Eileen Tabios reviews Amanda Earl's THE BOOK OF MARK (2018)

Eileen Tabios was good enough to provide the first review for Amanda Earl's THE BOOK OF MARK (2018) over at Galatea Resurrects. Thanks so much! You can see her review here.

Eileen Tabios reviews Sacha Archer's upROUTE: The Language of Plates (2017)

Eileen Tabios was good enough to provide the first review for Sacha Archer's upROUTE: The Language of Plates (2017), alongside his NOTES ON THE SIGN OF POETRY: ADDENDUM AND PRINTS (The Blasted Tree, 2017), in the new issue of Galatea Resurrects. Thanks so much! You can see the original review here.

upROUTE: The Language of Plates

Reading Sacha Archer’s upROUTE: The Language of Plates took me out of my kitchen and brought me to a diner. I suppose it could have been a coffee shop but somehow it was a diner—the ubiquitous one on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where I spent a lot of time at the counter looking down at … plates. (To be more specific, “Tom’s Diner” which obviously was popularized by Suzanne Vega who used to sing on campus at Columbia/Barnard when she and I were both students there.) 

There are plates, of course, in my kitchen but being brought to that diner means, I believe, a place where one is by one’s self, perhaps with a notebook, looking down at a plate (scrambled eggs, grilled potato cubes and ketchup), a mug of coffee nearby. I repeated that position numerous times for years as a former resident of that Upper West Side.

In that position, I looked down at plates—full, half-full, then empty. You know how some joggers say that going for a run can help them clear their mind and then end up focusing perhaps on something of deep concern? I know that feeling from going by myself to diners and eating by myself. By the time I finished my plate, I’d also come to some resolution over something-or-other in my mind. (Don’t go there—I  also used to jog…)

All this is evoked by reading upROUTE: The Language of Plates. Some of the pages contain words and symbols with unknown significances, followed then by some pages of poetry from which one can discern sufficient relationships to the marks on prior pages. So what happened was sighting, then consideration, a mulling over, and then some insight. Love it. I love, too, the way the process is discernible. Here’s a for instance, from two consecutive pages in the chapbook:

What do plates have to do with such? Well, one looks at a plate. A plate offers something edible—that the viewer can (ahem) chew over … ruminate over: a mulling over. If insight follows, what the plate offered was sustenance. And the insight travels…upROUTE by rising from the plate towards you.

All that happens between you and the plate. Thus, again, not my kitchen where it’s populated by other creatures who distract but a diner where (despite the possible crowd) I am by myself. To be by myself ensures a direct, unmediated engagement between me and, uh, what’s on my plate.  Again, another fruitful example from Archer’s:

Regardless of the specific instances offered in the pages, I think the take-away can be larger: it can be about the merits of solitude, of making up your own mind instead of being (over-)influenced by others, by having the trust in your own abilities, by letting your imagination roam, by trusting that you can surface poetry. Through Sacha Archer, plates apparently have a large vocabulary.

Recommended for an immensely satisfying reading experience.

*

The chap was published by above/ground press, a reminder yet again of how much great work is being produced among indie presses.  Kudos as well to poet-publisher rob mclennan.

Jim McCrary recommends: Megan Kaminski's Wintering Prairie and Touch the Donkey

Jim McCrary recommends a short list of small press publications over at Galatea Resurrects #23 (A Poetry Engagement) including Megan Kaminski's chapbook Wintering Prairie (2014) and the small poetry journal Touch the Donkey. Thanks much, Jim! See his original list here.

Eileen Tabios reviews j/j hastain on Galatea Resurrects

I don't know how I missed it, but Eileen Tabios reviews two j/j hastain publications, including hastain's above/ground press title [Tabios' photo of same, above], over at Galatea Resurrects #18. Thanks, Eileen!

See the entire review, here. I include but a fragment:

we / cum ::: come / in the yield fields / amongst statues with interior arms by j/j hastain
(above / ground press, Ottawa, 2012)

The yellow cover, as you can see, is thinner than the interior pages, beginning with that pale lavender page.   It's as if the cover cannot contain what is inside.  It's a perfect visual metaphor for how so many of hastain's poems -- including this chap-length one -- work: the poems reach out for engagement and often succeed. I love this highly-effective cover design!

we cum ::: come ... powerfully presents a fresh (read: fleshly-intelligent) spin on the love poem as well as the erotic poem.  For instance, this excerpt: 

Innervations of post-threshold threshing. Wanted all of your tattoos to be of wanting. Wanted you to come in my eyes so I could see. This dependency on ether-lipids. It matters to note that since then, we have never washed our sheets. 

This poem, like many of hastain's, is enervated by the desire to create new worlds that go beyond gender as a reductive binary: 

What other taunts in place of chronology or normativity?
Minarets seeping from ephemeral loins.

The language is paradoxically smooth -- the text flows so smoothly and yet carries a punch!

One should acknowledge the significance of the image on the front cover (palms with holes in their centers) as well as the epigraph: 

"there is a word for incomplete and it begins inside" - Nathalie Stephens Touch To Affliction 

To me this means that as hastain explores the creation of a new trans-(reductive) gender world, the explorer must be rooted with the explorer's interior (including naturally the psychological).  (Perhaps the base for such a search cannot be the exterior when the birthed body often cannot encompass the individual's identity.)  It is that search (for completion?) that makes for such a moving result.  Yet hastain wisely avoids solipsism because so much of what hastain writes is also clearly inclusive of an Other, often the erotic partner.

In one section hastain writes, "In an attempt to get home we never rest." I first responded selfishly to that by hoping the poem's persona or hastain never gets "home"  because the attempt generates such wondrously alchemical results -- for example, how this same section ends with  

Multiplicitous labors to upkeep divergent foundations. Fecundations. We believed in veer. Tactics and tacits. Creamy ratios. The moon was this world's first cave. 

Such sensuousness!

But, more importantly, the phrase is "...we never rest" not "...I never rest".  hastain may be depicting an interior passage but what hastain's opened up as a possibility is that there is/are others within one and it wouldn't surprise me if hastain would be open, too, to being part of other's or others' interior explorations.  A "hole" -- as is the case with certain Native American weavings -- represents a space for entry by others...

If the hole is within a proferred hand rather than more obvious alternatives, isn't the offer more intimate? More difficult to resist ... more easy to accept...?

Edric Mesmer reviews Armantrout, mclennan + hastain at Galatea Resurrects #19 (A Poetry Engagement)

Edric Mesmer was good enough to review three above/ground press titles in a recent group review over at Eileen Tabios' Galatea Resurrects #19 (A Poetry Engagement) [see the full review here]. Thanks, Edric!

Custom
Rae Armantrout
above/ground press
2012

Practices inhabited herein might include: the role of the maternal under patriarchy, the engendering of personal memories, the cloak of downward American mobility—commonalities and not—or, emo-hipsters and reality TV stars, “with that small fist pump // now used / to indicate / irony’s uselessness.” No stranger to techniques minimalistic or the over-read line made modernly familiar by Jean Rhys, Armantrout’s work continues—here in small scale, else writ large—to [decipher phatically] the obscurantist’s archaeology of speech made poetry: “let volumes speak volumes.” To quote from is nearly to quote in entirety these four poems! As always, Armantrout’s syllables are scant but not underwhelming, tensile in prehensility: “Water-strider, pond skater, / Jesus bug // skitters across the surface / tension // and // the ‘least-area surface’ / (flat, smooth) // has a surface tension / of zero.” Why strand that and, uncoupleted? Just as deity and insect reconnect and make anew construct, so surfaces work, rework, make riptide of ripple.

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep,
rob mclennan
above/ground press
2012

As a feather, falling. So might go a line in mclennan’s latest, off his Ottawa-based press, above/ground. Modernity on the half-shell, emphasis plays folie à deux; as though Woolf were whispering to Robert Lax through a hearing[,] trumpet filled with water. These poems, each writ in dedicatory fashion and epigraphed, fall halved in binomial sets. They may be lean, stark, like “Laden, speech. A poor frail body. Swims. A mouth shapes words.” Other times they forget their own rules, at best, as in one for Pearl Pirie, titled “The learning curve that sometimes manages, itself”: “The gathering place of something, we. I can’t recall. It was I who called, who called, who.” And, in an uncommon third section, a coda, from the same—“Was contemplating an action. In, action. Inaction. We were, contemplating, we. Action. We were simply, in. This was, simply. This simply, was.” Minimalism is not wager against the sentence, nor: it is here a direct action in media res that may append its own apprehension. How, like a comma.

we / cum ::: come / in the yield fields / amongst statues with interior arms
j/j hastain
above/ground press
2012

“Tears are a way of staring.” Perhaps, wrote Kristeva, also a form of nonverbal articulation… There are so many such articulations—verbal, at least partly—that one has the feeling of watching Balla’s dog awalk with feminism’s theoretician. I am reminded of the sway Irigaray’s words have long had over me: that there may be no way to utter outside the patriarchal forms of language inherited, but we try anyway. Such utterances iterate in one of hastain’s latest, as where the reader encounters “non-articulable gender,” “how to be other-than,” “You wanted me to name you there,” “Oh female he,” “our interactive contour,” “To be gripping and gridding differential like this,” “Tactics and tacits. Creamy ratios,” “Like scaling a curve.” Prose sections find again and over definitions we knew of ourselves but had no way to say, as where asking: “a rainbow when there is no sun?” A lunar rainbow then, known to appear over Niagara Falls on nights of full moon, as Margaret Fuller went looking for (but didn’t see) in 1843. It’s that hastain’s images continue to find embodiment that make xir work—not so far beyond the concept, so much closer than theory—“A form full of noise.”