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Her Mouth as Souvenir
Winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize
In a startling voice propelled by desire and desperation on the verge of laughter, these poems leap from the mundane to the sublime, from begging to bravado, from despair to reverie, revealing the power that comes from hanging on by a thread. Poet Heather June Gibbons conjures belief in the absence of faith, loneliness in the digital age, beauty in the face of absurdity--all through the cataract of her sunglasses' cracked lens. In this debut collection, we are shown a world so turbulent, anxious, and beautiful, we know it must be ours. Under pressure, these poems sing.
Includes a foreword by Jericho Brown.
From the poem "Bobby Reads Chekhov"
They say if you're sad, you haven't been
smiling enough. Want to make better decisions?
Eat more cheese. Perception is reality,
my horrible boss used to say when I'd try
to explain anything she couldn't see,
though maybe she was right. Can we know
reality any other way? The painter saw
purple in the trees, so he painted them purple.
Leaving the gallery, we see purple everywhere.
Studies have shown meditation makes
brain waves akin to coma. Is that so,
you say, fingering your tiny screen.
In a startling voice propelled by desire and desperation on the verge of laughter, these poems leap from the mundane to the sublime, from begging to bravado, from despair to reverie, revealing the power that comes from hanging on by a thread. Poet Heather June Gibbons conjures belief in the absence of faith, loneliness in the digital age, beauty in the face of absurdity--all through the cataract of her sunglasses' cracked lens. In this debut collection, we are shown a world so turbulent, anxious, and beautiful, we know it must be ours. Under pressure, these poems sing.
Includes a foreword by Jericho Brown.
From the poem "Bobby Reads Chekhov"
They say if you're sad, you haven't been
smiling enough. Want to make better decisions?
Eat more cheese. Perception is reality,
my horrible boss used to say when I'd try
to explain anything she couldn't see,
though maybe she was right. Can we know
reality any other way? The painter saw
purple in the trees, so he painted them purple.
Leaving the gallery, we see purple everywhere.
Studies have shown meditation makes
brain waves akin to coma. Is that so,
you say, fingering your tiny screen.
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 30, 2018
About the author
Heather June Gibbons
2 books17 followersHeather June Gibbons was born in Utah and raised on an island in Washington. She is the author of the poetry collection Her Mouth as Souvenir, winner of the 2017 Agha Shahid Ali Poetry Prize. She is also the author of two chapbooks, Sore Songs and Flyover, and her poems have appeared widely in literary journals. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she has received awards from the Fine Arts Work Center and the Vermont Studio Center. She lives in San Francisco, where she teaches creative writing at San Francisco State University and in the community.
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July 17, 2018Heather June Gibbons’s debut poetry book, Her Mouth as Souvenir, is a study of distraction, mediated reality and our humdrum efforts to avoid reflection by filling our time with activity. Here is a poetry collection that will reminds you quite eloquently of the fugue state of your mind as you caress your tiny screen. It precisely delineates the modern state of frayed nerves. Here is the opening:
"My project is plain persistence, self as spatula
scraping self as burned crud off skillet."
Personally, I don’t think more apt lines have been written to describe daily life in 2018. Divided into three sections, the poems in this book explore modern distraction and misperception, love and regret. Gibbons is at her best when she focuses her considerable powers on the boredom of inactivity or the strangeness of interacting with machines. In “Self-Portrait as Tongue” Gibbons writes:
"A strange kind of stress
waving my hands back and forth
in front of a touch-free dispenser
waiting for its sensor to sense me"
This kind of low-key anxiety runs through the whole collection. As in the excerpt above, Gibbons’s images usually carry something of the surreal in them, even though they seem quite ordinary at face value. Gibbons is a poet who can make words turn at their heels, so that the ordinary comes to wrestle with the routine terror of the ungraspable.
"My project is plain persistence, self as spatula
scraping self as burned crud off skillet."
Personally, I don’t think more apt lines have been written to describe daily life in 2018. Divided into three sections, the poems in this book explore modern distraction and misperception, love and regret. Gibbons is at her best when she focuses her considerable powers on the boredom of inactivity or the strangeness of interacting with machines. In “Self-Portrait as Tongue” Gibbons writes:
"A strange kind of stress
waving my hands back and forth
in front of a touch-free dispenser
waiting for its sensor to sense me"
This kind of low-key anxiety runs through the whole collection. As in the excerpt above, Gibbons’s images usually carry something of the surreal in them, even though they seem quite ordinary at face value. Gibbons is a poet who can make words turn at their heels, so that the ordinary comes to wrestle with the routine terror of the ungraspable.
August 3, 2018
Souvenirs from the Future
‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ is as provocative, sharp, and sensual as the title promises. Despite the virtuosic range of formal technique, Heather June Gibbons has strung these poems into a delicate breathless sequence with one hell of a denouement. In terms of other poets, imagine combining the experimental glee of a young Veronica Forrest-Thomson with the ability to carve out those deep sacred vacuums in the everyday like Sharon Olds.
The first two sentences in Jericho Brown’s foreword had me hooked. Accomplished writer admits that they too suffer from a gap between our everyday rationalisations and the blur of life’s big shape beyond our control. To bastardise Lucretius, we can’t see the clinamen for the next cup of tea, but we’re not afraid: why? Brown implies that the following poems will reveal that giant red glowing ball breaking up our horizons, but without telling us what to do. By the end of the second paragraph I skipped ahead to the collection itself, I was ready to go. When I came back after, I realised the foreword worked like a simple warm embrace. No hint of bleach in the fresh waters. The heavy quotations are left largely unexplained, one suspects, as a gesture of respect, and also because these poems are not comprised of clever one liners. They are formal unities in a strikingly clear way. And you don’t show how a nice watch works by levering out a cog.
Which is not to say that these poems are cold gadgets. From the first poem in, you get the sense that Gibbons is working through some very real material and won’t just do things for effect. Even in her most dense imagery, there’s an implicit rationale that can be uncovered if you think about them hard enough. Every now and again, you succeed, and some everyday object is transformed. Think Frank O’ Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with you’; Heather June Gibbons shares a Moxie.
You may need to look up a few words once or twice. None of them seem placed to trip up the reader in some kind of facile estrangement effect. Instead the tricky vocabulary (bibelots, leis, Calliope, Charmeuse, Astarte…) rewards the reader by bringing them closer to solving the mystery which lies at the heart of the sequence. Personally, it made me feel like I was learning something without it being too much of a hassle. Gibbons has struck lucky with a convincing alloy of demotic American English (‘Basically, my meridians are f****d’) and something which stretches through history and across various forms of expertise (music, biology, theology, neuroscience), and all delivered with a lightness of touch which doesn’t jar, but invites.
In a gesture of balance, a critic might flag up how well exactly the ‘Sore Songs’ (a reference to Berryman’s ‘Dream Songs’) function as a warp for her weft in the text as a whole, but for me, despite their shared title, they served as a kind of light relief. The use of ‘unbearably sad’ in ‘Let’s Pretend’ struck like a cliche; a reference to a teenager listening to Nico’s ‘I’ll be your Mirror’ pained me with my own callow youth.
Overall, to my mind, ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ responds to the fundamental question of how poetry today can avoid looking like cheap reproductions in an antique shop and be relevant to someone who doesn’t need to read in the age of Netflix and podcasts. It is vital, sardonic without being desperate, sexual without being predictable, and leaves us re-enchanted with what it is still expedient to call Nature. Read ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ before everyone else gets there.
‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ is as provocative, sharp, and sensual as the title promises. Despite the virtuosic range of formal technique, Heather June Gibbons has strung these poems into a delicate breathless sequence with one hell of a denouement. In terms of other poets, imagine combining the experimental glee of a young Veronica Forrest-Thomson with the ability to carve out those deep sacred vacuums in the everyday like Sharon Olds.
The first two sentences in Jericho Brown’s foreword had me hooked. Accomplished writer admits that they too suffer from a gap between our everyday rationalisations and the blur of life’s big shape beyond our control. To bastardise Lucretius, we can’t see the clinamen for the next cup of tea, but we’re not afraid: why? Brown implies that the following poems will reveal that giant red glowing ball breaking up our horizons, but without telling us what to do. By the end of the second paragraph I skipped ahead to the collection itself, I was ready to go. When I came back after, I realised the foreword worked like a simple warm embrace. No hint of bleach in the fresh waters. The heavy quotations are left largely unexplained, one suspects, as a gesture of respect, and also because these poems are not comprised of clever one liners. They are formal unities in a strikingly clear way. And you don’t show how a nice watch works by levering out a cog.
Which is not to say that these poems are cold gadgets. From the first poem in, you get the sense that Gibbons is working through some very real material and won’t just do things for effect. Even in her most dense imagery, there’s an implicit rationale that can be uncovered if you think about them hard enough. Every now and again, you succeed, and some everyday object is transformed. Think Frank O’ Hara’s ‘Having a Coke with you’; Heather June Gibbons shares a Moxie.
You may need to look up a few words once or twice. None of them seem placed to trip up the reader in some kind of facile estrangement effect. Instead the tricky vocabulary (bibelots, leis, Calliope, Charmeuse, Astarte…) rewards the reader by bringing them closer to solving the mystery which lies at the heart of the sequence. Personally, it made me feel like I was learning something without it being too much of a hassle. Gibbons has struck lucky with a convincing alloy of demotic American English (‘Basically, my meridians are f****d’) and something which stretches through history and across various forms of expertise (music, biology, theology, neuroscience), and all delivered with a lightness of touch which doesn’t jar, but invites.
In a gesture of balance, a critic might flag up how well exactly the ‘Sore Songs’ (a reference to Berryman’s ‘Dream Songs’) function as a warp for her weft in the text as a whole, but for me, despite their shared title, they served as a kind of light relief. The use of ‘unbearably sad’ in ‘Let’s Pretend’ struck like a cliche; a reference to a teenager listening to Nico’s ‘I’ll be your Mirror’ pained me with my own callow youth.
Overall, to my mind, ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ responds to the fundamental question of how poetry today can avoid looking like cheap reproductions in an antique shop and be relevant to someone who doesn’t need to read in the age of Netflix and podcasts. It is vital, sardonic without being desperate, sexual without being predictable, and leaves us re-enchanted with what it is still expedient to call Nature. Read ‘Her Mouth as Souvenir’ before everyone else gets there.
November 17, 2018
If there is chaos in “Her Mouth As Souvenir” it’s because the book begs us to pay attention. So many moments collide with each other, scenes overlapping scenes, and the flurry of images (reminiscent of Addonizio) provoke us and challenge us into focusing on what it feels like to keep living. It’s rough. Especially in the beginning.
In the first section of the book, the speaker struggles between a state of dreaminess and consciousness
“...somnia is a fall/ slow enough to float”
“...even air has its blackouts”
“buried alive inside a mountain”
And then there is the poppy. Is it a stand-in for opium? A metaphor for the drowsy, languid, self-absorption? Perhaps the poppy points toward a compulsive inattentiveness, it feels so uncontrollable through the text. “Poppy that my heart was, sullen/ mouth agape…” Even on the abstract painting of the book’s cover art is a poppy mouth. Bright red lips, dark inside.
Much of the beginning of “Souvenir” feels like rummaging through a hoarder's house, holding onto each object and not knowing what is valuable, exhausting the mind, “stare at it, figet your scars, aren’t they better/ than grease marks? Aren’t they something?” while trying to find the thread of meaning that connects all the pieces together.
“When I saw take a stab, I mean get a grip,
meaning grasp, meaning straws.”
And there is something also here about a mother connection, though it isn’t obvious right away: “remember, your mother was
a singer who sang herself
to sleep, she stitched you
your heart was hers.”
or in another poem:
“remember that we are not
really ourselves, but perfect
copies of a long-lost original,
a revolutionary system
so gentle it removes the stone
without bruising the fruit,
repairs the gaping hole.”
The second section in the book connects us to the details of adult life. Lovers, secrecy, and six poems spread throughout the section entitled “Sore Song” (which I’m guessing are poems from her recent chapbook through Dancing Girl Press, “Sore songs.”) I think Gibbons must enjoy straddling the line between abstract and intimate, “Eros, you are so personless and difficult.”
I feel a sense of spinning numbness, in these poems:
“...I miss the worthlessness
of minutes spent waiting for a cab, beep of a truck
backing in, a bad cover band warming up on the pier,
...please come on to me, so I can get out of here.”
(taken from one of the Sore Song poems.)
The third and final section refeshes the reader. These poems feel focused, newly awake, alive to small, nearby objects:
“Come closer. The pupil constricts, striating
the surface of a leaf stuck to the stem
of a bloom: camellia…”
Near the end of the book the images become more organized, the poems more formal in their structure:
“an aerial photograph of winter, rural Colorado:
black lines spider and spread where the herd
dispersed, then a thickening, dark mass of tracks,
cattle gathering around…”
and welcoming delight,
“To be conscious of every breath
is unable to think of anything else,
which is to say, happier.”
For this reviewer the narrative arc in “Souvenir” is the most delicious part of the entire book, going from chaos, to disillusioned longing, and finally resting on attentive joy in at all that is.
In the first section of the book, the speaker struggles between a state of dreaminess and consciousness
“...somnia is a fall/ slow enough to float”
“...even air has its blackouts”
“buried alive inside a mountain”
And then there is the poppy. Is it a stand-in for opium? A metaphor for the drowsy, languid, self-absorption? Perhaps the poppy points toward a compulsive inattentiveness, it feels so uncontrollable through the text. “Poppy that my heart was, sullen/ mouth agape…” Even on the abstract painting of the book’s cover art is a poppy mouth. Bright red lips, dark inside.
Much of the beginning of “Souvenir” feels like rummaging through a hoarder's house, holding onto each object and not knowing what is valuable, exhausting the mind, “stare at it, figet your scars, aren’t they better/ than grease marks? Aren’t they something?” while trying to find the thread of meaning that connects all the pieces together.
“When I saw take a stab, I mean get a grip,
meaning grasp, meaning straws.”
And there is something also here about a mother connection, though it isn’t obvious right away: “remember, your mother was
a singer who sang herself
to sleep, she stitched you
your heart was hers.”
or in another poem:
“remember that we are not
really ourselves, but perfect
copies of a long-lost original,
a revolutionary system
so gentle it removes the stone
without bruising the fruit,
repairs the gaping hole.”
The second section in the book connects us to the details of adult life. Lovers, secrecy, and six poems spread throughout the section entitled “Sore Song” (which I’m guessing are poems from her recent chapbook through Dancing Girl Press, “Sore songs.”) I think Gibbons must enjoy straddling the line between abstract and intimate, “Eros, you are so personless and difficult.”
I feel a sense of spinning numbness, in these poems:
“...I miss the worthlessness
of minutes spent waiting for a cab, beep of a truck
backing in, a bad cover band warming up on the pier,
...please come on to me, so I can get out of here.”
(taken from one of the Sore Song poems.)
The third and final section refeshes the reader. These poems feel focused, newly awake, alive to small, nearby objects:
“Come closer. The pupil constricts, striating
the surface of a leaf stuck to the stem
of a bloom: camellia…”
Near the end of the book the images become more organized, the poems more formal in their structure:
“an aerial photograph of winter, rural Colorado:
black lines spider and spread where the herd
dispersed, then a thickening, dark mass of tracks,
cattle gathering around…”
and welcoming delight,
“To be conscious of every breath
is unable to think of anything else,
which is to say, happier.”
For this reviewer the narrative arc in “Souvenir” is the most delicious part of the entire book, going from chaos, to disillusioned longing, and finally resting on attentive joy in at all that is.
September 17, 2018
A truly wonderful debut. You can read my full review here:
https://www.usi.edu/sir/reviews/the-m...
https://www.usi.edu/sir/reviews/the-m...
May 18, 2020
Läste som del av kurs. Berörande med tydligt narrativ.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews