation within these poems is one of truthfulness. Inspiration is an incredible core working well to maintain its nightly cues. For there is a recharging, a resting, a rebounding of the night that instills a sense of growth, satisfaction, and contentment from poem to poem. It is the sigh as acknowledgment. It is the sigh as appreciation. It is the sigh as the token of experience. The blossoming pear trees invade the city, and the plums, and the other white blossoms that lead to nowhere and nothing. From “Free Will” The world that exists in the poet’s reality is a world of perceived transience and transformation. It is a world of life and death. It is a world of conclusion. Observation, observed by the poet, becomes the guide to truth itself. As we explore our worlds we will find resolution. There is an overwhelming pressure to relate Wier’s works with the ideas of centered self of the most famous 20th Century existentialists, and, perhaps contentiously, with the detachment of many Buddhist teachings. This pressure is rooted in the conclusive, stable space that we arrive to after conflict, struggle, and exhaustion. And yet Wier’s work is ultimately also one that is beyond the poet at times, one that is deterministic, even, with more untouchable universal laws and reasoning arriving around each breath. It is also a work that is filled with attachments to the value of the beauty of this world of revelation. As a collection it reflects significant moments of conversation and active exploration, which arrive to the eruption or arousal of moments following the processes of examination. To be with the poet during these transformative iterations is not universal of poetry, but, as presence, it is an intention that exists and is attempted in many poems in many cultures. Wier’s work successfully invites the reader into the process, while also explicating the results before, during, and after. This is the power of the glyph. Of the burn. Of the sigh. There is the wonder that it exists as action and the wonder of context that surrounds the action. Wier’s work is thus one of itself and that which led to its creation. The effects are stunning, filled with awe, and assuredly will impact many readers and many types of readers. as paths cross with any place we’re in we believe we can never leave From “Autophagy Irrespective”
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Unmark by Montreux Rotholtz (Burnside Review Press, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem) I am an error fish an arrow sunk in distance. A piece of flesh strung in sails a sunning pair that lick up bare light that lick up the story behind us. From “Capsule” I read Unmark and fall into the space that sits before me, the spaces that sit before all of us, and I begin to begin. It is a process of relief and it is a process of the latent, hypnagogic pleasure of possibility. This hypnosis is deeply rooted in a poetics which has a field both open and mindful, both contextual and liberating. To speak of this hypnosis is to speak of Montreux Rotholtz’s poetry as one that borders on pure and potent language, a la Lissa Wolsak, and the inescapable prowess of the poetic vignette, a la Joshua Marie Wilkinson. It is a poetry of the range of story but also a poetry of the tongue and the lips and the air that fans out from beyond and within. Rotholtz’s Unmark is a testament to the limitless devouring qualities of the image and the woven cord of the journey approaching, arriving, and exploring experience. Phantasmagorically positioned, the language falls into place like laws of reality, challenging and questioning, establishing and stabilizing, reinventing and revolutionizing, emerging only to emerge again. This poetry is raw, resonant, reverberating in its wholesomeness. There is the guttural and the brutal and it is matched with the secure and exquisite. It is outlandish and homely. It is a poetry of the charred remains and the frozen preserves. Juxtapositions abound into a world of extremities, where memory is fantastically filled with fantastic possibility. [. . .] I had long been coveting the suburbs and your wrist like a burnt cyprus, lilting, glistening, blistered and split. From “Consignment” Rotholtz writes of worlds within worlds. In some moments, these scenes are unfalteringly exotic. Spot-lit locales from spaces of storybook and epic pockets of earnest, exposed spaces of hiding. In other moments of the poetic present, the idea presence is a determination of witness and self. There is subjection, personalization, and an intimate relation with the act of description. These moments stand and sit as representative of the hazy motifs sliding across the skin of Unmark—motifs of precision, attention, and capture. What is the subtext of our relationship to each and every collected prong of time? Where does that arrow pierce us, and what is the blood pouring out of our response to trajectory and impact? For readership, the fall into the poetry within Unmark is the fall off the cliff into cool water, the fall into beds of prickly soft grass, the fall into the cushions that have guarded days’ worth of sleep, the fall into the arms of a person who has been able to protect and wrangle the world via sincerity. This book is the opposite of void, the outward remarks of introspection, the subtle and provocative underbelly of the undulation, the dip into a needed rest on the periphery of life’s quests. The effect is feverish, trance-inducing, tongue-lolling, eye-batting, with pages spinning across the palms like the musing of notes or the spongey effect of a mossy recollection. [. . .] I heard the pig smoothly butchered, packed in plastic. I heard he was an hour in the dying. I heard, and this is true, the meat rotten and the veins like the cables of a bridge. From “Hog” As a book, as a collection, Unmark shows us a world of happenings and exposures. It is a seasonal, transgressive, and impassioned transience of poetry that feels flight and scrapes across poem to poem, image to image, line to line. It is a book that creates etch-like senses of being and boundary, where the voices of the poems are voices of those who survive, and those who exist, and those who persist throughout the oft-stark and oft-harsh elements of spectra, protagonistic and antagonistic at once, a clash, a chatter, a flail of limbs, mental awakenings meeting sedation, the friction meeting the relaxation. As a book, as a collection, Unmark is enticing in how far it goes beyond the expectations of itself as a thing, an object. The poems exist with such fervor and relentless presence that the impact and impending solidity becomes aflutter, afloat, freshened, and discarded. A poem is a poem, and poems are poems, and in this entrancing whirlpool of language, Rotholtz’s writing shudders the system of the body of poems for the sake of and respect for the poems themselves. It all fits together, one long slush of dream in which the linguistic bathers may find comfort and resolve. [. . .] The sea convulsed. The ghost did not come back, though we watched for it, ready with a net and knife. Sheila, she looked infinite, sunk in the glass wedges that bordered the lamp. From “Axiom of Ghosts” With the enamoring of language, we endure the hypnosis of comfort. A ring of the aural as we recite that which our gaze falls upon. The poetic becomes an instrument for understanding the housing and mediums of desires and desirable visions. The breaths beat. The beats breathe. A relief occurs in the same way some beings molt. The discard is the veil, weight, pause of presence lifted. We become opened to the possibility of our past, the memory binding images, the refreshing of our experiences, as we become opened to that act of creation we contain simply by being alive. Unmark is a powerful push towards this ideal space of such retribution, of the complex brush of humanism scrawling across the beautiful, bare walls of structure that all of us, at some point, long to possess, long to dream within. Safe Word by Donald Dunbar (Gramma Press, 2017)
Review by Greg Bem (@gregbem) I fell in love with a certain part of my forehead and thought about it all the time; glaciers fucking just off-screen. I glued memories to the clouds From “Autosave” There come these moments of refusal and fusion in poetry. The landscape of the American grain that’s been shucked, shuffled, torn into place. Packaged and processed, left to sit, collecting digital dust, and then the greatness comes along, and we have the rot, the decay, and the bountiful blossom of the reorganization of our longing. A paradigm for the wet, new, and ferocious. When poetry becomes of two-backs, the spectral scythe of the re-engrained, the revisited, the revalued. Nostalgia quirk. Freshening. Donald Dunbar, in his new collection and instant cyborg classic Safe Word, tills the soil of our blusteringly decrepit society well. Organs are milked, tendons are aroused, cords are uncoiled, and through the magic of a poetry of startling we see newly alit beauty in spite of as well of despite all the blanketing, muffling, strangling noise of the abscess of current cultures. This is poetry spritely and damned at the same time, a poetry of the noxious and the vomitus, the peculiarly pestilence-inducing awe of the spectacle. This poetry sleeps soundly as time, as Time, and in a spaciousness quantifiably infinite. If you imagine a screen sob right no prayer can get through, Or staring through the screen to the sun behind it, you can see How seeing your lover in love with someone else too is similar To the joy of watching her eat ginger candy, rice crackers, or roe. From “Bronze Glitches” I only visited Tinder and only swiped 50% of my total daily allowance once during my full-on read through of Dunbar’s Safe Word, rather transfixed on the undying references, the alluringly mellow appropriation, appreciation, and indoctrination of the contemporary image. Images abound in Dunbar's writing like cached excess: viscerally apprehended, they keep my sockless feet in tow through negligence, the wrangling of the language wrapped around my body like a whip, or a smart watch. Should poetry be so dominant? Should it steer us away from our mighty reliance upon the Media and the Comfort? Who really is the damned in poems like these? Who really is the sprite? Are we all just burdened by fixation, addiction, and relief? Aren’t we all floating down the same cables of fiber and bitrate, the same G worth of connection? And does it end, in value, or at least the proposition of value, through art like the Dunbarian appeal? A moment of refraction: in a degree of humility, seriousness, and curiosity, I set down the book, a couple of sections of the 12 between the safety of this book’s covers, and wrote: “Donald Dunbar is one of the most inventive poets living in the United States today, and within that inventiveness is the certainty of, to use an image he uses, pixels.” Of course, I know Donald, and admit a degree of filial spirit bias, the extraordinarily uncanny bias and the resonance, more importantly, the resonance of his work operating via a cultural coordination, almost vacuous in quality, to what I’m used to on my daily, mind-buzzed existence. This is the type of synchronicity described in cyber punk novels of the early 1990s. In other words, his work despite all of the jokes and the profundity and the hushing is still demonstrative of work and embodiment of a truly multiformal, curse-bless ringing. It is a poetry that seems to ring with a truth like the best of work, labor, rings true—hammer to nail, as is so stated in poems like “Ekphrasis Potpourri” where the lines go: It’s so precise it’s your throat getting crushed It’s simple It’s as stupid as physics, as ethical as a hammer These poems are boundaries and they are emotional. The reminiscence of stress permeates line to line, line to line, in between the depressant references, in between the stimulant references, in between the elongating rush of a memory of blood from an acid-induced platform. They are the defrag for the most sober of readings. I am thoughtful about how my mind felt, thinking of anxiety and its burgeoning inverse. If anxiety has two faces, or is two-sided, or contains any manner of duality, it exists because we exist the same way, a loop, snake eating snake, rabbit entering rabbit (to use an image Dunbar uses). Anxiety's plurality is a sequence of complementary understanding, balance, the tool holding us into position as we push it along. It is the simile, this feeling of anguish and uncontrolled pressure, valves opening to release in sputter. What we do with it, language that sits between the poems, between the subtle flux of the line, as what we do with emotion, the response, the graceful touch, the flipping of a piece of paper in a book. There is the splash of color: rosy lit and limelight. Shell as tomb and sarcophagus, prison and confinement, adornment, astonishment. Book of poetry. The work rips open the reality of spectra, holds the reader through it. There is tenderness. There is godliness. There is dirtiness, and we all get to play. Play is part of the world we can always live in, and it is a world, I think, that Donald promotes. It is a world of experimentation, but one of foraging, risk-taking, deeply dived. We don’t know how strongly the act of play brings us closer to reality, brings us closer to truth, to reaching the height of progress through a loss and a gain doubly. And it is through it, through process, through orientation toward the unearthing of countering the core concept of the book (boredom) that we find the ultimate answer: play, play, play. Experiment. Find light. Find the light, light, light that Donald speaks of to us. It seems so simple, but it is not. This world, our world, the world we all live in, today, is far too intricate, too aged and evolving of itself in such rapid fluidity, to be simple, and thus poetry. And thus, pieces like “Organic Shrapnel,” the long prose output penultimate within Safe Word, serve as code, codification, and coda to a world of lavish and excessive and that which is unnecessarily necessary cum exceptionality; pieces like “Organic Shrapnel,” which lead us via fireplace phone app to justice. Justice coming in the form of connecting the dots to push the endless, barely touchable world forward, finding through experimentation the linear progression of idea to idea, image to image, us to us, the world to itself, repositioned, through an actual action of shift. It is overwhelming. It is a sigh. The poems gargle, jarbled, their own identity, and it helps, like a pill, or a click. [. . .] All I need is large numbers, vaccinations, and another there. There, there. A fuck-fest in VeggieTales costumes, organic genitals. Poem plugging a urethra. All that I need is everything from sonnets stitched into the play’s text to play-rape overdubbed with field recordings of insects molting, mornings in clawed bathtubs, missiles with pouty lipstick, the missionary word for strict pleasure. from “Cherry Coma” I move from the effects to the world beyond the effects. I think beyond the book, think about the Poet. Think about the role. Who is it that identifies with the extensible quantity of essence and everything that Dunbar extracts and contracts through the poet’s voice-gaze? Is it the privileged? Is it everyone? Are we all more than we’re willing to admit? Horizontalism? Dare I say equity? These questions of course stand coarsely but require no immediate answer, make me challenged, unsettled, aroused to find the action and move with it, feel comfortable and allowable to see and to pursue and to find the acclimation toward the antithesis and complementary other side of anxiety, burden, the boast. I wonder if we're all so lucky. If we're all so welcome. I wonder at what point to these pages feel brittle. Who would swipe 100%? Who would need more to buffer? Counter fear or maintain uncertainty? Is there conversation in this book? What lag and what connectivity? It becomes fractal, like everything. For some of us, this is a poetry of coping. For others, it is a poetry of orgasmic relief. And for others still, it is the bridge to the land of the core of the absurd that we sit with, bathe in, smear ourselves sub- and unconsciously on a braying, paisley-lit basis. Perhaps a combination of all, perhaps a nether-region containing none. As I sit here, ponder, stare off into the wallpaper distance through warm shades of screen filters, I think about the gentle ride to understanding of a poetry that is also an ambiguous poetry, a blurry process, of a poetry that lets us sigh with relief, laughter, sex, and mouse (book?) gestures. Perhaps there is all duality here, all similes to be uncovered and shaken, stirred, or kept pure and set aflame. And perhaps that is all there needs to be. What makes money make money? Like an applause sign flashing the whole show, a single red rose, like a plastic bag, digests itself into a fist. from “Applause” With Donald’s work, we are bested by its language of openness and its degree of our anti-oppressed exposure to surges of information. We becomes the person who will find themselves reading this book, for whatever reason. I find this work, these writ, remarkable indeed through the process of making a remarking, a return to touch, a gentle mode of reassurance that we can look upon and upon again. And that must make Safe Word the coded language of nothing short of love found before those fractals become understood as fetishes strewn about the forever space of the virtual plains we slug and slog through. |
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All reviews by Greg Bem unless marked otherwise.
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