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Complicity
A dazzling and exhilarating new collection of poetry from an award-winning Canadian poet. For fans of Ken Babstock, A.F. Moritz, and Karen Solie.
Award-winning poet Adam Sol's fourth collection is a meditation on complicity. By turns intimate and lyrical, experimental and outlandish, the collection focuses us on how we cannot escape the troubling structures that determine our lives. How do we identify ourselves with communities - national, cultural, or local - while aware of the violence which underlies their arrangements? How do we pursue love when we know how fraught and imbalanced gender politics is? How do we continue to value art despite the prevailing rhetoric that considers it a marginal discourse? The poems are funny, allusive, off-kilter, and sonically rich, while crucially interrogating, lit with, the contemporary ethos.
Award-winning poet Adam Sol's fourth collection is a meditation on complicity. By turns intimate and lyrical, experimental and outlandish, the collection focuses us on how we cannot escape the troubling structures that determine our lives. How do we identify ourselves with communities - national, cultural, or local - while aware of the violence which underlies their arrangements? How do we pursue love when we know how fraught and imbalanced gender politics is? How do we continue to value art despite the prevailing rhetoric that considers it a marginal discourse? The poems are funny, allusive, off-kilter, and sonically rich, while crucially interrogating, lit with, the contemporary ethos.
- GenresPoetry
112 pages, Paperback
First published March 25, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
December 17, 2014
I never heard of Adam Sol before reading a review of his book (& others) by Stephen Burt in the Boston Review, and after reading the review I thought that the interrogation of how poetry tries to keep up with the surfeit of surveillance, terrorism, and (for lack of better concept) "social media" might prove for a heady reading experience. I very much enjoyed reading this collection and Sol does genuinely tackle those issues (as well as how family and friendship fit into that mix). The book is probably a 3 1/2 star, maybe even a 4-star.
Thing is, though, there isn't really a poem that stood out for me as truly memorable, or even a line that stuck -- all of the poems are smoldering, but none of them really flare up into full flame for me. Rather, it's the overall effort and intelligence behind his effort in the maelstrom of writing poems in these bewildering times that carried me from page to page. I guess that might sound a bit harsh and as though I'm saying Sol doesn't write memorable poems, but it's just that I wanted a line to really drive home a poetic response to feeling besieged and simultaneously lost in the chaos of our times, and I wanted it without any post-modern schtick. That's a pretty tall order, and maybe Burt planted the idea in his review (by the way, Sol has a lovely thank you to his family in the acknowledgements that compares a book to a garden: "thanks would also go to my family for being the earth, my sons for being the bees, and Yael, of course, for being the sun.")
To his credit, Sol is certainly interested in authentically tackling the bewilderment of living in an Age of Terror, and he also seems by-and-large dissatisfied with easy, ironic post-modern glibness. For me, the prose poems work best in the collection because they provide him an expansiveness to really explore the issues this volume tackles (I especially enjoyed one called "Disaster Contest," which is a chilling send-up of both writing contest and the idea that we have to out-do/out-imagine the terrorist imagination/sensibilities of, say, a Dick Cheney to really get any attention nowadays [you can tell I read this volume when the U.S. Senate report on torture was released]).
He ends the book with a fine prose poem called "The Museum of Sound," but the penultimate poem, "Yellow House Spider," gets closest to the tone and imagery I had high hopes would've been throughout the collection:
"Yellow House Spider"
clings by web and claw
to the shower tiles.
Naked, slick with soap,
I watch her try to
weather the crisis.
Everywhere I look
there are signs the world
wants to shake us loose.
The hot rain streams down.
What should I not do?
**
I really love that I first thought the naked, slick-with-soap body was the spider's and not the speaker's! It's a good poem and maybe I expected too much from Sol. I'll definitely be on the look-out for his other collections and read them closely.
Thing is, though, there isn't really a poem that stood out for me as truly memorable, or even a line that stuck -- all of the poems are smoldering, but none of them really flare up into full flame for me. Rather, it's the overall effort and intelligence behind his effort in the maelstrom of writing poems in these bewildering times that carried me from page to page. I guess that might sound a bit harsh and as though I'm saying Sol doesn't write memorable poems, but it's just that I wanted a line to really drive home a poetic response to feeling besieged and simultaneously lost in the chaos of our times, and I wanted it without any post-modern schtick. That's a pretty tall order, and maybe Burt planted the idea in his review (by the way, Sol has a lovely thank you to his family in the acknowledgements that compares a book to a garden: "thanks would also go to my family for being the earth, my sons for being the bees, and Yael, of course, for being the sun.")
To his credit, Sol is certainly interested in authentically tackling the bewilderment of living in an Age of Terror, and he also seems by-and-large dissatisfied with easy, ironic post-modern glibness. For me, the prose poems work best in the collection because they provide him an expansiveness to really explore the issues this volume tackles (I especially enjoyed one called "Disaster Contest," which is a chilling send-up of both writing contest and the idea that we have to out-do/out-imagine the terrorist imagination/sensibilities of, say, a Dick Cheney to really get any attention nowadays [you can tell I read this volume when the U.S. Senate report on torture was released]).
He ends the book with a fine prose poem called "The Museum of Sound," but the penultimate poem, "Yellow House Spider," gets closest to the tone and imagery I had high hopes would've been throughout the collection:
"Yellow House Spider"
clings by web and claw
to the shower tiles.
Naked, slick with soap,
I watch her try to
weather the crisis.
Everywhere I look
there are signs the world
wants to shake us loose.
The hot rain streams down.
What should I not do?
**
I really love that I first thought the naked, slick-with-soap body was the spider's and not the speaker's! It's a good poem and maybe I expected too much from Sol. I'll definitely be on the look-out for his other collections and read them closely.
Read
May 31, 2014Hi, Everyone! Please check out my interview with poet Adam Sol as we discuss his latest collection, Complicity (McClelland & Stewart, 2014). Read the interview and an excerpt now on my TTQ Blog. http://thetorontoquarterly.blogspot.c...
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews