What Weaponry

by Elizabeth J. Colen

Poetry. Fiction. Hybrid Genre. "Colen is not timid about addressing the perversities of American culture head-on... The subjects are dark, generating perhaps more discomfort than comfort, but Colen reminds us that the human heart is still quite functional." D. A. Powell"

Genres: Poetry, Fiction

90 pages, Paperback

First published August 31, 2016

Reviews

[Simón · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm always interested in books that are "novels in _____" like a novel in encyclopedia entries or a novel in recipes, so I knew there would be formal innovations here. But I found that these blocks of prose stood up alone, rather than depending on novel-like throughlines like recurring characters or ongoing events. Often, as soon as I finished a spread of two poems, I'd read them again, catching up on "all matter, if condensed, could fit into a sphere the size of a pea. I say bullet." The condensing of scenes does often go violent. There's drowning, shogun swords, fire, dog beating, more fire.

My favorite formal element is the emboldened words. Like a reverse erasure, most of the blocks have a few words and phrases emboldened, forming a second image or line of speech or I'm not sure? At first I thought these might be source-text from somewhere else, used in the process to generate the longer sentences. But nothing is cited, so I think these are like alternate titles, hidden messages. They have a paranoid, gaslighting feeling to me, like I'm forced to search out what's really going on. In "The Codes of Eventual Love" for example, the main narrative involves a dog freezing to death and rehashing of intergenerational parenting wounds. But the other phrase is "some kind of excuse./I think I/ wa/s the wrong kind/ of/ baby." Ouch.

A bleak, shapeshifting world to spend so much time in, though it's worth these pinches and cringes for the power of language itself to disturb.

[Andy · Rating 5 out of 5]

How can such a compact book with such compact chapters toggle and twist from the cosmic to the microscopic, the tender to the brutal, the land and housescapes of suburb-fantasies gone nightmare to beachfront love or corpses?
I love that someone would describe Colen's writing as David Lynch + Gertrude Stein, yet such predetermined frames don't offer much to the unique experience of reading What Weaponry!