Say So

by Dora Malech

Poetry. The poems in SAY SO are at once rigorously formal and wildly experimental. Human utterance—be it prayer or plea or pun or turn of phrase or epithet—is one of SAY SO's primary pistons; poetic tradition—rhyme, meter, form, rhetoric—is another; the beauty and betrayals of the body, or bodies—echoed in the beauty and betrayal of language itself—is a third. Together, these forces provide the pressure that makes SAY SO move and brings these poems to life.

Genres: Poetry

88 pages, Paperback

First published November 29, 2010

About the author

Dora Malech is the author of four collections of poetry: Flourish (Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2020), Stet (Princeton University Press, 2018), Say So (Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2011), and Shore Ordered Ocean (The Waywiser Press, 2009). She lives in Baltimore, where she is an assistant professor in The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here's sixty-five poems on seventy-five pages, i.e., only five of sixty-five extend onto a second page. The task, then, is to manage a pressure not given to exposition, to repair a Word wherein solecism, metonymy, and performative accelerate to play catch-up with misprision. There's a radical innocence in a method that has well-decided by now that method constitutes a saying, a Say So. Many of the poems beginning and closing the volume, and having to do with money, or marriage, permission granted between families to make an economic pact, are under 10 lines and may be conceived as contracts: "Every rearview a lovescape of ex-towns. | Bumper to bumper dear what do you heart? | I favor my left side I favor leaving. |My pheasants can fly but they'd rather run. | Never said feather oars or father me. | Where recipe calls for apricots try fog. | There should have been a strap from yoke to harness. | For record whatever I never kissed the bride. | Here lies the sigh begun nine lines ago. | I miss your wingspan miss your hollow bones." In "Flight, Fight Or," Malech's substitutions seem to gesture to an arrangement in love whereby the landscape of cars, and towns, and matrimonial expectations litter the saying the speaker would constitute as an act of goodbye. Before the scaling up a level of abstraction in the penultimate line (a little disappointing), it all seems a context for the final line's forestalling identification ("dear what do you heart") in patriarchal mythos, often "said so" in an American vernacular idiom (the play may be with the idiom, "what can I do you for?"). "Please refrain touch to our foregones," goes one poem ("Copy That")'s opening: "They's brains' ballast one conditions." That's difficult! The act of immersion in the landscaped/sensual demotic seems to require this bit of compression so that it can make its rather privileged "Try a prayer: || Almighty please bother to jiggle the handle. | Please press us at least a wine of the pickings. || This machine steam cleans. | This machine ends presidents." Perhaps Malech hears Woody Guthrie in this, as I do ("This machine kills fascists," Guthrie taped onto his guitar), but for her what's significant seems to be the machine-like violence in her immersive, punning method, the identification (and projection of strength) in her lyric wire -- a string different than Guthrie's, but every bit authenticity's captive.

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dora Malech
Say So

(Cleveland, OH: Cleveland State University Poetry Center, 2010)

If you like poems straight up, no twist, you’ll want to go elsewhere—but if your mind is playful and your ear tuned to verbal hijinks and sonic tumbling, then Say So, Malech’s third volume of poems, should be at the top of your must-read list. “Get over it, meaning, the moon,” she says. And, “As usual I am unusually tired. / All night my fingers double-crossed me . . . .” This is fast and skillful work in both ear and intellect. A few pieces run less deep than others, but it simply doesn’t matter. The run itself is exhilarating.

--Renee Ashley
Say So was reviewed in The Literary Review.
Fall 2011

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dora's poetry reminds me a lot of Fiona Apple's lyrics, albeit even more abstract. But in the space of a small poem, you're bound to find three or four lines that just knock your socks off. Lines like, "One last gust and I'll return these wings." Or, "Believe me/when I tell you I'm kept/awake by the light/from my body, splayed star." Incredible language and imagery throughout. There were a few poems that tended to blend into one another, but there are enough standouts to make up for it. The last poem, especially, the masterful "Body Language."

Not usually one for poetry, but read Malech's "Country Songs" in the New Yorker and had to pick up the collection. Totally worth it.

[Jane · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's nice that others enjoy this stuff. I find it all rather loveless, pointless, smartypants and headache producing, but maybe that's because I'm too old for it. I need more in a poem than verbal gymnastics, however clever. But hey, that's showbiz.

[Randi · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I need to reread this because, while it's a short collection, it takes awhile for me to soak up poetry. One of the best collections I've read, though!

[Biscuits · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes these poems trying to make the heart-shaped hand shadow of the cover inside you. My favorite poems are when she puts her hands down and tries to fly away on sound.

[Katlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

Satisfying and easy to consume.

[Tracy · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poems in Say So are language punches. They want the body to be seen as more than the meat it feels to be when seen, as language has multiple meanings when it is used. They watch the reader, confront desire:

“If you give me a dollar I’ll take my top off
and let you see my heart.”
(10)

There is a furiousness in the poems to unpack the heat, the heart, the end. Malech confronts the interaction of language and life (light):

“I’m tired of wasting
my best lies on strangers.

Believe me
when I tell you I’m kept
awake by the light
from my body, splayed star.”
(48)

Hear Malech read if you get the chance. She commands the room with her voice.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

The language is gorgeous and playful. The shorter poems make this successful, and the longer ones perhaps lose their way. But almost all in this collection are entertaining and lovely, well worth the read.