Kent Shaw (Author of Calenture)

Kent rated a book really liked it Stubble Archipelago by Wayne Koestenbaum	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
OK. I got it now. Or maybe I get it. I don’t know whether to read Wayne Koestenbaum in the present tense or the past. Like walking down the street must be a present tense activity, but you can only write about it if it happened in the past. Maybe rea ...more
Nov 20, 2025 05:31AM · like · see review
Kent and 2 other people liked michal k-c's review of Stubble Archipelago: "In my estimation Koestenbaum is one of the greatest poets alive and working. Stubble Archipelago is sharp, dynamic, angular, prone to stop and turn on a dime, etc. strong affinity with O’Hara and what I like to call his verb poems (I do this, I do th" Read more of this review »
Nov 20, 2025 05:30AM · see review
Kent rated a book it was amazing It's not over once you figure it out by Isaac Pickell (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I’m always at the mercy of that William Wordsworth poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us.” Like the title alone serves as refrain for all my discontents, or feelings in general, or just navigating the world. It’s not explicitly the impulse of Isaac Pi ...more
Nov 13, 2025 07:40AM · like · see review
Kent rated a book really liked it As She Appears by Shelley Wong (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There is a focus of self in Shelley Wong’s As She Appears. Like a self can be constructed in sentimental ways. A sensuality to independence. It’s common to note how pleasurable it is to learn who you are to yourself. Like that negotiation between lon ...more
Nov 06, 2025 06:10AM · like · see review
Kent rated a book it was amazing Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal by Sarah Rose Nordgren (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
Nordgren’s book is hard for me to describe. Maybe it’s writing that got caught in costume. Dressed as a period piece for a fashion magazine. Maybe it’s an occasional notebook for inscribing observations about fashion and hats decorated with birds’ fe ...more
Oct 30, 2025 06:48AM · like · see review
Kent rated a book really liked it Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
I don’t think it had occurred to me why I should read Ashbery through Wallace Stevens before this book. Like poetic history is clear that the two are connected, and I could see the sense to it. But I’d felt Stevens’s poems to use a rhythm of encroach ...more
Oct 24, 2025 06:55AM · 1 like · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — Hotel Lautréamont by John Ashbery <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kent rated a book it was amazing The Nick of Time by Rosmarie Waldrop	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
The relationship between irony and wonder often feels uneven to me. Irony is so tall, incisive, and imposing on a sentence or a poem. Yes, I appreciate what irony can bring to a moment. But often I’m kind of thinking, “But did you have to do it like ...more
Oct 07, 2025 06:07AM · like · see review
Kent rated a book it was amazing Repose by Amelia Zhou	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
How is the self formed? And should this self-actualization be staged as a form-ing process or a formationed reality? These, to me, are the underlying questions of Amelia Zhou’s book. Like how poetry can be concerned with “the poet” whose writing all ...more
Sep 28, 2025 10:28AM · like · see review
Kent rated a book it was amazing We Sailed on the Lake by Bill Carty (Goodreads Author)	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
There is a shape to the poetic impressions in Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake. A shape like a lake, I suppose. If you think of “shape” as what a lake looks like when you’re watching the mist hovering there in the morning. And you’re thinking to co ...more
Sep 23, 2025 06:54AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of We Sailed on the Lake by Bill Carty. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — We Sailed on the Lake by Bill Carty <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">
Kent rated a book it was amazing An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang	Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Rate this book Clear rating 1 of 5 stars 2 of 5 stars 3 of 5 stars 4 of 5 stars 5 of 5 stars
What I have often admired in Chang’s work is this central lyric concern. Or a fountain of lyric thinking that starts, say, with a juxtaposition between “ocean” and “anonymity.” That generates a loosened sense power of observation. Like it’s the the p ...more
Sep 05, 2025 07:27AM · like · see review · preview book See a Problem? We’d love your help. Let us know what’s wrong with this preview of An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang. Problem: Details (if other): Thanks for telling us about the problem. Not the book you’re looking for? Preview — An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang <iframe sandbox id="wrongBookKindlePreviewScreen">

Kent rated a book really liked it

Stubble Archipelago
by Wayne Koestenbaum

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OK. I got it now. Or maybe I get it. I don’t know whether to read Wayne Koestenbaum in the present tense or the past. Like walking down the street must be a present tense activity, but you can only write about it if it happened in the past. Maybe rea OK. I got it now. Or maybe I get it. I don’t know whether to read Wayne Koestenbaum in the present tense or the past. Like walking down the street must be a present tense activity, but you can only write about it if it happened in the past. Maybe readers should frame Stubble Archipelago by William Wordsworth, but his recollections consists of the spontaneous floppy pants he witnessed on the M train, on the Upper West Side, in someone’s fashionable scarf, and all of it's laid onto the page during moments of tranquility. Again. Which is the operative word for this book. Yes. Haphazard intelligences experienced on the streets. But Wayne Koestenbaum is an engine of again. He saw something; it makes him see something. Because art can accomplish that “again” again. Dreams can do it, too.

Though, to be clear, Koestenbaum is really into reality, and art is reality or runway or state of mind or perspective or a bunch of lewd acts that puts the randy in a name like “Randy.” Include the quotations. Like his poetry was walking through Manhattan, sometimes the boring parts, sometimes the poem just appears on the sidewalk where someone left their gum, and how did that orange peel get there, wrapping its legs around an object. Can an orange peel spoon a piece of chewed gum? How much poetry happens in the subway? How much poetry should involves touching, and if you write about wanting to be touched, and in the poem you are touched, where does that rate on the touching scale? Consult CA Conrad. Because these poems feel like what it feels like reading the mid-2010 books by CA Conrad, like Ecodeviance: (Soma)tics for the Future Wilderness, where there’s a prose portion providing notes and instruction on how they got to the highly disjunctioned poem immediately following. In the between is a poem from this Wayne Koestenbaum book. It happens again and again for CA Conrad. Which is the majgic of CA Conrad. Yes, there’s a j added to the word magic there!!

Imagine your life walking through a city as parataxis, but not only because you feel the side-to-side-ness of your life, because your life is always going somewhere. You’re living a day. Maybe your life is structured to accumulate enough dream material, art material, and mundane parts of Manhattan material to assemble a poem a day. Or your poems are a challenge to the universe to materialize enough so your poem can be recorded that day. And maybe the real challenge for Koestenbaum is knowing the difference between a record of objects and thoughts versus all the objects and thoughts that really happened. Meaning, you could consider reading Stubble Archipelago as a bouquet of objects whose poetic value is that their existences registered in this poet’s mind. He came to them. He saw them. And now they’ve been arranged in a poem. Again.

My suggestion: if you have a habit of shelving your books according to speculation and imaginative congruity, I would suggest shelving this book between Stacy Szymaszek’s Journal of Ugly Sites and Other Journals and Rae Armantrout’s (VERSED) BY ARMANTROUT, RAE(AUTHOR)Paperback Aug-2010. Szymaszek for the dense city life, the impulse to record all that the Greatest City in the World has to record. And Armantrout for the clipped tight frame. Not that Koestenbaum has a clipped tight anywhere in his body. At least I hope not, considering his stated interest in bulges. But more that the entirety of the poem could be summed up with an image of pursed lips. Like whatever someone’s thinking when their lips are pursed. The Mona Lisa painted over, but instead of mustache, like in how many episodes of the Pink Panther, she’s pursing her lips at you. Judging? Constipated? Knowing you know you shouldn’t be looking at her so long? That’s Koestenbaum finishing a poem. Each time. And he’s numbered them, in case you lose count. ...more

Kent and 2 other people liked michal k-c's review of Stubble Archipelago:

"In my estimation Koestenbaum is one of the greatest poets alive and working. Stubble Archipelago is sharp, dynamic, angular, prone to stop and turn on a dime, etc. strong affinity with O’Hara and what I like to call his verb poems (I do this, I do th" Read more of this review »

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It's not over once you figure it out
by Isaac Pickell (Goodreads Author)

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I’m always at the mercy of that William Wordsworth poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us.” Like the title alone serves as refrain for all my discontents, or feelings in general, or just navigating the world. It’s not explicitly the impulse of Isaac Pi I’m always at the mercy of that William Wordsworth poem, “The World Is Too Much With Us.” Like the title alone serves as refrain for all my discontents, or feelings in general, or just navigating the world. It’s not explicitly the impulse of Isaac Pickell’s It’s Not Over Once You Figure It Out, but it’s near rhyme with the opening of Pickell’s book. Maybe Pickell’s title is like the sequel to Wordsworth. Sure, Pickell says. You figured out how oppressive the world can be. But just coming to realize that doesn’t solve it.

It’s a depressing state of mind. And it speaks to the between which is what Pickell’s book unfolds for its reader. In its opening section, the poems register isolation to the point of exclusion. But not full exclusion, because that might actually be preferable to isolation. Instead the poet suffers a world that degrades an individual using many mechanisms. Not the least of which is capitalism. A system adept at fashioning specific kinds of exclusion that people might mistake for belonging, because at least you belong to this idea, this economy. And at least you can look at others, and see how they also feel excluded. Not like you’re going to talk about it with them. You might not be excluded for the same reasons as they are. But imagine there’s a ring of fire around each individual person who’s been excluded, and they each belong to the ring of fire.

That, for me, is the poetry of Isaac Pickell. His poems belong to whatever space can be carved when the world, or the place you’re from, or the dominant culture, sets a fire, and everywhere you look, it rings around your existence. That’s how belonging is set forth, or projected onto you, or just a fact of the matter. Pickell’s poetry is the perspective when all you see is fire. And it’s what he’s been told about why he’s had to live that life. The tales are incomplete.

Or that’s how it feel until the book enters the last section. Where Blackness is portrayed as the cultural bias projected onto people who the culture fits into that Blackness. And Pickell’s personal experience of passing as White but also not passing. And so what I read as Pickell’s between space at the book’s opening speaks to his experience of knowing Blackness as a thing Other people could suffer, and that he himself suffers from knowing about and living in the between of knowing and possibly being seen as, where he could suffer for avoiding being seen, or suffering because someone else decides for him how he will be seen. And what’s interesting about reading the book from beginning to end is how the poems move from a spare style that has an incompleteness for me. For instance, “What Words Won’t Put Me in the Ground” speaking about the “bark” that positions “black” as not yet “human,” still doesn’t lay out the complexity as broadly as “Our Greatest Ambition, to Be Met Somewhere Other Than the Middle.” In this poem, the poet walks in the shadow of the Middle Passage, like they were old shoes. And, for me, it’s this movement from framing exclusion and isolation in the book’s opening to a deeper scope of who Pickell is in that exclusion, and how he can feel the culture penning him into an excluded position, that’s where the book is most compelling. ...more

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As She Appears
by Shelley Wong (Goodreads Author)

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There is a focus of self in Shelley Wong’s As She Appears. Like a self can be constructed in sentimental ways. A sensuality to independence. It’s common to note how pleasurable it is to learn who you are to yourself. Like that negotiation between lon There is a focus of self in Shelley Wong’s As She Appears. Like a self can be constructed in sentimental ways. A sensuality to independence. It’s common to note how pleasurable it is to learn who you are to yourself. Like that negotiation between lonely and alone. And what I admire in Wong’s book is how she frames aloneness. There’s that invigorating morning walk in “Weather Advisory” that could be a walk home after spending the night with someone, or it could be that especially delicious solitude that comes with a morning walk when you’re going no where in particular. In this case, the poet is on Fire Island, with disheveled hair, a fog somewhere in the distance.

It’s one of many poems that benefits from a centering perspective. Which might sound like too psychological a take on the reading. I’m not meaning to speak to what I think might be happening in the poet’s life. More how the poem situates itself within its occasion. Yes, the book seems to chronicle the poet’s separation from a long term partner. And, yes, it’s that part of the breakup where she’s distanced herself from the actual breakup. So that, separate and alone, she can recognize the more tender parts of her life. This self that proposes itself in the opening section of As she appears feels like fertile ground for the new self that will emerge. The poems seem to absorb the landscape or situation around them. In “Watch Hill,” Wong describes the service berry tree, whose blooming signals the ground thawing after winter. An apt image for this moment in the breakup. So much is possible and unknown. But also the poet is learning there is a lot for her to know about herself

In essence, the poems fashion the self as a delicate formation. Someone who’s in process, in transition to a new outlook on life, with a new self to do that looking. I guess I would say many poems feel like a declaration of independence, but with a softer emphasis on the “declaration” part, and a subtle assertiveness on the “independence.” In some of my favorite poems, the poem constructs itself from a sequence of very independent clauses. A method she uses in the book’s opening poem, “For the Living in the New World,” and a later poem, “Invitation with Dirty Hands.” The poem is like an expressive bloom, with each sentence like an individual petal complementing the petals around it. ...more

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Feathers: A Bird-Hat Wearer’s Journal
by Sarah Rose Nordgren (Goodreads Author)

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Nordgren’s book is hard for me to describe. Maybe it’s writing that got caught in costume. Dressed as a period piece for a fashion magazine. Maybe it’s an occasional notebook for inscribing observations about fashion and hats decorated with birds’ fe Nordgren’s book is hard for me to describe. Maybe it’s writing that got caught in costume. Dressed as a period piece for a fashion magazine. Maybe it’s an occasional notebook for inscribing observations about fashion and hats decorated with birds’ feathers and stuffed corpses. Maybe it’s an extended monograph on the designer, Alexander McQueen, especially his intersection of violence, femininity, and birds. Categorically, it’s a hybrid book of contemporary prose lyrically playing at the contradiction underlying its subject matter, leaning heavily on juxtapositions between POV, literary non-fiction, and imagery. In fact, the availability of contradiction is the risk of the book. Wouldn’t it be easy to critique a fashion that killed thousands of birds just so women could raise their look to the fashion of the day? Hasn’t contemporary feminism revealed the contradictorily “natural” roles patriarchy projects onto women?

Nordgren’s graceful arrangement of subject, however, makes these critiques on contemporary culture feel like a muscular guide. Should the 19th Century fashion of pluming a woman’s hat with bird feathers cast women in a “natural” light? Should the fashion frame her as a possible conquest for the male gaze, as though he who would be “instinctively” drawn to master nature? Is the feathered hat just one of a long line of fashion choices, driving supply and demand cycles into what is now a familiar negligent profit-motive?

For me, what’s most striking about Sarah Rose Nordgren’s book is how swiftly she complicates the match between millinery and plumage. What else has drawn an association between women and birds? Yes, there’s how it might align women with nature. Or it’s the implication of human violence against nature, but whose violence? The women pursuing the most elaborate hat, or the men hunting for the materials necessary to make the hats? I appreciate the reach of Nordgren’s associations, extending beyond nature to include religious symbolism. The strange presence of a bird at the Annunciation. Is the bird a veiled sexual statement evoking statements about women? Is the bird the aggressor? Is the bird’s presence statement about conception? And, finally, in a capstone move, the controversial styles of Alexander McQueen. Like I can’t tell if Nordgren was animated by a fascination with what McQueen made, or if her research naturally led her to his work. But the McQueen essays make almost a perfect as conclusion to the book.

And part of that perfection is Nordgren’s investigation and indulgence of many unclarities. How observations on 19th Century fashion need to be unclear partly because they’re borne out of the 19th Century. And all we have in 2025 is an archive that might help piece together the diverging currents of thought. Essentially, there is no innocence accounting for a fashion that puts women together with birds. And, as time has borne out, iIt’s not only fashion and color coordination. There are so many complicated birds that might appear in women’s lives. While it might be argued that the book is about birds in women’s hats from the 19th Century, it’s how the book makes more of it, and the reason it needs to make that argument, that makes it so fascinating. ...more

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Hotel Lautréamont
by John Ashbery

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I don’t think it had occurred to me why I should read Ashbery through Wallace Stevens before this book. Like poetic history is clear that the two are connected, and I could see the sense to it. But I’d felt Stevens’s poems to use a rhythm of encroach I don’t think it had occurred to me why I should read Ashbery through Wallace Stevens before this book. Like poetic history is clear that the two are connected, and I could see the sense to it. But I’d felt Stevens’s poems to use a rhythm of encroachment. His poems were going to encroach on the imagination, open a space where it could appear—because that was the source of his poems. In Ashbery’s work, I alway felt something more kinetic, like a brisk walk, or maybe a flipped version of that. A day’s brisk walk over the poet. Where Stevens feels like looking into a crystal ball, and pulling the fog aside to realize, OMG, the imagination presents itself, Ashbery takes me on an involved textual journey, imagination in tow. Maybe I reconciled poetic history via both poets’ valuing the imaginative work necessary to make a poem. What it feels like to read a poem, to feel it reaching for some understanding. Only to be met with the irony that whatever understanding there might be, it will only be satisfied in fleeting moments.

Hotel Lautréamont has changed my sense of the Ashbery-Stevens connection. Because in this book, whatever the relationship Ashbery draws between poetic impulse and imagination, it’s not operating in a kinetic fashion. The poem isn’t carrying his imagination through the motions of a day, as I would say Ashbery often prefers. The poems in this book feel more static, or they’ve staked their poetic impulse to the ground. In anticipation that that ground will disintegrate from around the stake. There’s still that precious and tender feeling Ashbery brings to any moment. It just doesn’t feel to me that the imagination is a consistency, or an object that just occupies the poet’s body, as in other books. Like in *Hotel Lautréamont* a poem can center around a memory that’s from some past time, when the poet had felt poetic (he was on his way to a lover’s house, for instance), but then the world distracted him from those memories. Maybe a new season arrived, perhaps. Or the weather shifted. And it’s not clear whether those distractions should be part of the poetry, or if they cloud the poetry. Or, then, there are the poems that know exactly when or where that imaginative moment existed, like in “American Bar.” And all the history piling on top confuses the poet about what to do. Are the facts or circumstances interacting with the poetic impulse by proximity? Or are they disbursing the poetic feeling?

For me, this book presents a more confusing version of Ashbery. Or it’s like Ashbery wants you to combine a lava lamp with a villanelle. Where Ashbery will propose some imaginative twist on a present circumstance in the space of a single line, but by the next line it’s morphed into a different shape. It’s just different from other books by Ashbery, where I’ve relied on the sentences to guide me through the poem. In Hotel Lautréamont the sentences are rhetorical decoys. This book, however, commits more to the line, like how a villanelle would. But not in the conventional sense of a villanelle. Usually, a villanelle would hinge on the surprising coincidence of repeating lines, where the repetition doesn’t just content itself to say the same thing. Instead, it advances a new position using the same words. And with especially clever villanelles, there’s the added layer of the sentence, with repetition contouring those sentences.

I would argue Ashbery has a long history of subverting the villanelle’s coincidence of sentence and repetition. Pantoums and villanelles appear often in his work. And they register a minimized commitment to the sentence. I mean, the sentences are there. But they’re often drifting along. Like bad AI stringing words together. These poems feel more like an account of any given circumstance, a blur of their imaginative potential, and whatever the poetry that can be gleaned from that. They appear more frequently in Hotel Lautréamont. Like in “The Youth’s Magic Horn,” the repetition can be intensified. And given this frequency I’m inclined to frame it as a commentary on systems, and maybe the systems are accounting for the existence of poetry, then shifting their structure to accommodate it, at least from the poet’s perspective. A poem that seems to address this most directly is “Central Air.” ...more

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The Nick of Time
by Rosmarie Waldrop

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The relationship between irony and wonder often feels uneven to me. Irony is so tall, incisive, and imposing on a sentence or a poem. Yes, I appreciate what irony can bring to a moment. But often I’m kind of thinking, “But did you have to do it like The relationship between irony and wonder often feels uneven to me. Irony is so tall, incisive, and imposing on a sentence or a poem. Yes, I appreciate what irony can bring to a moment. But often I’m kind of thinking, “But did you have to do it like that?” Wonder is different, though. I don’t think to measure wonder by height. I would measure it by volume, and space it can welcome me into. Wonder is like the news stories about people in LA breathing extra oxygen, back in the mid 2010s. What did it do for them? Whatever they were dreaming it would. I think wonder would love to have a working relationship with irony, as illustrated in Waldrop’s book, The Nick of Time. But irony isn’t really suited for relationships. Not that I think irony would rather not relate to others, but because irony is so stuck on being itself. Pointing out the underlying contradiction, and the wisdom that might result.

Often, I would say it’s the reader who’s stuck deciding whether they want to read for the benefits of irony’s wisdom or to feel that gnawing, heavy-handed antagonism. What irony can do to the present moment! Like the pressure necessary for a poet to uncover irony feels very tall guy presumptive energy. Not in Waldrop, though. In The Nick of Time, wonder is the act of radical acceptance. Wonder feels like inventive new ways to cross the wires irony has pointed to. Like irony could repeat the phrase, “pouring-down rain,” saying that repetition of language can unemphasize the potency in language. And then wonder could step in to say, “And that makes it cozier if you’re a first-person subject saying it.” I might characterize the move to wonder in Waldrop’s book as a surprising and sometimes tenuous shift. But then she keeps making the move feel continuously inventive. There’s such a commitment to the domestic relations between irony and wonder.

And read from beginning to end, the book shows what it means to extend the logic of this relationship. For instance, a poem might propose the insubstantiality of a concept (like you can’t hold a concept in your hand), and isn’t it ironic to break apart any concept when you guide the reader to see it in a new light. Classic irony, you might say. And then the book extends the treatment of abstract concept to physical reality, unsettling the very concept of the physical world. What does it even mean to call something concrete? Yes, you hold a rock in your hand, and it creates a physical sensation. But your perception of that physical sensation resides in your mind. It’s an abstraction, says Irony. And so perception is itself a concept, which could be broken apart. And while this line of logic could feel incredibly cynical, reducing everything that’s physically real to a dispersed idea, Waldrop’s wonder maintains its inventive view on everything. Like being able to think is what matters. It’s the source for feeling creative moments in life. It brings a new light to thinking in any capacity, even following a line of reason that would seemingly break down what’s supposed to be real. Like rather than irony getting meme’d out to that 6’5” blue-eyed finance guy, Waldrop has irony do his thing, while wonder does theirs, in an amicable pursuit of interestingness.

I’m fascinated by a poetry like Waldrop’s that can bloom into the present moment. Wonder is everywhere! Where the poem interests and slows to a poet’s conscious rendering of whatever’s around her. And in living with what’s around her, her language opens into an articulated rendering of how the present around her feels and is active in the language, verging on an ecstatic, but invested more in the steady opening of a bloom. Like in those time-lapse images of a flower blooming, and at some point, there’s the invigorating fast forward into full bloom. The poems in this book are keeping that fast forward just ahead of them. Because the pleasure is in the bloom’s actions not its final unfolded self. ...more

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Repose
by Amelia Zhou

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How is the self formed? And should this self-actualization be staged as a form-ing process or a formationed reality? These, to me, are the underlying questions of Amelia Zhou’s book. Like how poetry can be concerned with “the poet” whose writing all How is the self formed? And should this self-actualization be staged as a form-ing process or a formationed reality? These, to me, are the underlying questions of Amelia Zhou’s book. Like how poetry can be concerned with “the poet” whose writing all this work, and part of the poet’s project is to speak from the self, and maybe be aware of the distinction a self affords the poet. Like everything I’m reading as I make my way through Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, and she’s observing the pressure a “self” would exert on forming the thesis for written language, AND she’s explaining all the ways poetry can be expressive of a self struggling with whether there is a clear thesis to be found in language, that is Zhou’s struggle in most of these poems. Where she assembles a third-person-ish version of a “woman” or a “dancer” or even a “baby” that speaks to what a self might be telling her to say, compared to the detached-from-self writer who is looking at all this and finding it a challenge to understand.

What it really reminds me of is that Jorge Luis Borges piece, “Borges & I.” At least in the triangulated situation of it. Where the writer complains about this famous writer, “Borges,” who’s exploiting all the parts the writer’s life so “Borges” can become famous as a creative and inventive writer. “But I’m the one who lived those things, not “Borges.” Says the writer of this flash fiction. Ironically, it’s written by Jorge Luis Borges! It’s a brief piece that I’ve tried using as a creative writing prompt to only mild success. Because its meta qualities are on the verge of collapsing on one another. It makes it a fun reading. But hard to model in a prompt. In Zhou’s book, the triangulation is more elaborate and sustained. Which allows for some especially evocative commentary on who she perceives herself to be, and who she is now after the different pressures that come with adulthood. For instance, in the poem “Forms of a Career (Fundamental Life),” she watches a dancer on stage, she admires the frozen poise, observes the dancer walking out the stage, and how dancing can serve as an escape from the fixed gaze of audience to dancer. The commentary on gender surveillance resulting from this extended consideration of the dancer is one of the most illuminating in Zhou’s book. Where she addresses both the expectations put on women has made her self a certain way, and who she is as a self feels pressured to change over time. In its fragmented allegorical method, it reminds me a lot of Valerie Hsiung’s The only name we can call it now is not its only name. In particular, how the poems get so involved with their own poem-ness they feel like they might lose sight of their allegorical commentary. Which is more a concern for the activity of reading, I’d say. Where I want to just read it for the actions. And then I just want to read it for the allegorical commentary. And I have to challenge myself to channel both immersive reading practices together.

Each of the book’s sections challenge a reading practice with their intentional shaping. The opening poem, “Does the House Protect the Dreamer,” features a poet dressed as a woman, who recognizes the feminine allures dress brings to a woman. But then the poem conflates “woman” with a real estate agent, who’s giving prospective buyers a sense of what’s available. What’s under renovation, what’s a work in progress. This conflation of agent to self and agent to property is a nice touch reminding me of Robyn Schiff’s A Woman of Property, where the present tense concerns of women, as they contend with the ways they’re read, and their roles are in constant consideration of one another. I wish this intellectual agility was consistently available to me in my reading. I might have been missing something in “A Whole Body Is Complete Therefore Usable.” But so much of this book is stretching my reading activities! ...more

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We Sailed on the Lake
by Bill Carty (Goodreads Author)

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There is a shape to the poetic impressions in Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake. A shape like a lake, I suppose. If you think of “shape” as what a lake looks like when you’re watching the mist hovering there in the morning. And you’re thinking to co There is a shape to the poetic impressions in Bill Carty’s We Sailed on the Lake. A shape like a lake, I suppose. If you think of “shape” as what a lake looks like when you’re watching the mist hovering there in the morning. And you’re thinking to compare that view with the view of the lake on Google Maps. Which is a facet that could be part of how you’re thinking of what people told you about the lake, and layer on that what people do at lakes, what people feel like at a lake. Impressions are complicated, deeply implicit, and the best forms of impression are the ones meshing with the many other impression that might exist. It’s like looking at Impressionist paintings, that from a distance represent or communicate a moment. An impression. But on closer investigation, or on a viewer’s reflection, connote more, thus revealing more of their doing-ness.

In Carty’s book of poems, this doing-ness revolves mainly around the temporality or shapeliness of an impression. What it takes to experience a moment, while many other moments inflect upon your experience of that moment. I don’t immediately see this in the book’s shorter poems, because there isn’t necessarily enough space for the poet’s perspective to build an argument. It’s longer poems like “A Row of Trees,” whose spacing and position on the page feel like driving beside a row of trees, and experiencing the landscape as a series of frames. Like you’re looking out the passenger-side window, and maybe the sun keeps flashing into your eyes, because the tree blocks the sun for a moment. What is impression when it’s evenly portioned like this? How does thought run into thought? Or how does associative logic connect one feeling to the next? This poem is especially interesting to me, because the “frames” drawn by each tree trunk are merely incidental to the landscape. And yet how they’re experienced makes thought feel intensely segmented.

And for Carty’s poems, this poses an open question. What does it mean that thought is consistently running into other thoughts. Even in situations where, say, his child is lost at a park (like in “A Crown for Laocoön”), and the need to attend to that moment can still be overrun by other thoughts and impressions. Or moving to a new place as a new grad student and trying to acclimate overrules all events, even an impending hurricane, as in “Domestics.” Like with Impressionist paintings, there is pleasure to be had in close observation of the specific and granular, and it’s possible to intuit the specifics’ weaving into one another, like they form a natural fiber. The shorter poems might not have the space to engage with larger questions about impressionism, but they do dwell in their poetic occasion, what prompted the poem, adding subsequent moments in, often warping sentence structure. It’s a poetic sentence that Carty carries forward from his previous book, Huge Cloudy. Which is partially a comment on what pacing can do for a poem, and do for the reader experiencing theese different pieces together. There is a need to say something, but that something is not so significant that the poet need go to too far with it. Like every good artistic statement on the impression, the poems are mindful of stasis, but stasis is often accretive. It keeps spreading. ...more

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An Authentic Life
by Jennifer Chang

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What I have often admired in Chang’s work is this central lyric concern. Or a fountain of lyric thinking that starts, say, with a juxtaposition between “ocean” and “anonymity.” That generates a loosened sense power of observation. Like it’s the the p What I have often admired in Chang’s work is this central lyric concern. Or a fountain of lyric thinking that starts, say, with a juxtaposition between “ocean” and “anonymity.” That generates a loosened sense power of observation. Like it’s the the poet’s stance on reality. It reminds me of Larry Levis writing in The Gazer Within that poets should look at the world with the gaze of an animal. And I always imagine him in a small Midwestern town; it’s winter, and he’s looking over a median of dead grass. Like an animal would have this anchored position, but they don’t even know what “anchored” would mean. Their looking is just what or who the animal is. In Chang’s previous books, I could feel the poet in that rarefied position, that life, observing the world to me. The certain light she could see in the world, and what she understood about the world may or may not have changed after having seen what she’s seen. It’s a structured discursiveness. Meaning, it’s aware there is something for the voice to say, but it plans to pursue that something at a relaxed gait.

I was struck, then, by the poems opening An Authentic Life. It’s like they knew what they were supposed to be writing about. And it mainly revolved around her relationship with her father. Which is assuredly a collection of conflicted feelings or unresolved moments that haven’t settled into what “stable relationship” would mean to her. These opening poems in An Authentic Life occupied a more prosaic muscling. Aware of the father, like they’re occupying the same physical space. Like they’re together, even when they’re not actually in the same space. It fits, in fact, with a theme addressing what it means to move from childhood to adulthood. The poems remark not only on the poet’s life as a daughter, but also her life as a mother.

And I think once the poems establish some of the more important and emotionally textured tenets, as they shift into the second section, that fountain of lyric thinking returns. The more noticeable sentimentality from the opening poems, a troubled sentimentality that can complicate the poem’s drive forward, draws an impactful context. And that lyric sentiment appears with surprising juxtapositions. Like in “The Age of Unreason,” thoughts on her father are arranged with thoughts on war. But in this case the subject of war is something more relevant than just the soldiers who were involved with the physical violence and murder of war. War is portrayed as something more than the specific windows of time history might assign to it. It’s the long shadow war marks on countries and the people living there. In “The Age of Unreason” Chang thinks through the implications of a school shooting from 1989, where the killer used his reasoning about the Vietnam War as rationale for killing children of Vietnamese and Cambodian refugees.

And what I leave the book thinking is: What constitutes an authentic life for the poet? Is her childhood authentic in the way she has learned authenticity from outside sources? From friends or even acquaintances she remembers meeting once, which she describes in “A Lunch Date.” And how can a reader think through a lyric voice that feels authentic, drawing towards a thinking that feels most true to the poet, all while the poet reveals a many-faceted consideration of what she’s heard authenticity should be. And how many of those facets would seem to be contradicting it. ...more

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