Fort Not

by Emily Skillings

Poetry. In her highly anticipated debut collection, FORT NOT, Emily Skillings creates an "atmosphere for encounter," akin to searching for meaning through lip-reading. We soon realize that these poems are speaking to us in tones that appear elegantly improvisational. And while the poems may "shout from the periphery," it is not without reason, but because of their desire to direct the reader to a created space--a world that allows for "curved logic," "that dirty, off-gold color," "middle-class nausea," and "metallic power" to coexist. The mysteries here embrace a natural, physical music, pulling us into a moving current of painted images, poetic histories, and draped bodies evaporating to reveal others behind them, as quickly as they appear.

Genres: Poetry

109 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 2017

Reviews

[el · Rating 3 out of 5]

i have really loved the poetry i've read from emily skillings in online literary magazines....i'll be honest though i did not know what the hell was happening in this collection 83% of the time....and that's on me. too experimental, too abstracted, too elevated, and i am not yet ready to receive the messages she is transmitting to me here. will be back later for a reread, girl, sorry for the placeholder rating....

[Burnside Soleil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like strange but wonderful conversations picked up on a long-wave radio.

[S P · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garden of Slow Forms
In the middle of your life it is a Sunday.
Shocked blossoms rush, network, embed freely.

You decide to take your new throat for a walk
And track a softening center ring of thought.

The daylight is scrolling itself to death.
Everything presses into an atmospheric parfait.

Objects held by mounds of soil
On-and-off themselves in neat rows.

The available openings open wider-open.
Slits, in bunches, grow wild terminals.

A lake explodes in a nearby district.
A heavy storied treeline stores a form.

Instrument of indecision, the Calabash harp,
Combs into a cream-colored fog. (4)

The Banks
Lately I’ve been thinking about how I might like to write
a series of poems as single, unbroken lines that extend far
beyond the borders of any screen or page, penetrating
rightspace as far as they need to in order to magnetize
and attract their particular streaming content and shape.
I say “shape” knowing full well that lines would be line-
looking, but imagining that they (through careful shifts of
rhythm, word length, and elliptical constructive maneuvers)
could somehow curve, pool, or orbit their way out of
predetermined linearity, like a perpetually self-revising river
bank or algal bloom forming via the scrolling and gathering
straightway. In this way, an augmenting line becomes
a walk along a landscape, stopping and starting, pulled
towards a theory of unread sky—non-statements moving
past the usual present and standardized textual demarcations
into dunes of words & rafts of collective swerves, propelled
determinedly eastward. I think the only possible way
I could compose these poems, honoring my desire to lose
visual track of their origins to the left/west, is by typing
them into my internet browser bar, which might give me that
necessary past-blindness—the line disappearing into a formal
horizon as I move through the screen, making things
happen, or allowing their happening, as it may. I also enjoy
the potential conflict between what I foresee as the semi-
naturalist (ecopoetical?) leanings of these line curves and their
birth on the internet, pre-search. Archie Ammons did a
similar thing with a typewriter and coils of thin receipt
paper. How have I not said causeway yet? How do you get,
draft drift from a theorized space to an arranged series
of marks? Walk me from pink to sandpiper along an
unavailable action. Grass escapes into itself. Pools just
kind of happen. I might want to start the first poem with
the word here and end the last poem with something a little
more several. Something neither from nor towards. A body
in a frame. Razor clams. Transferred moisture. Some
swelling continent of bees. Far-off rocks rejecting light.
Blue again. Something like that. (59*)

Poem with Orpheus
Every word in this poem is a dead body.
Each word dies as you read it
and floats behind in a wooden canoe

that covers itself with itself

to make a coffin. A white, historical plane

knits above the dead word to shroud

and replace it. The poem before (this) point

is streaming and invisible. The rivulets

on which the coffin boats float

move backward forever. That last word (word)

and then (last) (that) (forever) (backward)
(move)—you killed those words.
You actually wrote this poem in its own blood.
The poem was alive just a minute ago
and then you arrived. You walked (here)
sluggishly against the wind of the underworld
to push against each heavy body. I’m trying
to (protect) these (words) (from) you (with)
((special armor)). If you view this entire poem
in a mirror you will see death at work
as you see bees behind glass in a hive.
That last line is from Cocteau’s Orphée,
a film in which we come to know
all poems are direct transmissions
from the dead. When I transcribed it I reversed
its screen death and then (((you))) came
and looked at it, sending it back
to this blank page, a banal trauma,
a repeated rest on nothing. (73)

[aya · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5? 4?

[Kelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

“And I say to this place, get used to me.
I have nothing left that didn’t come from you.” (68)

Eerie and thoughtful, this collection both comforts and haunts. I feel like an intruder, walking through these poems, peeking in between the lines. Skillings is so bare in this work, at times intentionally and, at others, it seems she is provoking me to strip myself down too.

Perhaps it’s more apt to say I feel like the haunted and the ghost, reading this collection.

There’s something about the profound banality, the uplifting of the seemingly mundane to a harsh light that rings so unsettling here. It does feel like I’m tying into an alien broadcast—about my own life rather than just sone random stranger’s life.

I recommend this collection for readers who enjoy a unique, somewhat odd collection of poetry that touches upon and blends the divine and the profane in eeriest of ways~

[Steven Critelli · Rating 2 out of 5]

Emily Skillings has all the technical ability of a good poet, but little of the heart and soul. With few exceptions the poems are mirthless, vapid and overburdened with too much angst. Perhaps I don't have enough patience for emotional dredging on this level, but poems ought to do more with language than this. The closest Skillings gets is with "Canary" a twist on Wallace Stevens's "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" that is clever and effective. To the extent that Skillings occasionally channels John Ashbery's style, the efforts are sophomoric at best. Lastly, the book goes over 100 pages, too long for most masters, let alone a debut.

[Susie Anderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I adored this and Skillings' writing is so strong. but the overall collection runs a little long and the guts of her writing is diluted slightly because of the volume. Gel, meanwhile, is a masterpiece and it was worth everything else just to read that.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorites:
Garden of Slow Forms
Siege of La Rochelle
Parallelogram
Fort Not
Basement Delivery

[J & J · Rating 1 out of 5]

1.5

[Maud · Rating 3 out of 5]

pretty pretty poems some stronger than others but many lovely lines in each, I just couldn't hold a thread together

[Mas · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant book. My absolute favorite poem is "Matron of No." Every single one is great though.

[Ray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Didn’t know words could move like this. My bad, words.

[Jacob]

“If you’re wondering whether this hurts, it does.”

[lex · Rating 5 out of 5]

huge fan, will seek out the rest of her books.