If Not Metamorphic (The New Series) by Brenda Iijima

by Brenda Iijima

If not metamorphic, changed by geological pressure, then what? Iijima’s newest book uses the long form, frequently in choral antiphon, to ask what kind of pressures exert change—as in the title poem, where war and human cruelty have turned even the kelp murderous—and what exactly is sometimes words take on other forms before our eyes, sometimes sentences try on new endings in shameless view, and puns on popular culture poke through the deepest meditation. These poems truncate and disrupt narrative, borrowing now from the parataxis of renku, now from the verse-prose travelogue of haibun, but do not foreclose the possibility of epiphany; Iijima still envisions a “Great Swan” that holds within it creation and “Eureka / Or death?”“Iijima’s eco-provocations have the lightness and gravitas of an improbably reconsecrated world glimpsed at its hectic, interrogatively driven conception. On the edge of loss, words have taken on direct agency.” —Joan Retallack“Plato, arguably the philosopher with the most influence on the development of Western culture, famously banished poets from the ideal city in the name of the philosophos with a tacitly hegemonic regard for the danger posed to the State by the massive social power of poetic eros. The title of Brenda’s Iijima’s new work, If Not Metamorphic, promises the emergence of an ‘unhindered and spiraling’ structure that, as it turns out, recoups and transforms this marginalized power of eros. What occurs is nothing less than the ramified beauty of the work’s own variegated measures in a ‘continuum of elaboration,’ wherein ‘Essentiality becomes / Phantasmal’ and ‘Erotic / Rebellion’ flies in the face of a Platonically underwritten Occident that by philosophical default knows one habitually physio-psychical state, so to ‘The state / Would have us / Becoming / Bland.’ Anything but bland, Iijima’s fantastically life-affirming work ‘Eureka / Or death?’ My response is to read aloud in wonder and appreciation.” —Christopher Rizzo

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

Reviews

[Opal McCarthy · Rating 5 out of 5]

yes or i should say, yes? this book is a smart and gorgeous echolocation, she pulls off a long poem of question marks,

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"I felt warm in the trauma cocoon"

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"When she
began a sexual relationship with the earth"

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" Mistress metamorphose me and my
tricks in blue screens like horizons"

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"Spinal tap everglade"

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" I've been happy there, echolocate
In awe."

[Lizzie · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn’t like the first two poems but I really liked the last two

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2010 Sexiest Poem Award goes to Brenda Iijima for her poem "PANTHERING" in the book If Not Metamorphic, ALL DETAILS AT THIS LINK: http://sexiestpoemaward.blogspot.com/