Annotated Glass

by Alyse Knorr

Brian Teare, author of Companion Grasses, says this of the book:

Inside every intimate relationship, Alyse Knorr argues, lies a land of the imagination known only to those in relation. Her beautiful and wise Annotated Glass follows its protagonist, Alice, into and out of lands invented in childhood and adolescence, between family members and lovers, uncovering in each situation and between each of its characters “a network of nerves speaking each to each.” The beauty of Knorr’s writing lives in these electric connections, the way Alice’s desire for her lover Jenny runs—a “current on my tongue like the inside/of a star.” But the wisdom of Annotated Glass lies in its ability to describe the loss not only of family and lovers but also the imaginative landscapes that remain behind when they do. Knorr captures each elegiac departure with images of startling clarity and ambient texture: "yellow tractors mowing/fields of sunflowers whose faces/have turned black." This is a first book of rare real power and insight.

Genres: Poetry

66 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Sally · Rating 5 out of 5]

Knorr’s book follows Alice through many wonderlands of grief, desire, and memory, and the images for her longing are so visceral—so authentic, surprising, and lyrical and hard, just hard. Alice has lost her sister, Rose, who drowned in childhood; she has lost her lover, Jenny, whose love built a new kind of land with her, one where “A man sells thousands of balloons on the shore/of the sea they have made. Alice buys them all…”

These poems hurt and sing, with their progressively and finely-tuned music, as when, in “Alice and Jenny are Escorted Off the Southwest Airlines Plane,” (for a “kiss/ declared un-benign”), “The flight attendant says this is a family airline” is broken down in later lines, into “I’m saying his is a fantasy error rewind—this the/ famine air rhyme, the femme-hair kind; firmly blared/ sign forgotten leaking sewer brine,” and later,

So this is a family affair—line up to see it this is a family/
affair this is a family this is.

I’m bowled over by the range and complexity of this volume of brief poems—how both magic and mundane lands (“Alice in Brotherland,” “Alice in Public Restroomland,”), as well as memories and Alice’s own artwork (her sketches) and her dreams, are able to do different kinds of work to reveal richly various but interconnected aspects of the voice here. The poems handle Alice’s adult family life and her childhood with equal power. Alice remembers, long after Rose’s death, taking Rose to a winter carnival on her sixth birthday, where “Giant tiered floats like/ white-frosted cakes, gauzy pink butterflies/ teetering on stilts, and a ten-foot tree/raining lights down its sides”:

And Alice’s mother folded a crane out of
a receipt from her purse and tucked it into
Rose’s hair. And Alice held Rose up to see
above the crowd and said, _Look at all of this--
all of this is for you_.

The shattering beauty of these poems is not to be missed.

[Joe]

AG follows Alice in her relationships with her sister Rose and lover Jenny. Heartbreak, grief, and being pushed into adulthood. I thought of Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems." & sometimes Christian Gerard's in the works Stella & Wilmot poems. Character is always, I think, communicated slowly in poems, particularly those driven by the lyric image. You see the world through a character’s eye and the character through how that eye inflects things. You get to know Alice just as the sequence is closing, which sent me back to the beginning. Didn’t want to lose her--

The gaps in the ocean
They cover with islands
And the gaps in the islands
They cover with sieves.

This leads to a permanent
Kind of friction
Which please them—

They who never expected
To find such play here.

When their smoke goes up
Over the ships
They speak gibberish
Incantations to provoke
The gods they have made
And the gods they did not make.

They have planned
Which fossils to leave
Behind but have not
Considered when.

Finished this on the metro in DC, a good place for it. DC is where I learned poetry & staggering love. Anyway, way to kill it w/yr debut book, Alyse. Put this on the bookshelf between Peter Klappert & Drew Krewer.

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think this is one I'll come back to again.

[Sofie Frydman · Rating 5 out of 5]

this book shattered me

in a good way