Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love

by Keith S. Wilson

Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is a collection whose poems approach family, politics, and romance, often through the lens of space: the vagaries of a relationship full of wonder and coldness, separation and exploration. There is the sense of the speaker as a cartographer of familiar spaces, of land he has never left or relationships that have stayed with him for years, and always with the newness of an alien or stranger. Acutely attuned to the heritage of Greco-Roman myth, Wilson writes through characters such as the Basilisk and the Minotaur, emphasizing the intense loneliness these characters experience from their uniqueness. For the racially ambiguous speaker of these poems, who is both black and not black, who has lived between the American South and the Midwest, there are no easy answers. From the fields of Kentucky to the pigeon coops of Chicago, identities and locations blur―the pastoral bleeds into the Afrofuturist, black into white and back again.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

First published May 21, 2019

Reviews

[Julie · Rating 5 out of 5]

First, you are invisible,
which is another word for Jesus

she's gone. Second, the medulla oblongata makes you
automatic, so even when I am not thinking
of your hips, I am
thinking of your hips (the dreams I have dreamed
of being loosed like a sparrow would pronounce themselves

into wilder dreams if I were a bird already.
From A Short List of Grievances

And I swoon. Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is ripe with this sensual language, a celebration of love and body, of sex and longing. But it is also about a Black/biracial man confronting a world that thinks they already know all about who he is because of his skin, his heritage, the legacy of his father.

I can't imagine my father wishing he would rather be
anything. Once upon a time, he was a watermelon
growing from a box. His mother died. His father beat
the blush out of him, and teardrops dripped black
from his face into his food. from The Way I Hold My Hands

In Calf's Head and Ox Tongue, a boy in Nikes on a school trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and finds himself both represented in the paintings and yet somehow trapped by the expectations and limitations of art.

What happens when you stare into the sun?
A crow is born. From here, I think
about the image of God.

He set the jagged stars
in the square holes of us. from Mob

Gorgeous and tragic imagery from a writer who writes in shapes and colors, who pulls the sky down to our level so that we may see what he sees within. I love the artistry and imagery of Wilson's poems, as beautiful to the mind as they are stirring to the soul.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt like I was on a bad first date the entire time I was reading this. Couple decent lines but with every poem, I became more sure this was not for me. On the plus side, his use of the word “raisin” as a verb did lead to a debate among a couple friends.

[Aricka Foreman · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wilson is a poet with boundless imagination. Love poems-in the truest sense-that ache with rigor and intimacy and should be required reading when we talk about how contemporary poetry stretches beyond the margins.

[Rozanna Lilley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Delicate and punchy - an unusual combination. This slim collection is bookended by two gorgeous love poems, both filled with celestial imagery. Rather like a Terence Malick film, the Milky Way and mascara, the moon and a mouse create a sense of the continuum of a universe permeated by longing. 'Who else will sew you in the stars?' asks Wilson. Who, indeed. Wilson is an Affrilachian poet. He writes in vivid colour about 'Yellow Journalism' ('from littleness, i told stories./ a litany saved me/ from pouring blacktop in kentucky/ like my father.') and 'Black Matters' ('there came a light, blue and white careening/ the police like wailing angels/ to bitter me'). Wonderful, heartfelt stuff.

[Carolyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

There's some really cool imagery in these poems. I particularly loved the two Minotaur poems, as well as "Fieldnotes", "Scrapbook" and the poems where he talks to his dad. These poems are really layered and thick. References to paintings (that you can google and have by your side while you read), homages to other poets (more poets to discover!), and the bittersweet melancholy of lost love.

This is not easy, transparent, simple poetry. I've read the whole collection 3x-4x and there are still a couple of poems I haven't quite found my way into ("Ode to the Glow") for example, but they're well worth reading.

[trx · Rating 5 out of 5]

genius

[kaitlyn · Rating 5 out of 5]

favorite poems this go around:

the way i hold my hands
scrapbook
heliocentric

i love this book so much. it teaches me something new with every read.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes I feel like I’m bad at reading poetry- it’s hard to focus and remember the experience afterwards. I lose the thread, read the words but don’t connect fully 😕

Nonetheless, this is a strong collection. It touches on the Black experience, love in different contexts, loss, and mythology. The Minotaur poems made me think of Guy’s son, Sonny, on Bojack Horseman 😅

[Alyse Bensel · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection has force--a driving central push around connection and love that interweaves Biblical and Greek imagery with grounded visceral experience.

[Ianna Chia · Rating 4 out of 5]

an exploration of love, science, racism, family— the language is clean and empowered, and some poems left me stunned and sighing.

favourite poems
- aubade to collapsed star
- 6:45p.m.
- a unified theory
- asterism
- a short list of grievances
- i find myself defending pigeons
- string theory
- heliocentric

[Marguerite Hargreaves · Rating 3 out of 5]

I found this somewhat choppy and unpolished but that's what notes, especially field notes, are: raw observations, scribbled down largely without judgment or order. (Like my poetry notebook.) When I looked at the collection through that prism, the book made more sense. So, I sat with it, like a scientist at her post, looking for patterns and meaning and hoping to draw a conclusion or two.

This is very topical. Through the poems, we experience racial profiling, otherness, police violence and plantation tourism amid the ordinary dance steps of imperfect embodied partnership and against a backdrop of an often inscrutable universe governed by laws we struggle to understand.

I really like:

A Unified Theory; The Test; Asterism; Minotaur, Sixteen, Enters a Convenience Store; and Light as Imagined Through a Body of Ice.

But I only keep books I purchase if I'm going to read them again. Otherwise, they're given to friends or the public library. I'm undecided about this one.

[Lee✨ · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this because “Heliocentric” is one of my favourite narrative poems of all time.

It’s everything I love, a beautiful almost. It reminds me of a song I was obsessed with, Looking Glass’s “Brandy”, and it’s just an all around delight with delicious imagery that prevails throughout Wilson’s writing.

But if you come into this with that expectation, with your first exposure to his poetry being this collection’s conclusion how on earth do you ever top that?

“A Unified Theory”, “Calf’s Head and Ox Tongue”, “Mob”, “Augury” and “Light as Imagined through a Body of Ice” were strong contenders. Almost every poem had a line that made me stop and go, wow that is so very pretty.

But I haven’t read something so perfectly for me as “Heliocentric” and as a result this collection stood in its shadow.

[Jessica · Rating 3 out of 5]

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Review originally posted here to Booked J. As always, a copy of this book was provided by the publisher or author in exchange for my honest review. This does not effect my opinion in any way. "Loving is misnomer, because you are expected of your heart's opinion on a sentence that is never completed, even as you are having it. Nothing must be more free than the feeling of the right to leave."

Poetry is the most intimate form of expressing our thoughts. The good, the bad. The passionate, the painful. It's telling a story--personal, fictional, anything--in a way that hits close to home. For Wilson, the prose mingles with personal experiences and a little mythology sprinkled in for good measure.

What I loved most about Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love is how the mixture of prose and mythology went together so well. I found myself in a trance for many of its pages and could feel the hum of Wilson's words for hours after I'd closed in on reading it.

While there were a few poems that I simply did not connect with, this does not--or should not--define your view of Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love, nor does it take away from the quality of writing. This is one of those collections that has something for everyone, but maybe won't work wholly for us all. At the end of the day, that's what makes it unique and standout amongst the surge of modern poetry.

Overall, I firmly believed Keith S. Wilson's art needs to be read. If you love poetry, be sure to add this to your list before the year is up--you won't regret it.

[Kelsey May · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Fieldnotes on Ordinary Love" (Copper Canyon Press, 2019) is, in my opinion, very underappreciated. It’s three months old and I’ve not seen a single gushing post, share, or write-up on it, which is a damn shame, as it’s easily in my poetry top five for 2019. Keith S. Wilson’s debut is graceful and gripping, descending into territory of Greek myths, racial tumult, and birds. The highest praise I can offer for "Fieldnotes" is that I want to write like Keith after reading it.

I finished this collection at the beginning of last week and have been revisiting a few specific images from these pages, including this powerful observation in “Augury“: “I remember being told I should never touch / a baby bird in its nest. That afterward, // the mother would rather let her children starve. / It isn’t true. But how many eggs // has the fantasy kept safe, / how many feathers made elegant, my hands clean and far away / to fold snowflakes or cranes?” Keith’s poems unearth small, succulent truths and set them rolling inside my heart.

Also reviewed at https://hyypeonline.com/2019/08/25/fi....

[Melinda · Rating 4 out of 5]

I took my time reading this one, a collection pondering race and love. It was in many ways the most challenging volume for this relatively new poetry reader, but also one of the most rewarding. I feel as though this one needs multiple readings, and I'm more than willing to put the time in for a second (and third...) reading in the future.

[DeeSoul · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot remember the last time I read a good love poem. I definitely cannot remember, before this collection, reading so many good love poems at once. Wilson's verse is the closest I've gotten to calling "Shakespearean," for his strength of rhythm, image, & diction. So many gems in here, but drawn especially to his ekphrastic work. Definitely a collection to return to.

[Jun · Rating 2 out of 5]

Couldn't decide between 2 and 3, so 2.5. Quite expensive for what it was.

I really liked some of the poems, but others sounded like nonsense.
I can't recommend reading this on a kindle, as the lines don't align properly, perhaps it's better when properly spaced.

[ash · Rating 2 out of 5]

To be fair, I don't really like poetry unless it's simple and easy to understand; but I had to read this for class. I feel bad rating it so low, but I just... didn't get it - and I'm an English major.

[Scott Pomfret · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, oblique, dazzling game of leap frog from topic to topic by this lilting lyricist who lunges between references to lovers, science, history, and want. Rarely does one describe a collection of poetry as entertaining, but this collection fits the bill. An impressive first work.

[Lulu (the library leopard)]

pigeon poems!

[sydney · Rating 3 out of 5]

didn't love it, didn't really hate it either. however;
>Who could love you like this? Who else will sew you in the stars?

[Neyda · Rating 5 out of 5]

Deeply touching! I read each poem multiple times. The best way to read this collection is out loud.

[Katharina SA · Rating 4 out of 5]

LIKE SALTED CARAMEL ICE CREAM! EXACTLY LIKE THAT THIS POETRY COLLECTION

[Shawn Aebi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not much to connect with here. Need the cypher to unlock what he is trying to say. All over the place - sights, smells, recollections, dreams.

[Shaina Clingempeel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Love the space imagery. And the pigeon poems. Especially liked Aubade to Collapsed Star, I find Myself Defending Pigeons, Asterism, etc. <3

[Phoebe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tender, captivating, surprising. I loved these poems.

[Abby Henry · Rating 5 out of 5]

excellent (i loved “heliocentric,” “the lost quatrain of the ballad of a red field,” “aubade to collapsed star,” and “the way i hold my hands.”)

[Syd]

again my brain is small but I did like a lot of this and it made me want to make my brain bigger so I could understand all of the juicy references and wordplay

[Rae · Rating 5 out of 5]

beautiful/natural/touching application of the (here, often cold) language of science to (deeply warm) human experiences and loves and tragedies

[Clara Gauthier · Rating 4 out of 5]

loved his use of greek mythology and othered bodies through the minotaur and basilisk

very contemporary, though it’s good in some places and bad in others