our pal Kevin Spenst was good enough to review Dale Tracy's Gnomics (2024), as part of his regular column of chapbook reviews, in a round-up assemblage in subterrain #102! Thanks so much! This is actually the second review of Tracy's Gnomics, after Daniel Barbiero reviewed such via Arteidolia. As Spenst writes:
Dale Tracy's Gnomics (above/ground press) is astonishing in how much can be crafted within two- or three-line poems. Tracy's collection is replete with prophecies ("Those who drink the oil of ancient beasts / become the dragons who breathe fire"), persona poems ("Edging Stones // Since I am a garden, / I grow to a limit") and sylloisms ("Sounds bounce into distance. I hear sounds from a distance. Distance lives inside my ear.) This later poem strikes me in its compression of thought, touching as it does on a central argument in Tracy's 2017 book With the Witness: Poetry, Compassion, and Claimed Experience, where she theorizes poetry outside the cloying embrace of empathy as understanding another's experience. Instead, Tracy argues "literature helps one to know what it is to encounter another." I hear this nuanced argument again in "Distance lives inside my ear." We hear another person's story but that story only lives within us always at a certain remove.
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