Proof Something Happened

by Tony Trigilio

Poetry. Winner of the 2020 Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize. A book of poems based on a legendary UFO Encounter. "Near Lancaster, New Hampshire, in the White Mountains, they noticed a bright light in the sky that seemed to be following them. The light grew larger and brighter." "Tony Trigilio has plucked an early incident of ufology from the margins of twentieth-century cultural history--Betty and Barney Hill's close encounter--and created from a variety of documentary sources an original and highly resonant work of contemporary poetry. What comes into question in PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is how the imagination creates out of pervasive psychological tensions its own inner typology. Employing an open-ended poetics, Trigilio offers a range of angles from which to approach the Hills' alleged abduction, challenging us to take responsibility for why we yearn to believe, or if not--what to expect."--Susan Howe "Tony Trigilio's PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is a stunning example of poetry's ability to access the unsayable. Though based on gaps--of memory, of credibility, of expressibility--what we experience is the unimaginable seeping in through those very gaps. His frankly gripping narrative is refracted through a poetic lens that complicates its surface and maximizes its ambiguity. A real tour de force, it turns us around and makes us face not only what we cannot see and cannot believe, but also what both see and believe but cannot face. He takes us to the point at which the limits of language and the limits of perception meet."--Cole Swensen "Tony Trigilio's PROOF SOMETHING HAPPENED is a peculiar and inventive take on the archival. It tells the story of Betty and Barney Hill and their supposed alien abduction. But rather than isolate the alien abduction as a singular moment--whether true or a lie--the book creates the sensation that the entire 1950s might be an alien energy, an energy that perhaps lives on in poems (such as these) and other sites, such as baseball games, late night TV shows, and paranoid letters. The anachronism of this energy makes me think of Greil Marcus's Weird, Old America, except here it is a weird new America, an expired newness that persists. Trigilio has made the archive into a meeting site of dream and fact."--Johannes Gˆransson "Tony Trigilio's repurposing of alien abduction narratives enacts a new turn in the recent move toward 'documental poetics,' wherein archival testimony is transmogrified into poetry. The docu-dramatic clarity of Trigilio's style adds its own patina of verity to the story of a uniquely American transcendental encounter. Here is proof of the outer limits of human experience."--Andrew Joron

64 pages, Paperback

Published May 30, 2021

About the author

Tony Trigilio is the author and editor of seventeen books, including, most recently, The Punishment Book (BlazeVOX [books], 2024), the fourth installment in his multivolume poem, The Complete Dark Shadows (of My Childhood); Craft: A Memoir (Marsh Hawk Press, 2023); and Proof Something Happened, selected by Susan Howe as the winner of the Marsh Hawk Press Poetry Prize (2021). A volume of his selected poems, Fuera del Taller del Cosmos, was published in Guatemala in 2018 by Editorial Poe (translated by Bony Hernández). His books of poetry also include Ghosts of the Upper Floor (BlazeVOX, 2019), White Noise (Apostrophe Books, 2013), and Historic Diary (BlazeVOX, 2011), among others. He is editor of Elise Cowen: Poems and Fragments (Ahsahta Press, 2014; new edition forthcoming, 2025, from BlazeVOX) and Dispatches from the Body Politic: Interviews with Jan Beatty, Meg Day, and Douglas Kearney (Essay Press, 2016). Trigilio is the author of the critical monographs Allen Ginsberg's Buddhist Poetics (second edition released in paperback by Southern Illinois University Press in 2012) and "Strange Prophecies Anew" (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000). With Erik Mortenson, he co-edited the essay collection The Beats and the Academy: A Renegotiation (Clemson University Press / Liverpool University Press, 2023); and with Tim Prchal, he co-edited the literature anthology Visions and Divisions: American Immigration Literature, 1870-1930 (Rutgers University Press, 2008).

His poems have been anthologized widely, including The Best American Poetry (ed. Elaine Equi; Scribner, 2023); Wherever I’m At: An Anthology of Chicago Poetry (After Hours Press, 2022); The Eloquent Poem (Persea Books, 2019); The Golden Shovel Anthology: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks (University of Arkansas Press, 2017); Poems Dead and Undead (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2014); Obsessions: Sestinas in the Twenty-First Century (Dartmouth College Press, 2014); The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral (Ahsahta, 2012); A Face to Meet the Faces: An Anthology of Contemporary Persona Poetry (University of Akron Press, 2012); and Villanelles (Knopf/Everyman's Library, 2012), among others. His critical essays have appeared in the collections Reconstructing the Beats (ed. Jennie Skerl; Palgrave/MacMillan, 2004) and Girls Who Wore Black: Women Writing the Beat Generation (Rutgers University Press, 2002). His articles and book reviews have appeared in journals such as American Literature, Another Chicago Magazine, Boston Review, The Journal of Beat Studies, Modern Language Studies, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature, The William Carlos Williams Review, and others.

Trigilio co-founded the poetry journal Court Green in 2004, and was an associate editor for Tupelo Quarterly from 2017-2021. He is Poetry Editor and Nonfiction Co-Editor of Allium, A Journal of Poetry & Prose. A past recipient of an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship in Poetry, he lives in Chicago.

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of all the things I would've expected to find a poetry book themed on, "a particularly well-documented case of alien abduction" would not have been on the list! This is very well researched, and has a nice sort of dreamy feel to it. I appreciated the inclusion of the historical racism - it helps set the thing in a particular place and time.