Yellow Rabbits Review #34: Unmark by Montreux Rotholtz

​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.