Groundspeed

by Emilia Phillips

Groundspeed moves and doesn't stop moving. From pastorals on American highways to self-reckonings after a cancer diagnosis to examinations on grief and transience after the death of a brother, this collection of poems asks readers not only to size up threats but anxieties. Phillips witnesses a small plane crash and examines roadside attractions. She reckons with sexuality after a partner asks for a threesome, and renders a candid portrait of a nude, post-surgery body in a mirror. In this raw and personal book, Phillips insists upon one s own preservation through and beyond grief and trauma with the warning creation is only // myth; destruction narrative. "

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

First published March 15, 2016

About the author

Emilia Phillips is the author of a previous collection, Signaletics (University of Akron Press, 2013), and three chapbooks, most recently Beneath the Ice Fish Like Souls Look Alike (Bull City Press, 2015). She's received fellowships from the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, the Kenyon Review Writers' Workshop, U.S. Poets in Mexico, and Vermont Studio Center. Her poetry and lyric essays have appeared in Agni, Harvard Review, The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Ninth Letter, Ploughshares, Poetry, and elsewhere. She is the Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at Centenary College of New Jersey and the 32 Poems interviews editor.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you are out in public and you don't want anyone to talk to you, bring a book of poetry.

An emotional collection, pulling from memories of fear (cancer treatments) and grief (death of a brother) and poems of motion and transport (hence, the title). I particularly liked the longest work "Lodge" with its observations of the local hotels, their vacancy signs, woven with memories and observations like:

When dark times loom, we cliche. Night is coming. Whenever we have hope, we cliche. I see the light at the end of the tunnel. Both used as metaphors for the approach of death.

[Laurel Perez · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Groundspeed" doesn’t stop moving. Pastorals about American highways, self-reckonings after a cancer diagnosis, to examinations on grief and transience after the death of a brother. This collection of poetry hurts, it asks readers to see and analyze anxieties and threats. Poems of witness are in here, sexuality, and candid self portraits. It's a personal book, that's still tender and throbbing.

[Cedric · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phillips happened to be reading with a friend of mine (google Destiny Birdsong!) at Muzzle Magazine’s AWP Tampa '18, and as fate would have it, I had literally just started reading GROUNDSPEED when I got on the plane. (I bought it at AWP DC '17-it takes me forever to get to stuff.) Also Nabila Lovelace, who I didn't know, was on this billing also and was fire, as were a couple other readers-this reading was accidentally off the chain.

Phillips clearly keeps her senses attuned to every opportunity to write, a habit which I appreciate (and am indicted by the loss of, increasingly....) From doctors' offices, the tragedy of her brother's cancer cells, and budding sexuality, to barns and road trips and episodes of Cops, she finds poems everywhere:

Entente

Watching my mother tweeze a tick from her vulva,
its body like a tumid berry drupelet vised within
the dermal pleats, inflaming them florid—
I first knew I was other, and in my otherness, felt more

for myself than I’d yet. I was ten. Separate yet tender.
Mind, nerve. On the closed commode, she eyed
the nudnik swimming in place against her and beaked
at it, spreading herself, the muumuu gathered at her bosom.

I refused to move from the cold edge of the tub,
soaking cotton in rubbing alcohol as she instructed,
though I was frightened—by her

woolly gulf and what wouldn’t let go, empathy born
swift to toothe into my softness, the sympathetic verve
that first beget the endless plump & suck of I know.

"...tumid berry drupelet vised within
the dermal pleats, inflaming them florid..."

Here, the echoes of Mike Brown's killing, from "Static, Frequency":

I wish it wasn't easy
For the body to think I'e suffered
because I sweat in front of a gym TV
on which St. Louis police
draw on another young man. Because I wince,
because I'm grateful
there's no sound, because empathy
is always a bad overdub, don't
trust me. I'm running
from no one. On the closed
captioning: [man shouting] OH
MY GODD! This is America,
where few witness
and most watch.

Whew. And then:

I sang
at the dinner table: -get down, turn
around.- I knew the words then
but didn't (didn't I?)
know the song.

I appreciate Philips's understanding of historical context here, how her speaker (about whom I think we can make some safe demographic assumptions) confesses to a youthful ignorance, or myopia regarding American history that so many white Americans have failed to get corrective lenses for. If that history is a song, no faithful rendition could fail to include lyrics about the (likely) skin color of the young man, or the long series of brutality and avaricious events that predispose him to the predicament the speaker finds him in.

On a slightly lighter note, check these lines from the beginning of "Abstinence Lesson," where she does something poets often fail to do-engage in a bit of fancy versification (“quint-crowned”) while surrounding you with context so you know WTH is being referred to:

Mrs. M thumbed Scotch Tape on the backs of our hands: mine,

quint-crowned in Zanzibar blue, chipped and chewed, fidgeting
through Girls' Studies, "The Sex Unit." -A woman is like a piece of

tape,"- she began....

And then later:

By then, I was infatuated with a man twice
my age and had begun to hold my body like a pitcher of ice

water on a mirrored tray.

(I admit I don’t know quite how that hold must feel for the speaker, or appear to someone looking at such an arrangement of the body, but because the images are so familiar, Phillips perhaps inadvertently implies that we can know this feeling. “You know, like…how a pitcher of ice water looks when it’s on a mirrored tray. Like that.”) I’m guessing it’s an image intended to relate the way the young girl goes about trying to seem alluring in the eyes of someone she’s crushing on.

A couple of other poems I really enjoyed reading (this work is so pleasant to read aloud)- “Cartography in Absentia” seems to me to muse about the ways people who were formerly good friends can change so that they can never be the same kind of friends to each other:

The friend you seldom see becomes a stranger
at once when you remember him while together
you eat lunch in late summer on the sidewalk
outside a café in the delible shade of an umbrella.
The shadow, slimming, urges you closer together
In your uncomfortable chairs, as if this clement
course of acquaintance is like a river changing

(really appreciate this familiar moment-scooching chairs around in this direction or that to run from the sun. also “delible” to describe shade.)

Ultimately, you can’t quite express to the friend all that’s happened since those times you hung out together or talked almost everyday-you’ve changed:

You can say -this happened- and -this happened-
and -this, this.- But it doesn’t add up to the whole
just as the shadow and the light doesn’t
make the sun; or, ir erodes if you try to
trace the long shore of What Was, which is why you avoid
each other’s eyes, rebuilding, as you must, your flooded
towns of knowledge into small talk and small bites
and finally, a quick -Good-bye!-...

We’ve all been there. I like how Phillips just talks this out for us. I’m sure she must’ve been might distracted writing this in her head during that conversation!

Finally, the final poem in the collection, “Supine Body in Full-Length Mirror, Hotel Room, Upper West Side,” might be the one I’d most like to hear the poet read aloud. The space for what might be a reflection upon the speaker’s travels, or body, or lost relative seems to have been created by gazing upon her reflection in the mirror:

…the scars know more
about your past
than you choose to remember—
exact angle & slip
of a blade
in your cheek you’ve spent
months trying to douse

in the gasoline
of a better story.
& the stretch marks
rivuleting your breasts, the body’s

erasive white-
washing, the blot

where your areola was once
pink…

Later:
…& the doves they released
over your brother’s grave wear
symbolism like buckshot
in the breast,
unknowingly.
Such dirty things
meaning purity…

Phillips has put out another book already, and she has done well if it approaches the quality of this one, which I highly recommend. I hope to get to her earlier work at some point for comparison's sake.

[Melissa · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful collection. Phillips writes the body and faith and our tech-based, fast-paced America with precision and power. The first two poems of the book hit you in the gut, hard, and from then on you know: this is a book that'll stay with you, this is a book you won't put down.

[Joyce Roberts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Powerful, moving, alive in thought and language.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, moving poems that shift kaleidoscopically among familial, social, and cultural situations, creating a poignant sense of human connection and compassion.

[Rebecca Renner · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was the best poetry collection I've read so far this year.

[Simeon Berry · Rating 4 out of 5]

Micro-blurb: a coat of many colors for history & culture's exquisite corpse.