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Gravity Well
In Gravity Well, Marc Rahe’s incisive third collection, the poems beckon readers through an ever-shifting series of landscapes, drawing our gaze across a dynamic tableau—an octopus wearing a sweater, a white sky over the bridge we’re standing on, flowers pressed into a forgotten book—as a means of revealing the most particular thrills and anxieties of the human condition. Unafraid and unwavering, careful and concerned, Gravity Well propels its reader through the imagined apertures of the universe one striking image at a time, leaving us ocularly magnified in a world now seen anew. A singular voice in American poetry, Rahe deftly centers the body in relation to ailments such as love, decay, aging, friendship, and grief. His powerful, meditative plea is resounding: “Earth, turn me.”
Marc Rahe is the author of The Smaller Half (Rescue Press, 2010), On Hours (Rescue Press, 2015), and Gravity Well (Rescue Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, MAKE Literary Magazine, PEN Poetry Series, Sixth Finch, and other literary journals. He lives in Iowa City.
PRAISE FOR GRAVITY WELL:
Marc Rahe’s luminous poems find grace in acts of intentional remembrance, in turning back to sing “what can be seen/looking behind.” The speaker’s world resembles our own fraught moment—fallen, divided—but never numb. These poems hum with moments of transcendence, between body and weather, air and breath, between today’s pain and the deep wounds of the past. In precise, lucid lyrics, this voice insists that our capacity to feel is what binds us, ecstatically, to our planet and to one another. —Kiki Petrosino
Marc Rahe is the author of The Smaller Half (Rescue Press, 2010), On Hours (Rescue Press, 2015), and Gravity Well (Rescue Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, MAKE Literary Magazine, PEN Poetry Series, Sixth Finch, and other literary journals. He lives in Iowa City.
PRAISE FOR GRAVITY WELL:
Marc Rahe’s luminous poems find grace in acts of intentional remembrance, in turning back to sing “what can be seen/looking behind.” The speaker’s world resembles our own fraught moment—fallen, divided—but never numb. These poems hum with moments of transcendence, between body and weather, air and breath, between today’s pain and the deep wounds of the past. In precise, lucid lyrics, this voice insists that our capacity to feel is what binds us, ecstatically, to our planet and to one another. —Kiki Petrosino
94 pages, Paperback
Published October 20, 2020
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About the author
Marc Rahe
3 books5 followersMarc Rahe is the author of The Smaller Half (Rescue Press, 2010), On Hours (Rescue Press, 2015), and Gravity Well (Rescue Press, 2020). His poems have appeared in The Iowa Review, jubilat, MAKE Literary Magazine, PEN Poetry Series, Sixth Finch, and other literary journals. He lives in Iowa City.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
October 28, 2020
Gravity Well is a collection of 60 poems split into four sections titled with phases of the moon - Waxing Crescent, Waxing Gibbous, Waning Gibbous, Waning Crescent in which he explores life, love, aging and grief. There is a strong science feel to many of the pieces and I wonder if this is the author's background.
This wasn't a collection I responded to immediately. Rahe has a writing style I'm not used to, although I feel it is quite akin to our thought process, mine anyway - flitting about like a butterfly in places. I read every poem twice, some three times for them to speak to me. With each reading I discovered new things, paused at a certain section of phrasing, smiled to myself at a thought, an image. And I imagine with each subsequent reading other elements will jump out at me. Not every poem worked for me, sometimes there was imagery that didn't connect with me, and that's OK - poems are designed to bring out different responses for different people.
There were several standouts for me. Previous Lives takes a simple calendar with crossed out squares as the starting point for a detailed discussion of aging and the passage of time. Momentum contains my favourite line of the whole collection - 'These check stubs are marked and perforated foreshadowings of our regret.' I thought that was beautiful. Fable of the Cephalopod has the most wonderful imagery - no simple frog in the throat for Rahe, but a sea creature instead! In Winter, about the circle of life & death, made me a little sad and How I Miss You contains another beautiful line - 'What is warmth without your arm on me?' The Sky without Air fascinated me and I loved Design Specification, Is Coincidence a Spring of Romance and Not Yet, all about navigating the choppy waters of relationships.
Gravity Well is a rich, multilayered collection of poetry with much to discover within its pages. I found new things on every reading and know I will continue to do so. An intimate, imaginative portrayal of life, love and loss, told with a singular voice. Rahe picks up on the tiniest details and uses them as his focus, resulting in a unique collection I am happy to recommend.
This wasn't a collection I responded to immediately. Rahe has a writing style I'm not used to, although I feel it is quite akin to our thought process, mine anyway - flitting about like a butterfly in places. I read every poem twice, some three times for them to speak to me. With each reading I discovered new things, paused at a certain section of phrasing, smiled to myself at a thought, an image. And I imagine with each subsequent reading other elements will jump out at me. Not every poem worked for me, sometimes there was imagery that didn't connect with me, and that's OK - poems are designed to bring out different responses for different people.
There were several standouts for me. Previous Lives takes a simple calendar with crossed out squares as the starting point for a detailed discussion of aging and the passage of time. Momentum contains my favourite line of the whole collection - 'These check stubs are marked and perforated foreshadowings of our regret.' I thought that was beautiful. Fable of the Cephalopod has the most wonderful imagery - no simple frog in the throat for Rahe, but a sea creature instead! In Winter, about the circle of life & death, made me a little sad and How I Miss You contains another beautiful line - 'What is warmth without your arm on me?' The Sky without Air fascinated me and I loved Design Specification, Is Coincidence a Spring of Romance and Not Yet, all about navigating the choppy waters of relationships.
Gravity Well is a rich, multilayered collection of poetry with much to discover within its pages. I found new things on every reading and know I will continue to do so. An intimate, imaginative portrayal of life, love and loss, told with a singular voice. Rahe picks up on the tiniest details and uses them as his focus, resulting in a unique collection I am happy to recommend.
October 24, 2020
I haven’t read any new poetry for a long time so I jumped at the chance to read this new collection. For me, poetry is very emotional. It’s about whether a poem connects with my feelings in some way; is the poet describing something I recognise, something I’ve felt or seen? There tends to be certain images that make me stop and think.
Others make me smile because of the beautiful combination of words. In Writer Friend he describes an unsettled afternoon as ‘forecast-come-true afternoon
of cloudy and scattered’. I also loved the Schroedinger reference in Our Shared Life
of ‘The bee trapped with you inside/ your helmet in traffic, will or will not’. It made me think of that moment before something happens. In that moment, playing simultaneously in the biker’s mind, are the bee that stings and the bee he successfully releases back into the world. We get another sense of the in-between reading his poem Stellar, as if moments in time are Russian dolls with each possibility stacked within each other - touching but separate:
‘This tree was my favorite the day it rained during my walk. Uncanny when it’s raining and it’s sunny at the same time. As if being in someone’s presence and feeling the presence of their ghost’.
in In another I loved the line ‘the air was as wet as dog’s breath’ because it made me feel the humidity of a wet day in August, that moisture hangs like misted breath in the air.
There are also themes running through his work that interest me greatly because of my own writing work which is focused on how the body, particularly a faulty or malfunctioning body, interacts with the world. Raehe has a way of describing age and the changes of the body that are surprising and moving. In his poem Appetite I loved the following section:
‘I’ve been reopened along the same incision
and though metal plates and wires, metal screws,
can only be said to ache, I say
it is the metal in this leg that tells me
the sky is so full of mountains and trenches
as the ocean, metal that warns me
of my own weight held past a certain angle from the center.’
I love how he describes the constant ache of the structure that holds the speaker’s leg together, but it isn’t a negative statement, it’s just something that’s there. Also it’s a way of gauging the world, like I know if my joints ache it’s going to be wet or if my muscles seize it’s going to be cold. The unnatural pins and wires he needs for his Stemlimb actually link him to the natural world - to the heights and lows of the lands, and even how the force of gravity can be sensed as he finds the balance of walking with these metal supports.
In Fable of the Cephalopod he uses humour to describe a sense of coughing up a foreign body, something that feels like ‘an octopus that was trying to wear a sweater’ giving the reader a sense of how stuckit feels, trying to force eight woollen legs from them wrong bronchial tree’. Later he describes the moment of having a blood test, very routine for me and others who are ill, but tense all the same. He perfectly describes that moment when you almost hate yourself for trying to make the medics life easier. When you feel guilty for being difficult, as if you could control the way your veins and body work:
‘at a blood draw my vein resisted the needle. The needle
slipped aside inside my arm, despite repeated attempts. I made,
for the phlebotomist, a joke I hoped would defuse her growing anxiety.’
I felt a connection with parts of the work, and as always with poetry, I know that re-reading will bring further meaning and interpretation, depending on my mood. Poetry’s meaning lies with the readers once it has left the author’s pen. It may well have had an original meaning,but really the beauty of poetry comes out when the reader brings their ‘stuff’ to the poem. I’m sure there are other bloggers who have had totally different experiences with the images and themes but that’s the beauty of it, it can touch a multitude of people very differently. I thought this was an imaginative and thoughtful collection from a poet I’d never read before. It sparked my interest in poetry again and I am looking forward to reading more for the blog and for my own enjoyment.
Others make me smile because of the beautiful combination of words. In Writer Friend he describes an unsettled afternoon as ‘forecast-come-true afternoon
of cloudy and scattered’. I also loved the Schroedinger reference in Our Shared Life
of ‘The bee trapped with you inside/ your helmet in traffic, will or will not’. It made me think of that moment before something happens. In that moment, playing simultaneously in the biker’s mind, are the bee that stings and the bee he successfully releases back into the world. We get another sense of the in-between reading his poem Stellar, as if moments in time are Russian dolls with each possibility stacked within each other - touching but separate:
‘This tree was my favorite the day it rained during my walk. Uncanny when it’s raining and it’s sunny at the same time. As if being in someone’s presence and feeling the presence of their ghost’.
in In another I loved the line ‘the air was as wet as dog’s breath’ because it made me feel the humidity of a wet day in August, that moisture hangs like misted breath in the air.
There are also themes running through his work that interest me greatly because of my own writing work which is focused on how the body, particularly a faulty or malfunctioning body, interacts with the world. Raehe has a way of describing age and the changes of the body that are surprising and moving. In his poem Appetite I loved the following section:
‘I’ve been reopened along the same incision
and though metal plates and wires, metal screws,
can only be said to ache, I say
it is the metal in this leg that tells me
the sky is so full of mountains and trenches
as the ocean, metal that warns me
of my own weight held past a certain angle from the center.’
I love how he describes the constant ache of the structure that holds the speaker’s leg together, but it isn’t a negative statement, it’s just something that’s there. Also it’s a way of gauging the world, like I know if my joints ache it’s going to be wet or if my muscles seize it’s going to be cold. The unnatural pins and wires he needs for his Stemlimb actually link him to the natural world - to the heights and lows of the lands, and even how the force of gravity can be sensed as he finds the balance of walking with these metal supports.
In Fable of the Cephalopod he uses humour to describe a sense of coughing up a foreign body, something that feels like ‘an octopus that was trying to wear a sweater’ giving the reader a sense of how stuckit feels, trying to force eight woollen legs from them wrong bronchial tree’. Later he describes the moment of having a blood test, very routine for me and others who are ill, but tense all the same. He perfectly describes that moment when you almost hate yourself for trying to make the medics life easier. When you feel guilty for being difficult, as if you could control the way your veins and body work:
‘at a blood draw my vein resisted the needle. The needle
slipped aside inside my arm, despite repeated attempts. I made,
for the phlebotomist, a joke I hoped would defuse her growing anxiety.’
I felt a connection with parts of the work, and as always with poetry, I know that re-reading will bring further meaning and interpretation, depending on my mood. Poetry’s meaning lies with the readers once it has left the author’s pen. It may well have had an original meaning,but really the beauty of poetry comes out when the reader brings their ‘stuff’ to the poem. I’m sure there are other bloggers who have had totally different experiences with the images and themes but that’s the beauty of it, it can touch a multitude of people very differently. I thought this was an imaginative and thoughtful collection from a poet I’d never read before. It sparked my interest in poetry again and I am looking forward to reading more for the blog and for my own enjoyment.
March 27, 2022
Work in a not entirely unfamiliar gnomic mode. Structural model: pancaked multistory building, but not a high rise. (Don't seek stairwells here. It's all chutes and fireman's poles of parataxis). But this is a poet who still believes in making a wide range of sounds, even if the language rarely gets Latinate. American English for sure: the music of a stiff upper lip, trembling with unspecified yet strong emotion (that is, maybe suppression makes all feelings "strong emotion.")
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews