Soul in Space

by Noelle Kocot

"Illuminated, feral, Kocot's creativity engenders an excitement comparable to being twelve years old, exposed to good poetry or music or art for the first time. . . . One can't help but to be unsteady, but believe in that instability. . . . She leaves us hanging in the best always about to fall, always about to be saved."-Nick Sturm, Coldfront

"Characterized by an utter irreducibility, Noelle Kocot's poetry displays an elemental movement of thinking and suggests a poetics of vision."-Jean-Paul Pecqueur, Rain Taxi

Noelle Kocot's poetry resets hierarchies in favor of a world outside of time or telescope. Soul in Space is a masterful combination of Kocot's intimacy and authority over poetic form, and leaves a brighter and weirder world in its wake.

But now, back to our story,

It has coffee in it, a naked river.
Blessed are we who rapture

An electric wire, blessed be
The falling things about our faces,

Blessed is the socket of an eye
That lights the body, because

In the end, in the very end, it's
Just you. You and you. And you.

Noelle Kocot is the author of six collections of poetry. Her work has been featured in The Best American Poetry (2012 and 2013) and in Postmodern American A Norton Anthology (edited by Paul Hoover). She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, the Fund for Poetry, and the American Poetry Review. She lives in New Jersey.

Genres: Poetry

144 pages, Paperback

First published October 15, 2013

About the author

Noelle Kocot is the author of four collections of poetry, with a limited-edition discography forthcoming in 2010, and a fifth full-length (The Bigger World) forthcoming in 2011. Her most recent full-length collections include Sunny Wednesday (Wave Books, 2009) and Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems (Wave Books, 2006). She is also the author of 4 and The Raving Fortune (both from Four Way Books). She is the recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Academy of American Poets, The Fund for Poetry and the American Poetry Review. She currently lives in New Jersey.

For more information on this author, go to:
http://www.wavepoetry.com/authors/25-...

Reviews

[TinHouseBooks · Rating 5 out of 5]

Veronica Martin (Columnist, The Open Bar): Soul in Space by Noelle Kocot. Read around a campfire at the coast, read in the morning under a bouquet of flowers and then taken back home to the city from the sea and re read, even after the flowers had long dropped all of their pollen, this collection of poems has resonated with me in all geographies over the past year. Kocot’s defined meditations—“To give up something is to re-kill it” and “How often we say things we don’t mean/ Fully, with our full selves” and “Talking about oneself is rarely intimate”—are laced with nature, with bees and super-meadows and mosquitoes, and let go into an eventual verse that soothes as much as it empties: “You see, I’ve learned to stretch the canvas/ Of my life into a boundless river,/ To elongate and subtly alter the lie/ By taking the F from the ineffable fiction/ Of the original word and grinding it up/ Into a pigment that bathes these walls/ In a seascape which I leave behind/ In hopes that you may someday swim/ With fullest reverence past it.” “How often we say things we don’t mean/ Fully, with our full selves. But this is/ All right, since we cannot make sense of/ The growing weeds, the things that go/ Where only blue travels.” Kocot’s poems are full of statement and nature and longing but also something stronger, punctuated with the telling of a loneliness. The life on the page is a calculation, a reflection and also an invitation into this geography of silos and summer ash and bed sheets. These poems feel like linens left out to dry in a vast unpopulated and silent space, the world more woven into their threads with every breeze, not forgotten but regarded, left intentionally, so we might at once observe and inhabit the decomposition of their soul and the creation of a new entity: “I don’t/ Want to sound coy or even ridiculous,/ But after all, the azure of a face drawn/ In sand at the edge of a sea is my own/ Two deaths. The first one happened 7/ Years ago. I’ve grown all new cells since/ Then.” She leaves us “Lost in the harp of your grey dress” and lying in “…an overturned/ boat, the arc of modernity, the poem.”

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

Sparse poems that take a minute to get into the balance of Kocet's vernacular. I feel like I have a sense of her landscapes, of the place called New Jersey. There are a number of small lines, short bumps that jump out and swallow your breath, beg for rereading. And that is what a poem should do.

[Lindsey]

Favorites: "Talk," "Poem," "II," and "9.10.08"

[Burgi Zenhaeusern · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite poems in Soul in Space is the very first poem:
Talk

My body is
A little
Green sea.

Bears bathe
In it
Then go to

Sleep in the
Basement.
A four-wheeler

Slams past,
And then the
Sea splashes

Around and
Around.
O little sea,

O my body
Sit here with me
While I just talk.

It is such a brilliant opening poem for the collection, setting the tone of easygoing intimacy and familiarity for the colloquies that follow. As a reader I felt as much addressed as getting to witness these exchanges between the speaker and [fill in your own idea]. And there are delicious occasions to smile here and there, such as this last stanza (from On the Debut of Olivier Messiaen's "Quartet for the End of Time:"
"Somehwere an angel has counted
Infinity wrong, and rests his cheek
Upon the stars."

The language and images poured into the lines of conventional forms are sharp as knives and as brilliant. There are riddles. There are sonnets. There is music. Go and experience this poetry for yourselves.

[Wolfshe · Rating 4.25 out of 5]

A great collection of poems. Very inspired by this particular style and content. Really enjoyed and look forward to reading/marinating on it again!

[Vincent Scarpa · Rating 1 out of 5]

(If you just so happen to share similar poetic interests and sensitivities as do I, a line like, "The egrets are waiting for you/waiting there in the abecedarian grass" might be all you need to know about this book.

Lots of grass that I can get down with. "Abecedarian"? Nowhere on that list.)

I tend to enjoy most of what WAVE puts out, so I picked up this collection last year and decided I'd read it tonight. Sadly, it seems I really don't care for Kocot's poetry, (at least in this book, which very well may be nothing like her other collections.) These poems felt tracing-paper thin on the level of content and of language; unfinished with more left to move through or toward. The work felt almost lazy in this regard; like the poet and her poems were acknowledging their limited movement and effect, but Kocot didn't want to revise or rewrite them, didn't want to probe or work them. The product, then, are poems of indecipherable logic, intent, and effect, which is some people's bag, it just isn't mine.

Overall, the collection felt like it was hitting more or less the same notes in each poem, and I suppose I'd find that repetition more enjoyable had those been notes that compelled me in any way, or at least activated some attraction toward how Kocot was employing language.

[lia · Rating 4 out of 5]

me refiero exactamente a esto cuando quiero explicar qué entiendo por poesía estadounidense actual. tiene la brevedad y la naturaleza del haikú, pero in this day and age me resulta ligeramente artificial, de que: poesía hallmark. o sea, se me hace raro pensar que fueron escritos en nueva jersey, 2013, pero que pudieran haber tomado lugar cien años atrás. nada hace referencia a la vida actual. con todo, no dejan de ser bellos y buenos.

"the sun rises, too, / over my water- / logged heart"

"(...) i say, / touch me, or let me touch you, in a / garden filled with daylilies"

"i wish i had a sample of its handwriting / so that i could be less lonely"

"i am not finished emptying myself, even though / i thought i was"

[Seth Arnopole · Rating 4 out of 5]

Noelle Kocot’s poems are often like miniature acid trips. It’s not always clear if the trip you’re on is a good one or a bad one, but you will definitely go to a different place.

[Stormie · Rating 2 out of 5]

I’m sure this is well loved, just wasn’t my style.