Of

by Kai Ihns

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

Published January 1, 2024

Reviews

[Clinton Smith · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Of” is an excellent and immensely moving book. The poetry in it is experimental in a lot of ways without being over-challenging to find an entryway into, and the methods used in the writing of the poems, which (to over-simplify) involve a lot of iteration of phrases and words, exploring the multitude of perspectives that one can look at an object or an emotion from by doing the same thing with the language itself, culminates in an extensive topography of feelings and memories that are the result of blending all of the minute variations of perspective. She also is able to work effectively doing this with a wide variety of leaps of association that the reader somehow intuitively gets. It’s best to take one pass at the longer centerpieces of the book, put the book aside for a while, and then come back and ponder the dual mystery and clarity of the writing via re-reading. Particularly excellent are poems such as “Repair Hours” and “Blinker Description.” If you decide to take the plunge with “Of”, there’s an interview with her on the website of the Cleveland Review of Books (easily found on their website, www.clereviewofbooks.com) that provides some insight into how her interest in visual art in particular informs her approach and that I found gave me some useful insight into the work prior to starting it.

Two poems are a good way into the work. With “Blinker Description,” she uses her deft touch to portray many things and how the bring about their opposite (utopia/non-utopia; the free market promise vs reality) while weaving in almost as an afterthought the types of existence that can thrive underneath the nightmarish “overstory” of America (Walmart, in this case, other things, later). However, the way she does this is very personal rather than political, almost anti-political, and the poem almost dances with its repetitions and associations, there’s something much greater here than the story:

Jameson writes about WalMart, utopia
insists on what’s important in utopia is not what can be
imagined or proposed but what can’t be so
it's an extension
what i found really was, um, waning
difficult now to imagine, not a wholesale annihilation, he points out
waning
there are still surviving enclaves that occur
it still exists around us
like the language of childbirth born in the old one
the coexistence is occurring it’s the change and process

then he moves
Some remarkable things: the “um” (the writer being willing to show it’s being worked out on the page, reconsidered); the pivot to something that’ both universal and personal without having to adjust the language to make it more personal (“surviving enclaves that occur” is a remarkable line, and reads back also as the other side of a dyad with “wholesale annihilation,” which with the WalMart lead in reads both backward and forward, with “wholesale” taking on its multiple meanings, and then the multiple uses of the word “waning” and how they are different in each spot. She’s giving, in a sense, the poetic overview of what is euphemistically called “subculture” but not portraying is as such because, of course, it isn’t, it’s simply “occurring” and it’s not less important than WalMart (later called “the de facto evil”).

The poem then moves more overtly to the personal with a humorous image (it should be said that there’s often a humorous, whimsical joy to the writing and the methods of association that belies what are quite heavy themes at times), a marvel that is probably the most spot-on way I’ve been placed in a WalMart in writing:

you must find another way out to get free
says the donut
Today I go to the third floor because
I am not ready

neither present nor taken away from you

“Repair Hours” contains some remarkable writing that delves into the different kinds of repair that happen in our own lives while different repairs of all sorts are going around us, such that the act of living itself becomes a kind of mending. About two-thirds of the way into the poem, we have a stanza section in which Ihns takes some of the (generally considered) less attractive elements of living and uses them as a sort of metonymy for her own feeling about her life in the first line:

I take up my life, like a rope
Like my own smell which is gentle but too close
Can’t really empty it out
I take the trash
Cartons down, there are four flights, windows
With steam
A rotten beam above the window
Of the “salon”
Where we dry clothes
A tube, it takes a long way
to get to the street

The prose section on the roof repair that is interwoven through the entire narrative in “Repair House”, sometimes predominating, sometimes fading into the background, when I read it aloud had a lot of similarities in terms of stress beats and a general feeling of having the same structure, which I thought was remarkable, even more so for it being in the opposite visual format. Most of the poetry in the collection is like this, seeming to have thought-out elements that yet did not impede the sense that the writing itself has an immense spontaneity to it (apologies in advance for not being able to figure out exactly matching the line breaks):

The roof repair they are doing it above my head, going and touching. Their weight comes to me with a sound. The light one, and larger one, the curved French sounds of their voices, is there another? Third. What is their comfort up there, cold in the air of the freezing morning. The one
roommate is coughing through the wall, I imagine her. Does she hear them? must. You, ah there, afraid, full of angles. So sufficiently held.

An amazing book.

[Benjamin Niespodziany · Rating 5 out of 5]

Experimental, transcendent, absurdist, and forever with a singular voice. No one writes like Kai Ihns. Lyrical, rhythmic, musical mayhem. It's icing on the cake that when she performs at readings, she does so from memory, without the use of any books or pages or aids to assist. So cool.