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Planet Drill
Winner of Futurepoem's inaugural (2019) Other Futures Award.
In an era of disintegration, frack and melt, any human who wants to move away from habits of harm must feel for new ways to inhabit PLANET DRILL, using our signature bodily function: language. In Jessica Laser's Planet Drill, human language is like the slime-mold quietly recreating the subway map of Tokyo: deft, resourceful, pliant, responsive, and finally, collectively, wise.” — Joyelle McSweeney
In an era of disintegration, frack and melt, any human who wants to move away from habits of harm must feel for new ways to inhabit PLANET DRILL, using our signature bodily function: language. In Jessica Laser's Planet Drill, human language is like the slime-mold quietly recreating the subway map of Tokyo: deft, resourceful, pliant, responsive, and finally, collectively, wise.” — Joyelle McSweeney
- GenresPoetry
88 pages, Paperback
Published October 31, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
April 5, 2024
Most people are used to sentences that tie knots of sense at various pleasing intervals, creating a rhythm and at the end of the sentence there’s this implicit understanding that these knots, the intervals between them, the drumbeat they make, the lexicon used by the sentence to relate all moments to the larger sentence, they all make sense. Sentences are fun, elaborate, terse, segmented. Laser’s poems, however craft many challenges to that syntactic ordering of knots. Where normal sentences might have contours, like a luxury car commercial scene with the car driving through mountainous terrain. Laser’s sentences are like smooth muscle.
I never understood smooth muscle in biology class, except the movement is involuntary. Let’s call it subtle, too. Because those are the qualities to Laser’s lines (at least the lines that start with the conventional Poetic Capital Letter), and also her sentences. Subtle sentences that don’t necessarily “end.” Though in your reading you might have thought they had. Or, as I would suggest, you relax your sense of where a sentence would need to end, as a poem’s lines might guid you to hear them ending. They might not end there!
All of this about sentences? And lines? I’ve always appreciated Alice Notley’s essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment” (from Coming After: Essays on Poetry). In its analysis of poets like Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, and Joanne Kyger, Notley reads closely for these three poets’ relation between sentence and line. The sentence that overflows the line. The line that holds back the quick reading of a sentence. Something new happens in the poem because it’s in lines. Maybe the syntax gets a little more punchy. Maybe the intonation and stress on certain words draws away from the sentence’s expected stresses. Laser is in this sentence-to-line-thinking area. It is useful, and, as I hope this review would indicate (and argue), essential to hearing the book’s poems, that while reading you’re mindful of what a poem might be. How poems’ lines can consciously throw you off what its sentence is doing. Or this is just how I started reading the book. Because I was eager to see the long-sentence sense Laser had used in Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides. And the lines in Planet Drill appear independent of one another. I would say it’s a more subtle enjambment. Something more conspicuous in some poems and precisely heard in others.
And as I discovered Laser’s crafting of line, its balance between independence and sequence of the long-sentence feel, the book opened for me considerably. It guided me to what I hear as the book’s subject matter, which I take as sense or understanding, that can be shared among people. Like if there is a logic to a sentence, but the logic is idiosyncratic to how you hear the sentence, how can people share the sense at the heart of a sentence? Is this too abstract a subject or theme for the book? I’m not sure. But it’s what I hear, and I appreciate this way subject and form are linked.
I never understood smooth muscle in biology class, except the movement is involuntary. Let’s call it subtle, too. Because those are the qualities to Laser’s lines (at least the lines that start with the conventional Poetic Capital Letter), and also her sentences. Subtle sentences that don’t necessarily “end.” Though in your reading you might have thought they had. Or, as I would suggest, you relax your sense of where a sentence would need to end, as a poem’s lines might guid you to hear them ending. They might not end there!
All of this about sentences? And lines? I’ve always appreciated Alice Notley’s essay, “American Poetic Music at the Present Moment” (from Coming After: Essays on Poetry). In its analysis of poets like Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, and Joanne Kyger, Notley reads closely for these three poets’ relation between sentence and line. The sentence that overflows the line. The line that holds back the quick reading of a sentence. Something new happens in the poem because it’s in lines. Maybe the syntax gets a little more punchy. Maybe the intonation and stress on certain words draws away from the sentence’s expected stresses. Laser is in this sentence-to-line-thinking area. It is useful, and, as I hope this review would indicate (and argue), essential to hearing the book’s poems, that while reading you’re mindful of what a poem might be. How poems’ lines can consciously throw you off what its sentence is doing. Or this is just how I started reading the book. Because I was eager to see the long-sentence sense Laser had used in Sergei Kuzmich from All Sides. And the lines in Planet Drill appear independent of one another. I would say it’s a more subtle enjambment. Something more conspicuous in some poems and precisely heard in others.
And as I discovered Laser’s crafting of line, its balance between independence and sequence of the long-sentence feel, the book opened for me considerably. It guided me to what I hear as the book’s subject matter, which I take as sense or understanding, that can be shared among people. Like if there is a logic to a sentence, but the logic is idiosyncratic to how you hear the sentence, how can people share the sense at the heart of a sentence? Is this too abstract a subject or theme for the book? I’m not sure. But it’s what I hear, and I appreciate this way subject and form are linked.
December 17, 2022
This book has swagger, heft, and sparkle... highly recommended.
March 6, 2023
I think this was very good but I read it in a trance.
August 25, 2023
Might just be because the author came out of the Iowa Workshop (notoriously founded as a cold war culture project with CIA funding), but this feels like the author got very very high and tried to write down her observations. (Tried reading this high and not high and got the same result, just to be safe.) Gorgeous alliteration and phrases. Just doesn't quite hit home for me.
May 1, 2024
could not get thru.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews