Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists

by Laynie Browne

Laynie Browne's latest poetry collection, Translation of the Lilies Back into Lists playfully employs the list poem and delivers poems which evade genre and subvert the quotidian material of daily life. These poems consider elegy, absence and bewilderment while allowing associative logic to make poetic leaps in imagination and mood that belie convention. This book explores the myriad ways one could attempt to categorize a lived experience with its dizzying infinitudes by marking it in finite language, and ultimately shows how poetry is an experiment for that translation Browne's exquisite collection considers language, time, and poetics in a way that is as electrifying as it is elusive. In homage to poet C.D. Wright, her title is inspired by Translations of the Gospel Back into Tongues.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Hardcover

First published May 3, 2022

Reviews

[Kathleen · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I speak as if I knew where I were, where you are, where we are all to be" (137).

[Kent · Rating 5 out of 5]

I like to imagine what it would look like if I committed to texting myself throughout the day. Small notes. But not the notes that I might gather together on Apple Notes. Ah, a thought. Ah, a thought. More notes that I’m going to communicate to myself. And then how those would read if I were to bring them all together.

Writing this, I realize, sounds a little superficial. And I would say that’s part of the project Browne endeavors for in this book. Like whatever you think the force of Dailiness is, occupying any given moment during the day, and then poetically shaping it using resistance against details or specifics, that’s what these poems are. They read like notes she’s written to herself in reaction to herself. Notes that are like preoccupations, keeping her from showing us the “big picture,” even as we, as readers, project past the vagueness to something that might cohere. It’s all happening, in a day, after all. And I like reading it thinking about that limitation. Not that daily concerns don’t connect with bigger situations, more that a day’s thinking has a certain tone to that larger picture.

Maybe the lists sound like journaling. Maybe there’s a little of that. More like what it feels like to sound down and journal, and staying in that intentional space. It’s like leaving a series of sticky notes around the house, but the sticky notes don’t have anything written on them. You’ll get to that part. The language of the notes exists only in your mind. But even this analogy doesn’t do it, because there’s something more concrete to the language. It’s that space in your mind where every todo list exists. And sometimes these notes are in response to things she knows she should be doing that day. A lot of the book is responding to what the poet feels is expected of her. You should be doing something, say, like answering emails or writing or attending to a friend’s issues, but who the friend is, what the reading might entail, where the emails come from is unimportant for the poems, because the sense that they existed is sufficient. The poems pretend like that’s what was going on all along.

[A L]

Interesting project, but went on for a while.

[ayd · Rating 5 out of 5]

i <3 lists