Our List of Solutions 1st edition by Oeding, Carrie (2011) Paperback

by Carrie Oeding

Poetry. Winner of the 42 Miles Press Poetry Award, Carrie Oeding's OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS, masterfully utilizes voice to create personae of public selves set against a back drop of anxiety and personal longing that the speakers refuse to own up to. These vivid dramatic monologues get at the heart of human vulnerability, but they are anything (and everything) but soft spoken. Here, in this middle class world of barbecue grills and Mexican potato salad, the speakers are brazen, hyperbolic, frustrated, sarcastically euphoric, given to gossip, unbelievably funny, and often lonely. OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS is a lacerating yet poignant picture of American culture and its attendant suburban angst."Carrie Oeding's speakers are so compulsively social and so comically anxious and irritable in their impatient yearning that their humanity comes alive; their dithery streaming flows from loneliness, from the separateness beneath loneliness. These women wield their gestures of mistrust, scorn and disappointment as fragile, provisional defenses against their own hungry romanticism. Revealing all this is a project whereby Oeding has attained an originality rare in contemporary poetry."—Mark Halliday

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published September 1, 2011

About the author

Carrie Oeding's work has appeared widely, including Best New Poets, Colorado Review, Third Coast, DIAGRAM, Mid-American Review, PBS News Hour's Art Beat, and Brevity. Her first book, OUR LIST OF SOLUTIONS, won the Lester M. Wolfson Prize and was published by 42 Miles Press from Indiana University South Bend. She is Visiting Assistant Professor at Marshall University.

Reviews

[Andy Zell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Our List of Solutions by Carrie Oeding is a collection of poetry full of longing and insight and barbecues. One thing I noticed is that this collection works as a cohesive book and not merely a random selection of poems by one author. Characters and objects and themes recur throughout the book, filling out the neighborhood feel to the proceedings. There’s Sandy who says “No more!” before being introduced to the concept of Beauty by a neighbor and finally closing the book with her own list of solutions. There’s the neighborhood barbecues where people eat meat and someone is always on the edge of the group, where there’s gossip and someone disappointing someone else. And then there’s the way the world works, first its prelude and then its understanding. It’s an understanding that’s really a curse.
Some who curse knowing the world, punch who we love saying, This can’t be
how the world works!
And some of us cursers learn
to just watch those in the world who don’t know how it works.
Of course those aren’t the only two options, and that’s not the only way to curse. It’s a complicated book, and these are intricate poems that don’t follow the same narratives or structures I’ve seen before. A speaker in one of these poems is just as likely to imagine a lengthy discourse on a new enemy before fumbling towards complete stasis as imagine that an old high school band mate had the key to beauty and freedom in a great bike metaphor, but that it was now lost. The poems do new and interesting things like revise themselves as they go along as in “Ruby, Give Leo One More Chance”: “You can know a person […] You can know a person too well. You can know a story. / You can feel nothing at all. // I can walk up to a stranger and, and I— / who cares what I could say. / This isn’t about talking to strangers.” It’s intriguing, and it’s a neighborhood I’d like to visit again, even if all the deer have left.
[disclosure: Oeding and I were in grad school together, but I didn’t know her very well. I actually decided to read her book because of a review by Angie Mazakis, another grad student and mutual friend. Angie’s review is much better. You should probably read that one instead of this one.] http://asitoughttobe.com/2014/07/25/a...

[jess sanford · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've begun to think Carrie Oeding has been out there somewhere in the Midwestern wastelands acting as something of a doppelganger as I've eaten the potluck food and pumped kegs at leaving-this-one-stoplight-town going-away parties, wondering when I'd get around to making it my turn. This is one long way of saying that as I read these poems I found myself often thinking: swell, I'm not the only one -- in a way void of any kind of relief, a way entirely full of loneliness. This paradox often surfaces to my mind as an overarching gesture of the book -- a crowded, noisy, tiki-light bordered backyard rumination on the unique brand of suburban dystopia that only the Midwestern fields of cows and corn can offer. The speaker of this book is one that seems often to come out of the blurred landscape that lies at the center of this paradox, perpetually vacillating somewhere between insider/outsider with a comedic and often sardonic distrust and annoyance as much with herself as the ever-present neighbors:

"Don't wait for me to point out how people work.

Your friends will leave you for a stranger's birthday,

and you'll never get over it. I can't wait

to tell you how your kitten will turn out.

Oh, I'm ruining everything."

...

"Let's get you a soda,

with two straws and one person

to love, who'd break your cake, cut your heart

and its songs of what a heart is.

Then maybe you can come over

and surprise me with something better,

something that I would really

never get over, something that would ruin us both."

--from "Sandy, Will You Quit Saying Such Things?"


This epigraph from Frank O'Hara, set before the second section of the book would seem to capture this aspect of the speaker perfectly: "That's not a cross look, it's a sign of life, but I'm glad you care how I look at you." The speaker might be providing all the cross looks but life remains everywhere throughout this book -- the bizarre and complicated characters and their relationships that continually flood into all of the cracks in the fences are what really charge this book with a thick atmosphere of straining for ways to live and live with each other, for understanding in a way as hard to grasp as to articulate:


"What's the safest way to swerve, crash, and avoid that deer?

How long can you hold out? How long can you hold?

Children of botoxed mothers, what facial expressions will you acquire?"

--from "Prelude to How the World Works"


Numbness is prevalent in many forms as the speaker's own oscillations allow for varying distances, the farm-town malaise never quite as clean and static as the aerial photographs of patchwork fields might lead one to believe. What's it mean to be 'part of' any neighborhood, anyway? The role of the neighbor itself feels like one that is comfortable, even benign, but again with the same kind of insightful pondering the speaker herself often seems wary of trundles on--as unstoppable as anything can be--nothing in this book is ever as simple or alone or connected or complicated as it might seem:

"I see there is no difference in happy endings.

I used to call from my porch

until I realized I had to.

I see no one took the stray cat I positioned on the playground.

My barbecue grill is simply past scrubbing.

I know too much. I am never disappointed

and will glean these chimes until I really know

what not to want.

...

You residents of tiny disappointment

and fragile potlucks,

what can we get each other not to say?"


--from "A Way to Live in the Neighborhood"


This last excerpt is one moment of several that felt like points of crisis or saturation, expressed as dramatically as one might reasonably allow oneself to feel them considering the quotidian backdrop and inspirations for such turning points--turning points on an infinitely generating track--sure you're turning but where are we all going anyway? It ends on a lovely rhetorical bit that nicely encapsulates the broader, familiar angst of being over it all, but so what? "What now?" These thematic grounds may be thoroughly traveled in contemporary literature but having no answers one wonders if they can ever be explored enough; this is certainly a book that makes the case for poetry that wants to wallow in the absurdity of the cliche 'human condition'.

All of these characters shimmer safely behind their botox-smile walls in one moment before falling cripple to a milieu of gossip and adultery and disappointment and tee-ball trophy victories the next. If some of these scenes were played out on stage we'd never be able to stop laughing and crying and of course the stage is just a mirror or wobbly-handed camcorder account of almost anyone's Fourth of July extravaganza.


"It is easy to try hard. It's easy to make sense of things. I never want

to give in to the stories."

--from "Sandy's List of Solutions"


Ah, what a beautiful slice of self-deception our speaker offers here at the close of the book. Even as would-be documenter, willing deformer of every last dream and conversation she never fails, poem after poem, to fail to let herself off the hook. The space the speaker occupies throughout the book cannot be overlooked; while often an observation outpost on all the things mentioned here and more, the poems essentially revolve around the speaker's core experience, interpretation and reinterpretations of self using the only available context of stilted surroundings. Often the most compelling poems for me were the ones where the vision of the book scaled back down to the speaker's experience of the lonely isolation of herself alone--at home pleading to the porchlight--these moments reverberate with a kind of deafening silence, a ringing in the ears after an all-night concert that all these other poems stand as. This finally to me became the final vibration of the book, between the complications of self in relation to others and oneself as an other even to oneself when that is all that one is left with. And always the soft undercurrent of assurance that tomorrow the light will still have burnt all night for all the reasons in the world (there are(n't) any) and ... we never liked Louise anyway, did we?

[Ty Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a wonderful collection of poetry with subjects running the gamut from mundane to profound. Ms. Oeding has a fascinating view on the world and I'm thrilled that she shares it with us. This is a book I'll be picking up again and again to re-read and reconnect with her world.

[Russel · Rating 5 out of 5]

moxie,