The Game of Boxes: Poems

by Catherine Barnett

The second collection by Catherine Barnett, whose “poems are scrupulously restrained and beautifully made” (Edward Hirsch, The Washington Post)

 

Everyone asks us what we're afraid of
but children aren't supposed to say.
We could put loneliness on the list.
We could put the list on the list, its infinity.
We could put infinity down.
--from “Fields of No One to Ask”


 
In Catherine Barnett's The Game of Boxes, love stutters its way in and out of both family and erotic bonds. Whittled down to song and fragments of story, these poems teeter at the edge of dread. A gang of unchaperoned children, grappling with blame and forgiveness, speak with tenderness and disdain about “the mothers” and “the fathers,” absent figures they seek in “the faces of clouds” and in the cars that pass by. Other poems investigate the force of maternal love and its at-times misguided ferocities. The final poem, a long sequence of nocturnes, eschews almost everything but the ghostly erotic. These are bodies at the edge of experience, watchful and defamiliarized.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published August 7, 2012

About the author

Catherine Barnett is the author of four poetry collections, including Solutions for the Problem of Bodies in Space, Human Hours, winner of the Believer Book Award, and The Game of Boxes, winner of the James Laughlin Award of the Academy of American Poets. She lives in New York City.

Reviews

[Jee Koh · Rating 1 out of 5]

Of Catherine Barnett's James Laughlin Award-winning book, April Bernard, one of the three judges, wrote, "With subtle and cumulative force, The Games of Boxes builds a complex poetic structure in which fundamental questions about motherhood, trust, eroticism, and spiritual meaning are posed and then set in motion in relation to one another."

There is a danger here of mistaking mere repetition for "cumulative force," for what is most obvious in reading this collection is the limited range of poetic resources on display. The plainspoken voice can only carry a reader's interest so far. There are few striking details, and no original images. The versification is unexciting; it provides no resistance against the speaker. The endings of poems too often rely on the echo of a word in a different sense.

Titling the first-person plural pronoun poems "Chorus" does not by itself build "a complex poetic structure." One such "Chorus" reads:

Whoever's calling keeps hanging up, he
won't leave a message--
so we brush the television, watch our teeth,
and pretend to go to bed,
listening for ringtones in our heads--


This is barren of invention. How could it have passed muster unless it was seen as a stone in "a complex poetic structure." To build an arch, every stone must be sound and play its part. Here, the "structure" is used to justify not one or two crummy stones, but a field of them.

The second danger is to mistake simplicity for what is "fundamental." The sequence in the middle of the book is described in the back blurb by Ilya Kaminsky as "the best love sequence yet given to the English language from poets of our generation." That bold claim cannot be sustained by any reading of the sequence. After twenty-three segments of vague, generalized emotions, the sequence ends with this:

xxiv

Then he whispers there, there, as if I were a child
and not a woman lying beside him

but what's wrong with that
it's late

death's hovering like the cap
hanging from the doorknob

he takes in hand
when he goes

where never has anyone
left so quietly

disentangling the desires of one
from the desires of another.

Is life like that?
How I slept then.


The cap--to hang from a doorknob is not to hover. "disentangling the desires of one / from the desires of another"--is that the most imaginative way to describe a break-up? The plaintive question "Is life like that?" is simple-minded.

I made a mistake--there is one poem in the collection that is fully alive. In the "Chorus" that begins with the line "We didn't believe an elephant could squeeze into church," Barnett performs an imaginative twist on the saying about the elephant in the room. The comparison of the elephant in the doorway to "a curtain of light, swaying from side to side" is exact and surprising. In just 14 lines, the poem presents "subtle and cumulative force."

[Grady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exploring corners and planes of thought

Catherine Barnett has found her voice and it at times is reassuring while at other times disconcerting, yet no matter the direction each poem takes, the result is a flow of words that imprint on our minds and from there grow into our own permutations - seeds planted from the mind of the poet grow into thoughts tangential to our own experiences. That is what good poetry should do and Barnett makes that journey one we wish to revisit often.

There is a selection of poems that deal with mother/son relationships - words said actions observed feelings disturbed - and it is here she greets us face to face. In other poems she rhapsodizes on love and intimate physical relationships - needs desired needs met needs ignored. It is all symphonic or better yet, these poems are like the grains of experience that are the reasons lieder are written. But some examples share this better:

Mornings,

the boy across the table seems illuminated,
a kin of man-angel in his white t-shirt
and not juts an optical illusion
but real, the kind you can't wash out,
the kind that leads to cures or happiness,
like penicillin, or wine. I don't remember
putting one foot in front of the other
but we must have because here we are,
for another little while,
trying to make it to the intersection
of Pleasure and Meaning, which the map
says is a little further inside of here.

Apophasis at the All-Night Rite Aid

Not wanting to be alone
in the messy cosmology
over which I at this late hour
have too much dominion,
I wander the all-night uptown Rite Aid
where the handsome new pharmacist,
come midnight, shows me to the door
and prescribes the moon,
which has often helped before.

Chorus

Whoever's calling keeps hanging up, he
won't leave a message -
so we brush the television, watch our teeth,
and pretend to go to bed,
listening for ringtones in our heads -

Catherine Barnett may be all over the place with her thoughts and her sharing of moments, but every one of them becomes a poem in the truest sense - a fraction of time when the world stops while we readjust.

Grady Harp

[Karlo Mikhail · Rating 4 out of 5]

Was won over by the plainspoken and restraint side by side with the playfulness and the repetition. Love the sequence pertaining to childhood / motherhood anxieties, less so the vague sensualism of the latter verses.

[Susan Rich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Barnett is a poet you need to read if you are of this century but also a little bit lost in the past. This is a beautiful book that invites the reader into a crystalized world --- written --- I can only suspect --- long past midnight. The poems are meditations on urban life told with perfect pitch of high and low culture. the game of boxes ( starred review in Publisher's Weekly)is my pick this week.

Inventory

Down at the grocery store, tacked to the board
flapping in the wind,
the business card says
"Husband 4 a Day."
She takes a few,
tucks them into May, then June,

but now it's August
and she says the boy can use them
as bookmarks, placeholders,
kindling. She's still like a husband,
or at least a keepsake,
a light switches on

when anyone comes near.
She'd like more books, fewer rocks,
a path in the woods.
At night she hears knocking
from the fields, something
undoes in the wind.

In the morning, the floors creak
and hum because what's gone
is also there, singing
inside the clutch of stones
the boy slingshots into air.

Catherine Barnett, the game of boxes

[Kathleen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Spare, intense, erotic. These are startling and resonant poems that I am still savoring long after reading.

[Jeanne · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetic fragments of stories told in concise language, with much left to imagination. The subject matter of relationships, both with lovers and with children, give reason to celebrate our excess and absence of connection.

[Adam Feng · Rating 3 out of 5]

I might be positively biased because Catherine was my poetry professor—but I thought the second half was delightful.

The first half, on the hand, was good but at times unmemorable.

3.5/5

[Literary Review The · Rating 5 out of 5]

Catherine Barnett
The Game of Boxes

By F. Daniel Rzicznek

"The Game of Boxes" was reviewed in The Literary Review
"Loss Control" Fall 2012

As a writer, I create yearlong, but because of my position as an instructor of English composition, summer remains my season of “play,” three months when I treat writing like a full-time job. The giddiness of this freedom echoes back to my distant but distinct existence before summer jobs like golf caddying, dishwashing, bagging groceries, and even, one summer, unloading trucks, ushered me into the workforce. I find that this sense of play remains urgent, even essential, to my own work, but, more pressingly, to the books I choose to read. The spare, yet intricate poems in Catherine Barnett’s second full-length collection, The Game of Boxes, fulfill this need for linguistic and imaginative diversion. She is concerned with how we talk to our gods, our parents, our children, and our lovers. Reading Barnett’s work feels, happily, like play as it breaks through inattention and ennui to refigure the familiar in terms so original they become alien.
The book’s opening section offers more than a dozen poems with the title “Chorus,” most of them invoking a collective “we.” In the “Chorus” poem beginning “We thought it was safe under trees,” a storm overhead sweeps away an onlooker’s scarf, which Barnett describes as “red like a toy.” What type of toy, exactly, is with- held, the result being a controlled ambiguity that reverses expectations. To say a storm lifts and moves something as if it were a toy would be using a threadbare simile, but Barnett has switched movement for color—just one of many times in the collection that my anticipations were refreshingly thwarted. Barnett approaches language as a flexible, malleable material to work with, as opposed to a set of fixed or inherited formulas. In fact, it seems to be the formulaic that the poems want to undermine via play, as in “Sojourn,” which presents an autobiographical speaker having her picture taken by her son. The son is unhappy with the photo and asks playfully “Do it again [. . .] Pretend you’re really climbing” and the poet, upon see- ing the second version, is unsure if her eye is “smiling or crying,” creating more of that ambiguity. It is an unlikely place to end, and this is one of many poems in the book that employs non-closure (charged with negative capability) to punctuate the personal lyric. Nothing ends neatly—get used to it, I can almost hear the work saying beneath its breath. Later in the book, the poem “Providence” begins, “This evening I shared a cab with a priest,” the setup to a million jokes about religion, ethics, and mortality, but this particular priest reveals that “Some of the best sermons / don’t have endings,” a possibility that Barnett’s attractive and challenging work hinges upon.
Amidst poems that consider both literal and spiritual states of parent-child duality, twenty-four short lyrics (all collected in their own section under the title “sweet double, talk-talk”) explore love and sex with more fresh turns and moments of surprise. In the poem beginning “Sure, I say, fine, as if it doesn’t matter,” Barnett delivers a metaphor to impart the pleasure of a lover’s touch: “a match lifted from its neat white box / and struck on the afterlife bed.” The phrase “afterlife bed” pushes the reader back to the poems’ subject (the physical act of sex) while adding the strangely abstract modifier “afterlife,” a leap that successfully builds on the poetic momentum created by the unexpected “struck match” metaphor. Later, in “I want to see his face,” the speaker’s lover is “skipping rocks across a grave / or swinging his legs at its edge.” These images defy common sense (as well as accuracy of action), which help create halting, haunting visuals. Another poem from the same series begins, “Though I can’t sleep neither could I wake,” a tense shift so subtle that it might slip right by. But it underlines the poet’s awareness of consciousness (dream- ing is its own peculiar and unconscious form of play, memory and our conception of the past being another) and leaves unclear where and when the poem takes place.
Confronted once more with a suspension of finality, I’m reminded that Barnett’s poems fail to make “sense” in order to reflect a world that fails, too, to con- vincingly manufacture closure. The last poem in “sweet double, talk-talk” begins “Then he whispers there, there as if I were a child / and not a woman lying beside him // but what’s wrong with that.” The Game of Boxes reminds us that even grown- ups are still capable of fear, wonder, confusion, anger, joy, lust, and desire, and that in a mass culture rife with false resolution and happy endings, poetry can provide the necessary weight to return us to terra firma and the complicated, unceasing task of being human: a task that requires compassion, improvisation, and acceptance of the uncertain; a task that asks for a bit of innocence, even ignorance—in other words, a bit of play.

[Shruti · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poem 'Chorus', which begins with the line "We didn’t believe an elephant could squeeze into church alone", is worth the price of entry all by itself.

[D.A. Gray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Receiving this turned out to be pleasant surprise.

Barnett seems to find the sublime in the subway, in a discussion of religion, alone, or in a simple game played with the speaker's son. In addition to the slice of life moments, Barnett has 14 poems each titled "Chorus," which switch to third person and give these poems the feel of a Greek drama, the chorus being the collective refrain of the play.

I think the collective feel keeps each from staying pigeonholed as 'confessional' poetry -- we're challenged to see where we have had our feet in those shoes:

Chorus (Everyone asks)

Everyone asks what we're afraid of
but we aren't supposed to say.
We could put loneliness on the list.
We could put this list on the list,
its infinity. We could put infinity down.
Who knows why we're here, it's a "mystery."
We're getting older,
and when no one's watching
we climb right into it.

One that struck me, perhaps because of the ease with which she combines the daily and the eternal, not being mystical, not being trite. This is the last poem in the collection and seems to underscore the underlying theme.

Providence

This evening I shared a cab with a priest
who said it was a fine day to ride cross town

with a writer. But I can't
finish the play I said,

it's full of snow.
The jaywalkers

walked slowly, a cigarette warmed
someone's hand.

Some of the best sermons
don't have endings, he said

while the tires rotated unceasingly
beneath us.

All over town people were waiting
and doubleparked and

making love and waiting.
The temperature dropped

until the shiverers zipped their jackets
and all manner of things started up again.


I'm not sure this is a collection I would have picked out on my own, but the aha moments grow with additional readings. I will be reading more of the poet's work.

[Andrea Blythe · Rating 4 out of 5]

It took me a while to connect with the poems in this collection. Some poems I had to reread several times until they began to click (though I think the distance had more to do with my headspace than with the poetry. Once it did click, though, I discovered poetry that took the everyday and commonplace and didn't so much as elevate it, as roll around in it, feeling the sharp and soft edges and appreciating them for what they are.

The collection is split in three sections.

The first, "Endless Forms Most Beautiful," features a dozen or so poems named "Chorus," which alternate with other poems with individual titles. The titled poems all deal with an "I" narrator, an individual, who could be the same individual in each case, while the Chorus poems all focus on a "We" narrator that takes up the song of the populace that circles the individual. Sometimes, while driving or walking down the street, I'll break out of my own personal narrative and be stunned by how many lives are going on around me, each with their own stories, their own internal monologues — reading "Endless Forms Most Beautiful" reminded me of that experience.

The second section, "Of All Faces," is comprised of a single long poems, called "Sweet Double, Talk Talk," a modern love story, full of sex and intimacy and distancing and coming round again. It's beautiful and subtle and bitter sweet, like love often is. I read this through a couple of times and connected deeper with it on the second reading.

The last section, called "The Modern Period," is a series of poems that approach everyday moments, such as visiting a doctor, and finds deeper resonance in each moment.

[Christina M Rau · Rating 4 out of 5]

The speakers in Catherine Barnett's The Game Of Boxes vary among the innocent child, the adult in duty, the unsure woman, and the third person observer. That variety offers a renewed look at the world with every poem. Most poems show her mastery of minimalism, using specific nouns to elicit tone without needing the backstory, the excess words, or the title to speak for the poem. Though some poems veer into enigma, most become clear when considered in the space of the collection.

Most of the poems entitled "Chorus" (there are several) show universal thought like "Everyone asks what we're afraid of / . . . We could put loneliness on the list. / We could put this list on the list"

Lots of highlights:
"Inventory" offers "the floors creak / and hum because what's gone / is also there, singing / inside the clutch of stones"
"The Game of Boxes" offers "there's no end to it, / nor to dust nor to snow," an allusion to Frost.

And everything from "Sweet Double, Talk-Talk" packs a world of fear, confusion, and wonder.

[Jeff]

I don't want to dedicate stars here because I don't want to bash a poet on her highly-touted second work. And I know she won the Academy of American Poets Award and I know the other reviewers seem to be in love here, but I was pretty unimpressed by this work.

Nothing challenges, nothing is unique or traditional. It reads like someone who wanted to write what she always thought poetry was but never considered what it could be.

I feel bad writing this, don't want to knock someone around here. So I'll just be a little mean and leave the stars to the sky.

[Mark Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lovely little book that teeters on the precipice of abstract poetry without ever quite going over the edge. Of an optician, she writes: "She has custody of my eyes/and the way my eyes see..." In another poem she describes how a science student makes a model of the heart "until it looks like the model of a coat he might hang/ on a hangar with other missing coats." E Rey once in a while she does stoop to using those Latinate words which indicate the poet is still unconsciously trying please her professors, but on the whole this is a readable, warm little book.

[Sophie]

"We could put loneliness on the list. We could put this list on the list, its infinity."

"The mothers keep promising clear skies but when we look up it's all clouded over, like a fortune-teller's face in the face of the clouds."

"They're shadow and blank space and fragrance"

"He's a lozenge of smut"

"Beneath the oval mirror hanging from twine"

"I'm like the fever even after the fever broke"

"your smooth worn promises"

"This isn't me speaking but the old gentle hiss of a slow glass ship in a bottle on the sea."

[Linda · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read the whole book in one sitting. Then I read it again the next day. This is something I rarely do with poetry books, but I think that as the first two sections are written as contained sequences, they read better as a whole. The poems are beautifully and carefully made, very satisfying to read and surprising how much energy and life they hold inside them. I love this book. I'll read it again and again.

[Richard · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book has three distinct sections. I didn't care for the first (a mother's imagined voices of a kind of Lost Boy tribe), loved the second (a jaded loved caught by an erotic fascination), and thought the third was okay (a competent but unexciting case of urban ennui).

A better than average collection.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think I need to read this book a few more times before I can give it a decent review. The poems are easy to read, but they have a density to them. Some of the themes in the book include abandonment, loss, and love, both the purely sensual kind and the kind of a mother given to a child.

[Anne · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love this!

Everyone asks us what we're afraid of
but children aren't supposed to say.
We could put loneliness on the list.
We could put the list on the list, its infinity.
We could put infinity down.
--from “Fields of No One to Ask”

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 4 out of 5]

Strong book of lyric poems, the long poem in the middle that chronicles the complexity of feelings for another through acute and agile word play is particularly lovely!

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Seemingly simple verse that explodes in meaning and emotion.

[Charlotte Pence · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, one of my favorite poetry books that I've read lately. Surprising. Haunting in a delicious way.

[Greg Bem · Rating 4 out of 5]

My head responded to the vision of the world we've been waiting for: one that is full of peace, but strength, from the angle that's so often been disregarded.

[Ruby Scupp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Favorite poems:

- "Old Story"
- "Categories of Understanding"
- "Chorus [What's wrong? we ask]"
- "Sweet Double, Talk-Talk" (xi., xv., xix.)
- "In the Cabinet of What's Expired"
- "Soliloquy, ii"
- "Vast & Lonesomely"


Favorite lines:

- "windows filled with windows head home and away from home, / windows opening, / windows closing, / windows in suits and ties / wearing the eyes of strangers or stars."

- "The clock doesn't have an amygdala / so it doesn't worry, it tells / its own quick trickle-down story / of now and now and now"

- "I can only speak the way light / falls, the way the cotton sheet / lays itself over his sleeping or resting / or dissolving body, touching him with / its ephemera, its oblivion."

- "Everyone asks what we're afraid of / but we aren't supposed to say."

- "we'd be lost could we not / abandon them, could we not / find and abandon them."

- "He's only homeopathy, / a little lust- / tincture, overdose, / vials of must-"

- "I play the game of wanting / while holding very still."

- "But it's a pretty silver hope, / and I still swallow it- / I let it wash down my throat"

- "I couldn't be mist because mist / is airborne, mist doesn't wear black / and dirty up so many pages."

[Carl Waluconis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read one recent poem in The New Yorker by Catherine Barnett that sent me back to her previous books. In this award-winning first book of her poetry, it seems she is developing even as the book progresses. The closing sections are stronger than the first. She explores an intimate relationship in courageous and insightful ways. She seems best at her most terse:
i like the fever
even after the fever broke
I very much look forward to reading her newest collection, "Human Hours" just out September of this year.

[Kelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“I play the game of wanting
while holding very still.” (57)

This is a quite charming collection of poetry centered around motherhood, family, and fleeting love. Barnett is straightforward with her language and simple in her descriptions but not stale. This collection feels “homey” and familiar, set in the daily flow of life and the yearnings we all have for love and belonging or some sense of either.

I enjoyed this collection! Would recommend~

[Ramzzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

Even in fragments, The Game of Boxes by Catherine Barnett works synchronously, for it is assured in its musicality and convincing in its rendition of a content that is generic already for being a staple American melancholy (family woes, abandonment, middle-class relationship nuisances, etc.)

The poetic thrill however, is that, her poems in this collection have the style in between Louise Gluck and Lana del Ray.

[Kathy Piselli · Rating 4 out of 5]

I got this book looking for a poem of Barnett's I'd read that talked about sliding down California foothills on flattened cardboard boxes. That one wasn't in this collection but these words were: "a good day for sleeping, / a fascinating day."

[Ron Bernas · Rating 2 out of 5]

I heard the author interviewed on a poetry podcast and she sounded like someone whose work I wanted to explore. I'm sure if it was my mood or the poems, but I could find no connection and couldn't figure out what the hell she was going on about.

[Chris]

“Old Story” makes this volume worth reading.