Embryos and Idiots

by Larissa Szporluk

This is poetry both luscious and rigorous.-Lynn Emanuel
This latest collection from the young but already established luminary Larissa Szporluk is cause for celebration. Szporluk has proven once again that she not only deserves her elevated status in the poetry world, but reinvents and advances it with each new collection. This is spare, sly, seductive, and haunting poetry that resonates long after the rustle of the page. Szporluk has an uncanny ability to hone her words until their edges slice like small, deep paper cuts, whittling away at the human experience, searching for the truth of things.
Despite her three previously published-and much heralded-works, this visionary poet continues to innovate. She remains completely unpredictable, as if these visceral poems lead her to extraordinary places of their own volition. She writes of mother-son relationships, political and social events-always with an underlying mythic aspect, and always demonstrating an undeniable faith in the human spirit.

Genres: Poetry

71 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2007

About the author

Larissa Szporluk was raised in Ann Arbor, Michigan and earned degrees at the University of Michigan, the University of California-Berkeley, and the University of Virginia, where she was a Henry Hoyns fellow. Her books of poetry include Dark Sky Question (1998), which won the Barnard Poetry Prize; Isolato (2000), winner of the Iowa Poetry Prize; The Wind, Master Cherry, the Wind (2003); Embryos and Idiots (2007); and Traffic with Macbeth (2011). She has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently teaches at Bowling Green State University.

Reviews

[Stacy McCullough. · Rating 1 out of 5]

If you read one poem, essentially you read the entire book. Szporluk is attempting to create her own myth drawn from Paradise Lost, each of her sections a different part to the myth. She lacks variety though and though her voice at times is interesting along with word repetition and play, the obvious theme overtakes everything else. You should read Szporluk, just not this book.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you want to think about cadence, this is an exemplary book.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

A few poems were very good but overall this didn’t work for me.

[Tucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the poems are rhythmic with a surprising type of rhyme, which I enjoyed. Thematically, my favorite poem, near the end, was "Grin and Bear."

[Hannah Sanders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recommended by Adrian in an Email, June 15th 2010:

"Your mythological narrative idea sounds intriguing, and so apt based on your experience in this troubled yet magical region. Makes me think of this amazing poet Larissa Szporluck, whose work I *just* dug back into in an attempt to consider the source of a poem that's lived on my studio wall for the past...man...7 years almost. It begins, "It is dark inside the body, and wet, and double-hearted." Ain't that a juicy first line? Well, her newest book, "Embryos and Idiots", apparently uses an invented mythological character and his story as its "spine". Here's how the review from Amazon describes it:

these one- and two-page lyrical works comprise an original story, or myth, about Anoton, the child of a primordial god, who struggles with his divine parents, whose head becomes an island, and who gives birth to talking animals and quarreling adults. You were two people,/ the sun and the moon, Szporluk says; her entities absorb and refract more familiar tales (Adam and Eve, Don Giovanni, Joan of Arc), splitting and blurring personalities in order to reach deeper truths about the feelings we never entirely understand and about parent-child connections. Szporluk's readers discover why The sea is the greatest mother, and why we still come back to her rim. The story of Anoton vanishes near the end, and the book becomes simply a collection of (striking) lyrics; until then, his legend, such as it is, provides a thread to connect, and an excuse to elaborate on, Szporluk's supremely quotable conceits, her images and aphorisms about creation myths and procreation, babies and language, planets and bodies and love, in which The newborn's a reborn; every// beloved is the same. (May) "

[Gerbik · Rating 3 out of 5]

Awesome, to a degree. As a lyric, anarchic, female rejoinder to Milton's epic, orderly, masculine voice (she uses him for her title and epigraphs), the book is conceptually ambitious and tackles the myth of the Fall. Nonetheless, she does so by writing poems that are small, jagged, hypnotic and sexy, and they are all about tempting us into falling from having fallen: re-falling and somehow getting into new space morally and musically - or maybe she just wants to enter a new space-time altogether. There is an alien quality to her voice and she grafts us onto a disturbing mythology when we we begin the book: an impossible amalgam of gnostic myth, Hesiod, zoology, and science fiction. As in her earlier books, the prosody is dense and foregrounded and she occasionally veers into an anapestic nursery-school-rhyme that gives the work's complexity an unsettling feeling of non-sense, as though she's blurring and effacing her words intentionally by being dumb, inept - she willfully retards, often. She works through mistaken sounds, elisions, and often through subliminal trickery. Still, some of it clunks, goes astray, and overall, I have to say, it doesn't deliver. It's a fascinating voice, and the concept is zeroed-in, but it seems rushed - like it could have been a masterpiece but settled for a two-week number one position on the Billboard top 40. So to speak.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is the best one can expect from a poet who seems to be branching off from what her fans have come to love her for.

Individual poems are sometimes much more angry and fragmented, while others still keep the same old Szporluk extended melody, rhyme, and incantation. The book as a whole tells a new myth, a creation story all of Szporluk's making, and the accumulation of the poems and their emotional resonance is what brings this collection together in a way that seems a bit different for this poet.

One can still get caught up in the sounds of her poem, without realizing what they are "about," which I love--there aren't many poets who can make me appreciate them on entirely separate levels.

I haven't quite yet figured out why the third section seems to drop the Anoton myth and turn into a separate collection of lyric poems; my first guess is that they are individual emotional interpretations of the Anoton story through different eyes: through our eyes, Szporluk's eyes, contemporary society's eyes, etc. They definitely fit the theme of the book, but as of yet, the abrupt dissolution of the narrative that had been accumulating in various forms (a fairly clear narrative, nonetheless) seems just a bit peculiar to me.

[Tiffany · Rating 3 out of 5]

It took me awhile to get into the first section of this book. The language was, in Szporluk's usual fashion, magical and engaging, but all of the poems centered around a mythology that seemed, at first, a little hollow. By the end of the section, I was somewhat taken in (she gives voice to the rocks that make up an island, onto which a dead woman washes up), but then in the second section, she abandoned that mythology and switched gears all together! This book had some very memorable moments, but all in all, it didn't quite come together.

[Gary McDowell · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first section of this book is so beautiful.

I'm in the midst of writing a review of this for a lit mag... it's a hard book to pin-down. I love it, its beauty, its mystery, its mythology, but there's something really irky about the jumps that occur between the sections. I think it's easy enough to overcome those irky spots, but a small complaint never killed anyone.

It's still a fantastic book. Five stars for sure.

Update: Reread it last week. It's freaking brilliant! Nuff said.

[Kent · Rating 3 out of 5]

I appreciate the impulse to write a book of poems that tries to take on myth, and that then digs into that intense connection between mother and son to elaborate on it, but the time spent trying to establish this new myth never moves beyond contrived. Some individual poems are superb, of course. I admire Szporluk's work overall, and that skill is evident in some poems. But anything that has to do with Anoton suffers from over-determination.

[C · Rating 2 out of 5]

I love the poet. Just not this book.

I find the concept to be interesting, and at points it seems close to realizing its potential.

That said, the book tended to lose a lot of the power that I have found in Szporluk's voice before. I understand the need to try something new and I don't begrudge her ambition, but it feels a bit like a "miss" to me.

[Jordi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was pretty intense. I feel like I need to read it again, or a couple more times, before I can claim to fully understand it. One thing i do know, is that it is excellent poetry, and I will be looking Szporluk up and reading more of her work.

[Allison · Rating 2 out of 5]

I like the concept of the collection more than I actually like the poems in the collection. I'm not sure what that says about me.

[Sherry Chandler · Rating 3 out of 5]

I kept reading for the energy of the over-the-top language -- and the satiric humor. The vision is very dark.

[Kate Birgel]

I am about to get this one, given the title alone.

[Molly · Rating 4 out of 5]

(The start of poems in the book were a five and the last poems were a three, for my taste. So I compromised and gave it a four. And now I want to read more of Szporluk.)