My Second Work

by Bridget Lowe

“The contemplative second collection from Lowe (At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky) blends stories of childhood and family with astute reveries and allegories, fusing the familiar and the strange and evoking the qualities of a modern parable. At Lowe’s best, she employs metaphor with kinetic, visceral lyricism…The confounding nature of pain and suffering is transformed by Lowe’s modern and accessible verse.” – Publisher’s Weekly

Metaphysical and hypermodern, Bridget Lowe returns in this appropriately titled, much-anticipated second collection, determined as ever to make meaning from the perversity of suffering. My Second Work is rare in its ability to be both completely idiosyncratic and widely resonant, as Lowe transforms experiences of shame, disgust, and bewilderment into a kind of mutant hope. Poems in this collection have appeared in the New Yorker and Poetry and were honored by the Poetry Society of America.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published February 18, 2020

About the author

Bridget Lowe is the author of the poetry collections My Second Work and At the Autopsy of Vaslav Nijinsky, both from Carnegie Mellon University Press. Her poems have appeared widely in publications including The New Yorker, Poetry, American Poetry Review, Best American Poetry, The New Republic, Parnassus, A Public Space, Ploughshares, and elsewhere.

Her honors include the Emily Dickinson Award from the Poetry Society of America, a “Discovery”/Boston Review Prize, a scholarship and fellowship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and the Rona Jaffe Foundation fellowship to the MacDowell Colony.

She lives in Kansas City, where she was born.

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

The twin-subtexts here are grooming (as in the pattern of power-differentials in a relationship that includes the threat of violence, or coercive abuse) as well being under-employed, where the grooming must be wholly different, since it's for a paycheck: at least, until we work further toward that society we all see as possible.

"I moved to a grove impaled by a tower||where a ring of virgins in flannel pajamas|tended the roses that used to grow wild|among the child-sized grave of my face." This is rather droll, and doesn't quite have all the funniness that is its due for the insistence on the child's scale of the narrator's self-appraisal. It's all in that flat affect we hear in the volume's title invocation of autopoesis [the book is Lowe's second]. The conventional triadic stanzas and couplets are also this way and the best poem of the volume is its longest (and most adventurous).

There are actually two long poems: "In A Suburb" as well as "Imperfect Allegory of a Situation of Which I'm Not Permitted to Speak." Both poems return us to "the child-sized" scale in narration, "In a Suburb" is a 56-line lyric meditation on the randomness of a suburban miseducation, where "everything bad happened again and again" and there's "a kind of agreement on the status of things" -- which carries only the securitized child's nudged voluntary opt-in, so the empathy is taught to serve the siblings with whom one shares one's compromise, until the composite-ratio is rediscovered in a final dilation on an image from Disney World, "My brother posing in a leather Indiana Jones hat | And clutching a whip | Squinting his eyes to the Orlandian sun | He's about to be done we kind of already know it | And my little sister not even mentioned until this last line" --

This last image discovers a nice premonitory ambiguity in the brother's "about to be done" [by the Orlandian sun/outside the cosmological framework of the trip to Orlando's sun] before the reader is re-deposited onto the speaker's glib little autopoesis, a return to the child's frame.

"The Imperfect Allegory" is darker and seems to reject child's p.o.v. that in other poems rarely bears the weight of the conventional stanzas. Were I to say what it's about, it's the presentiment of the gender system in one's narration of a life in a child before that system traps them. By staying outside of "Rose" -- the association of this "rose" within the allegorical system is to THE KING, or in child's play, the "you are it" -- Lowe gets a tension the other long meditation flatly lacks. I think I like Lowe best as a symbolist, as in the "Imperfect Allegory".

[Rebecca Valley · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book would get four stars even if it was just “In the Suburbs,” which is a poem close to perfection. I loved many of these lines, reflections on love and womanhood and money and class. Sometimes the poems strayed a bit too far into narrative for me without the satisfaction of Lowe’s captivating lyricism, but overall a very solid collection with some poems that won’t stop singing.

[Meg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very lyrical, but was the poetry equivalent of watching all your friends hang out on social media without you. Just felt like I was missing something the whole time, and that there was scarcely something for me to grab onto. Could also feel that some lines were perhaps supposed to be humorous but they never landed for me.

Favorite:

- Mother Daughter Story

[Rose Knapp · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked the more metaphysical aspects of this collection. Reflections on the universe and the shared nature of humanity. It also looked at the more mundane and ‘shameful’ aspects of existence as equally worthy of poetry.

[SLT · Rating 5 out of 5]

The most excellent collection of poetry I can remember reading. So vivid and passionate. Visual and full of feeling. I can read it over and over and over and get something new every time. Her poetry makes me feel so alive. This was a delight!

[Melissa Johnson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a stunning book, full of humor and surprise and possibility. I love it so much, and I return to it often.

[Meg · Rating 4 out of 5]

A bit of a mixed bag of a collection, and was left feeling a little empty.