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Objects for a Fog Death
Objects for a Fog Death is a series of odes to images and objects, and to the “you” responsible for distancing these images and objects from mortal relationships. With this distance comes a profound desire and a heightening awareness of earthly proximity. Through the accompanying hypnagogic verses, oceans quiet the voice while disorientation hurls it into a temporary place—hovering overhead or shying away in the murk. Is a river an object? Is fog an object? Or for that matter, is fog a place? Behind this book lies a call for rescue from confinement and immobility, from the ineffability of touch. Out of this fog springs forth the coeval shriek of something that will not be reduced to love.
- GenresPoetry
104 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
March 11, 2011
A magical book (in the mysterious sense of the word). A concise book with sentences that snake surprisingly through multiple couplets and end up in unexpected places. Take this line from "Architecture" for instance:
If lightning is just more
heat, where is the cyclone
to entwine us until our
veins take down all
the trees between here
& seven days ago?
Doxsee writes in a way that feels like you are actually seeing the poems through fog--they aren't muddy or unclear or hazy by way of craft, it's not that sort of fog--but there always seems to be something swirling up and around the objects at the heart of her poems, or up and around the poet, or maybe the reader. The poems ask a lot of me--they required my vision, too. Or perhaps the fog is a constant and maybe the objects are swaying. Either way, there is lots of movement, and either way you end up thinking you are watching one thing before you realize that you have been looking at something different all along. In "Kitchen Tour" she writes:
Those are
old teeth marks
in the water from
when I bit
all the ice
cubes in half.
The poems are told in a sort of gloaming. That time of night when everything is floaty. It did take me a few poems to become comfortable in Doxsee's universe--that doorway into her poems required a certain patience to open, but to me that is a good thing. There are a lot of easily opened doors. A like a door that requires a bit of focused attention, a bit of study. Because once that door is open? It doesn't close. I can't go back. Once I stopped trying to fan away the fog, and just dove into Doxsee's surprising lines, vision be damned, I felt both lured further and sorry to turn the page on the last poem. Toward the end of the book, she writes, in a poem titled "Dear Sparrow":
You
pretend my door
is your skyload
of leaves, a new
kind of air
you sail.
That pretty much describes it better than I ever could. I recommend the book, especially if you are looking for a new kind of air.
If lightning is just more
heat, where is the cyclone
to entwine us until our
veins take down all
the trees between here
& seven days ago?
Doxsee writes in a way that feels like you are actually seeing the poems through fog--they aren't muddy or unclear or hazy by way of craft, it's not that sort of fog--but there always seems to be something swirling up and around the objects at the heart of her poems, or up and around the poet, or maybe the reader. The poems ask a lot of me--they required my vision, too. Or perhaps the fog is a constant and maybe the objects are swaying. Either way, there is lots of movement, and either way you end up thinking you are watching one thing before you realize that you have been looking at something different all along. In "Kitchen Tour" she writes:
Those are
old teeth marks
in the water from
when I bit
all the ice
cubes in half.
The poems are told in a sort of gloaming. That time of night when everything is floaty. It did take me a few poems to become comfortable in Doxsee's universe--that doorway into her poems required a certain patience to open, but to me that is a good thing. There are a lot of easily opened doors. A like a door that requires a bit of focused attention, a bit of study. Because once that door is open? It doesn't close. I can't go back. Once I stopped trying to fan away the fog, and just dove into Doxsee's surprising lines, vision be damned, I felt both lured further and sorry to turn the page on the last poem. Toward the end of the book, she writes, in a poem titled "Dear Sparrow":
You
pretend my door
is your skyload
of leaves, a new
kind of air
you sail.
That pretty much describes it better than I ever could. I recommend the book, especially if you are looking for a new kind of air.
January 28, 2018
This collection trickles "Where Kinds of Water Meet", it's "An Intoxication We Attend" all rolled out into a tour of words that captures imagination in a web. Whatever it feeds only the Objects found within the fog will explain its death.
Not a bad collection. "Meanings of the Null" was the best section. Looking forward to her other two collections. Still a treasured tome for my shelf to display. I'll list a few favorites below from other sections.
-Where Kinds of Water Meet
-An Intoxication We Attend
-Architecture
-Threshold Part Two
-River
Not a bad collection. "Meanings of the Null" was the best section. Looking forward to her other two collections. Still a treasured tome for my shelf to display. I'll list a few favorites below from other sections.
-Where Kinds of Water Meet
-An Intoxication We Attend
-Architecture
-Threshold Part Two
-River
June 22, 2013
Julie's poems in Objects for a Fog Death have this amazing sense of despondency, yet emotions that come alive to get buried in weather. The objects in the book are equally soft and sharp: velvet sacks, bouquets, and swans; fire-balls, bullets, and fishhooks. The pronouns are particularly unique components to objects as they are all ungendered. The resulting effect is a book populated by minds outside of bodies.
The most interesting poems I found are the poems that try to define what a poem is. “What is the poem” asked Graham Foust, and Doxsee proceeds toward no less a definition that “Falsetto”:
"To paint this
rollercoaster
the color of
common sense
sail it oarless
over the rapids."
That Doxsee’s poems are able to simultaneously resist the order of the senses and achieve a crystalline-like order on the page is one of the major accomplishments of this book. Nearly all of these poems are written in packed, terse couplets where each line is taut as a wire. Each word is an object to be found and manipulated from out of the fog of speech and emotion, and arranged, darkly, delicately, into machines made of music.
"The ides of September
ghosted me until I flew
back from my house
on an origami swan you
left on my knee when I
drifted."
She writes, “I’m holding / what’s left of my tongue” (from “To the Less Accurate Rippling of Tunes”), and she has taken those pieces and made a bouquet. That the bouquet is on fire is for us to deal with."
"People elevator the upward
numbers
and
The higher quiet of me
walks through smoke."
Indeed, Doxsee certainly makes a world in Objects for a Fog Death; her definition of that world, though, is “a picture of fog.” One who reads it must enter equipped with their own compass, map, and confidence.
The most interesting poems I found are the poems that try to define what a poem is. “What is the poem” asked Graham Foust, and Doxsee proceeds toward no less a definition that “Falsetto”:
"To paint this
rollercoaster
the color of
common sense
sail it oarless
over the rapids."
That Doxsee’s poems are able to simultaneously resist the order of the senses and achieve a crystalline-like order on the page is one of the major accomplishments of this book. Nearly all of these poems are written in packed, terse couplets where each line is taut as a wire. Each word is an object to be found and manipulated from out of the fog of speech and emotion, and arranged, darkly, delicately, into machines made of music.
"The ides of September
ghosted me until I flew
back from my house
on an origami swan you
left on my knee when I
drifted."
She writes, “I’m holding / what’s left of my tongue” (from “To the Less Accurate Rippling of Tunes”), and she has taken those pieces and made a bouquet. That the bouquet is on fire is for us to deal with."
"People elevator the upward
numbers
and
The higher quiet of me
walks through smoke."
Indeed, Doxsee certainly makes a world in Objects for a Fog Death; her definition of that world, though, is “a picture of fog.” One who reads it must enter equipped with their own compass, map, and confidence.
September 23, 2010
Idiosyncratic and delightful. As with her previous book, the work is a bit beyond my range of expertise, so it is difficult for me to truly assess. But I can say that I preferred this one to the last, that the remarkable invention of the book held me through periods of reading with great uncertainty, and that I will return to these poems with interest in the future. There is definitely something to be learned here for a poet like myself.
July 9, 2011
A collection of tight, allusive lyrics. Occasionally these are difficult to figure-- they are a bit like acrostics or poems where the associations are kind of hard to follow from one line to another. But when I felt like I did follow the connections, I really liked them.
It feels like there are five small books here, given the tightness of the sections. But given the nature of the poems themselves, that might be good, to help understand the argument more clearly.
It feels like there are five small books here, given the tightness of the sections. But given the nature of the poems themselves, that might be good, to help understand the argument more clearly.
March 21, 2012
Felt most engaged by the first, fourth, and fifth sections. Loved the "metal" poems. Curious linebreaks created tension, and sentences stretched over lines became increasingly complex. Reading these short but intensive poems felt like being swept up by a tornado, flung about a while, and dropped into an empty field.
February 3, 2011
My review can be read at Rain Taxi online: http://www.raintaxi.com/online/2010wi...#
December 8, 2012
Really like this. Aesthetically solid and linguistically interesting.
Very interested to see what else she has.
Very interested to see what else she has.
March 31, 2015
I've had this book around for a few months now and have yet been unable to get through it's entirety in one sitting. Nevertheless, each time I pick it up it stuns me.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews