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Void Sets
Michelle Gottschlich's debut collection of poems bears an acute & tender hand toward the inscrutable nature of being. Engaged in the milieu of void sets (code elements that do not show in surface content) & employing interruption, (day)dream, & other fragmented mental activity as valid manifestations of voice, these poems evince & commune with the buried codes & elements of repressed & othered worlds. Embedded in a culture latent with cruelty & expectation, here are poems that make space for the beautiful aberrations found in the socially estranged realms of mental illness & gender nonconformity. VOID SETS emits a harrowing & necessary glow, one that extends across the enigmatic chasm between persons & reveals forgotten corners, untouched depths: "The dream of mine / where you’re endless water / and I’m a tiny diver."
*
"This book reminded me what it is that I love, that I love, in poems: I love witnessing a real person talking, or trying to talk, to a real person (who might live inside oneself, yes, I know). I love the actual yearning and sorrow and prayer that the voice calling out is. I want you to hear this. I want to ask you this question. It's so goddamned beautiful and sad and true. Michelle Gottschlich's Void Sets is like a long and lovely and heartbroken call. It's an incredible book."
— ROSS GAY
*
"'Void sets' are the pieces of computer code that are not content: they indicate the presence of images, or provide a blank space; they offer, say, an italic shift; they bold. Michelle Gottschlich is bold: a smart questioner and comforter who spends equal time here talking to individuals (we listen in) and talking to herself (we identify): she’s talking to the reader like the reader has just finished saying something she urgently needs to respond to, in either direct or coded ways (there may be censors!)— “Do you think adults made us cruel?” she asks. It may be her directness that most distinguishes her, her refusal to avoid the difficult. Gottschlich wonders where a missed call went (and yes, that seems like a void set!) but she also has more patience for—and openness to—connection than the ‘hundreds of machines that mediate [her] life’ are designed to permit. She’s listening, she’s making content (out of discontent?) by exploring all the places contemporary culture likes to pretend there isn’t any.”
— SALLY BALL
*
"This book reminded me what it is that I love, that I love, in poems: I love witnessing a real person talking, or trying to talk, to a real person (who might live inside oneself, yes, I know). I love the actual yearning and sorrow and prayer that the voice calling out is. I want you to hear this. I want to ask you this question. It's so goddamned beautiful and sad and true. Michelle Gottschlich's Void Sets is like a long and lovely and heartbroken call. It's an incredible book."
— ROSS GAY
*
"'Void sets' are the pieces of computer code that are not content: they indicate the presence of images, or provide a blank space; they offer, say, an italic shift; they bold. Michelle Gottschlich is bold: a smart questioner and comforter who spends equal time here talking to individuals (we listen in) and talking to herself (we identify): she’s talking to the reader like the reader has just finished saying something she urgently needs to respond to, in either direct or coded ways (there may be censors!)— “Do you think adults made us cruel?” she asks. It may be her directness that most distinguishes her, her refusal to avoid the difficult. Gottschlich wonders where a missed call went (and yes, that seems like a void set!) but she also has more patience for—and openness to—connection than the ‘hundreds of machines that mediate [her] life’ are designed to permit. She’s listening, she’s making content (out of discontent?) by exploring all the places contemporary culture likes to pretend there isn’t any.”
— SALLY BALL
- GenresPoetry
35 pages, Paperback
First published May 26, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
March 28, 2018
A glitch in understanding
doesn’t know what it causes - {from} void sets
Comforting in their deceptive urgency, the poems, the parenthetical extractions, the half-rescued clarities, in Michelle Gottschlich’s VOID SETS seem conversations overheard by confrontational angels. These are verses that skip funerals to attend ghosts. Here, a thing left is a thing finished. Here, forgiveness and apology are differently godless. If our machines have made place too crowded for exodus, Gottschlich’s direct silences form the discolored language of exit. In the tense sanctuary of this book, I found myself worrying if I’ve made the right impression on my body, questioning why I pray over ‘first thought, first thought’, and wondering if the buttons I press come out of nowhere. Gottschlich is a poet of wrecked nostalgias and of the plainly dressed ongoing and has presence enough to aim the pop-gun away from the departing, or arriving, messenger.
doesn’t know what it causes - {from} void sets
Comforting in their deceptive urgency, the poems, the parenthetical extractions, the half-rescued clarities, in Michelle Gottschlich’s VOID SETS seem conversations overheard by confrontational angels. These are verses that skip funerals to attend ghosts. Here, a thing left is a thing finished. Here, forgiveness and apology are differently godless. If our machines have made place too crowded for exodus, Gottschlich’s direct silences form the discolored language of exit. In the tense sanctuary of this book, I found myself worrying if I’ve made the right impression on my body, questioning why I pray over ‘first thought, first thought’, and wondering if the buttons I press come out of nowhere. Gottschlich is a poet of wrecked nostalgias and of the plainly dressed ongoing and has presence enough to aim the pop-gun away from the departing, or arriving, messenger.
May 10, 2016
Nothing Monster House Press puts out is simple or straight forward and this work by Gottschlich is as challenging as anything else this publisher has found. I was fortunate enough to catch Gottshlich's reading at Bookspace in Columbus and her use of English and German throughout origins is on par with the more familiar Spanglish poems and prose bringing excitement to modern American poetry and prose. I won't suggest I can fully emphathise with all of the feelings Gottschlich expresses as I'm merely a man trying to learn more about all that I don't understand (a vast, dark void) about the female experience. In pieces such as "Hunting Season" though I find myself in parts of the male role wherein I recognize some of what wrongs I must own up to.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews