The Switching/Yard

by Jan Beatty

In Jan Beatty’s fourth collection, The Switching/Yard, she takes us through the ravaged landscape of the American West. In unflinching lines of burning lyric and relentless narrative, she forges the constructed body into movement. What is still stereotyped as the romantic journey—now becomes as scarred as the Rust Belt. What lives in our collective unconscious as the Golden West becomes almost surreal, as these poems snap that vision in half with extended description of ghost explorers.

We see the open truck cab, the farm workers on the corner waiting for pick-up; we see the speaker returning west to find the long-abandoned story of the birthfather. There is no stable landscape here except the horizontal action of moving through . Landscape becomes story. In this extended tale of the idea of family, we find stand-ins for the father in the form of a hit man, Jim Morrison, and ultimately the unyielding road takes the place of the body. The Switching/Yard is at once the horizontal world of the birth table where babies are switched, the complex yard of the body where gender routinely shifts and switches, and the actual switching yard of the trains that run the inevitable tracks of this book.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Heather · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jan Beatty's poetry pushes, unsettles, carries with it all the unexpected delicate beauty in the grit and the blunt everyday of Pittsburgh. Every one of her books lingers with me after I'm done reading and forces me to confront my own blind spots in my writing. The Switching/Yard explores roots and rootlessness, travels into the past by an adopted child looking for her birth father and travels by train through California, a place of shifting identities and populations. Boundaries, codes, the resulting failures and exhausting and finally quiet successes - so much to find here. Read the damn book.

[James · Rating 4 out of 5]

I finished this collection of poetry today and really enjoyed it.

For some reason, though, poet Jan Beatty has a running gimmick with back-slashes and equals signs. The equals signs appear in the layout of the book as dividers of some sort. The back-slashes appear in the title, the layout, and in the bodies of poems themselves. I got the impression they were supposed to have some sort of significance, but Beatty doesn’t explain this in the end notes where she explains everything else.

All that said, I’d like to read more of her work.

[Gerry LaFemina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Emotional, gritty, raw, precise, powerful, musical, crafted and beautiful.

[Cecile · Rating 4 out of 5]

Raw deep and witty.

[Bruce Cline · Rating 4 out of 5]

The poems in this volume
were written, for the most part,
like I, well, like them.
The author used words I mostly know.
Though there were times when the verse
was too raw for my palette,
and a number of her poems
required too much chewing.
But like a good but not perfect steak,
I think it’s okay if a little of it is raw
and a few parts require
extra mastication, especially
when the bulk of it is well-seasoned,
tasty, and easy to swallow.
For me, the key is when
the amount of chewing required
is commensurate with the quality
of the taste.
And for the most part,
that’s the balance she struck.