Infrastructures

by Elizabeth Hatmaker

Poetry. Film. "By turns heady and heartfelt, sardonic and spectral, INFRASTRUCTURES, the second book of poetry by Elizabeth Hatmaker, has all the hallmarks of a cult classic. In its pages, the poet interweaves images of Chicagoland with Midwestern industry's wasteland scenes, infusing them with ghost voices haunting AM radio, examinations of contemporary academia, obscure movies and film scores, critical theory, preoccupations with seedy characters like Bob Crane, and provocative recollections of the infamous lovers' retreat—the Sybaris. In poems that inhabit liminal spaces where art and lived experience become indistinguishable, Hatmaker explores Joyelle McSweeney's question, 'Can the body be possessed by media?' And as we descend with the poet into the shadowy highwayscapes of southbound Interstate 55 in the necropastoral tour de force poem Requiem , we, too, become possessed by the 'fictions / between the words where people go missing, / go dead, go / buried and gone under.'

Late in INFRASTRUCTURES, the poet asks, 'Do you hear / the difference between an explosion in the movies and in your life?' It's no yes-or- no question but the call to attention that this wild, dark book makes. She half-teases, 'My comma is my slit on the material,' and the book seeks to account for such pauses—in fidelity, in politics, in the stutter she understands to exist in the soundtrack which would seem, she suggests, to make all seem possible. In commerce and in mortality itself. The book delineates awareness of all that that splice stands in for and in awe of, all that versus the desire or feeling of obligation, Hatmaker writes, of some men and women to 'blow through the spaces between the words in order to give a more rounded sound to the language.' Gentle reader, be no spaces are blown through here. 'If you're not nervous'—as Miles Davis may have said—'you're not paying attention.'"—C.S. Giscombe

"Elizabeth Hatmaker's vibrant new book INFRASTRUCTURES is a feverish exploration of the specters conjured by media. Here, reality is production and postproduction, and Media and Life do not so much interact as stage and restage a proliferation of social rites. Perry Mason, childhood insomnia, Bonnie and Clyde, and windy Midwestern streets are spliced together as passionately as the sights/sounds in later Godard films. In INFRASTRUCTURES, we are watching ourselves watch others watch us. A perfect book for our times."—James Pate

"In INFRASTRUCTURES, Elizabeth Hatmaker 'noses on toward / someplace that is / not here.' How could her poetry be anything other than brave? Skewered by contradictions, we navigate her alt worlds, sketched through cinema and inhabited through intellect. Yet she cycles through places visible to anyone looking around. Desire in Chicagoland's tri-state zone flows through highways all dub and juxtaposition. Sybaris proliferates up and down the map—because this city famous in Greek mythology for pleasure seeking and luxury has reappeared as a hotel chain dedicated to Midwestern adult romance. Toying with another thing most insistently here, Hatmaker plucks at regulatory language, then drops its noise elegantly by the wayside. She pursues instead a 'living range / between / static and audibility.' What most amazes me about Elizabeth Hatmaker is her tremendous humanity, a constant, urgent transgression animating all her poetry. Love and death are fucked up. Somehow it's a beautiful ride."—Kristin Dykstra

94 pages, Paperback

First published April 30, 2017

Reviews

[Bob · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not much of a reader of contemporary poetry, but I sought out this collection because Hatmaker's preceding online essay "The Place of Noir: I-55 Mile Markers 267 to 238" entrances me, the idea of poésie noire attracts me, & Hatmaker was a social media comrade whose sly insights & waggish taste I sorely miss.

The infrastructure of *Infrastructures* includes experimental syntax, vivid renderings of midwest roadscapes, descriptions that help us see the sexual & aesthetic urgency of old grindhouse films, & playful but brief, searing reflections on desire, critical theory, & academic life.

It's an essential little book for anyone interested in noir, cinephilia, or the psychic lives of academics & other neoliberal subjects, but *Infrastructure*'s investments in noir, ruins, & film are not antiquarian affectation but of remarkable relevance to the haunted moment of 2017. Multiple poems in the collection rage against attempts to defang, anesthetize art, to straighten out the torsions of our labor, desire, and aesthetic experiences. I had the pleasure of reading it just after finishing the new *Twin Peaks* & just before beginning *The Deuce* & two of the collection's resonate with these other two arts noirs.

This unsettling contextualization of sexual alienation amidst the market from Hatmaker's poetic response to *Malibu High* rhymes w/ the work of *The Deuce*:

..."what
she gonna do in weary drone not this
drive-in, this sound-addled
offline mechanical body
mangled backdrop, torque of consent w/o dignity.
Rust can be fatal, crummy
oxidizing suggests nationalism, give and take of ownership
sudden attack on dignity--on your knees now--slow
assent to the global market--on your tits now--show me show me and shut up
--and violated like copyright all stupid nostalgia."

Hatmaker's poetic response to *Blood Mania* articulates an aesthetic of domesticated, anesthetized surrealism that both her work & the new *Twin Peaks* kick against:

"Surrealism w/o class, building a proxy w/ words and rhythms to avoid what
surrealism implies, methodology, heuristic w/o fluid, the cleanly scraped
body part, the parvenu class scene for us to gather and reference for failed
experiments, for slumming downtown ironic easy before drinks."

To conclude, my favorite stanza in collection comes in the last poem, "Requiem", which circles back to some themes of the first with a searing reinvention of Kenneth Fearing's work:

"It's out at the 8 and
in from 6 to 11,
desire's ear/
the double plot of
Noir. The flesh of no future
at your convenience and
in your rotted books
and images. In the shadow,
outside the 80/55 cloverleaf,
hidden by trees, a house built
in intermittent good years
a structure nailed
to a house, to a dwelling,
rooms and doors emanating
from blasted-out walls and this
is another failed body,
wires in this body run to lights that
don't work
in the dark, and the radios
of the freeway outside buzz
with the talk
of aliens, the rhetoric
of mystery, and in the dark
of bodies
our ears are peeled
for our missing."