Iteration Nets

by Karla Kelsey

Poetry. Karla Kelsey begins with the sonnet--fourteen lines (usually!) that she's appropriated from a variety of sources, homophonically echoed, and playfully assembled. She then explodes each sonnet into a voluptuous prose poem, later erasing that into a sinuous, open lyric line. The aim of the book is not to execute a plan or fulfill a form, but to generate new modes of inhabiting a poem. The result is a work of lyrical constraint and romantic conceptualism.

Genres: Poetry

120 pages, Paperback

First published September 28, 2010

Reviews

[Lydia Redwine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 stars

This collection is experimental at best. The process overshadows the words themselves in this collection. The collection is written in such a way that opens new doors for the forms of poetry-which being a poet myself, I can appreciate.

However, it caused me to find little meaning and to grow increasingly frustrated as I read. I couldn't make out much of what the author was saying.

I will say, however, that I did enjoy the second movement above the other two. It was the most understandable to me. For the most part, each line seemed to start with a subject and then act as though that subject was going to do something, but then new subjects would be introduced and we go around in circles and nothing really ever happens.

The poems sound good to the ear. I understood more when I read it aloud. There were quite a few repeating terms, phrases and concepts that, at a close read, could perhaps shed light on what the collection is actually talking about. From what I gathered some concepts (might lol) include, the impending arrival of death, the authors struggle to relate to others, global warming/humans destroying earth (?), and an obsession with roses perhaps as well. All in all, it is a collection I will probably one day read again. And I did learn some new words, so that's always a plus.

[Melissa · Rating 2 out of 5]

To me, the process takes precedence over the product here, the ear leading the poems too much. I feel like I should be compelled to close read but I don't; I get frustrated. My favorite section is the middle prose section, because there the very smart, very perceptive nature of the poet has room to make connections and I have more to latch on to, more that seems to have a person behind it, saying something meaningful rather than stringing jeweled bits of language together. Even that, though, in its best moments, restores words, imbues them with something new. . . .

2.2
I wanted to sit in the dilapidated park by the cracked central fountain, sad small songs, but a man in army green deterred me. But the idea of the man deterred me. But I deterred myself. The landscape's messed, I am this, walking in gusts of wind breathing out the bad air, breathing in the different bad, my bent tree swaying.

[Glen Retief · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm friends with the author, but I rated the book amazing because of the sheer inventiveness of its poetic process. I really haven't read another book consisting of sonnets composed out of samples of famous lines, homophonic translations, prose poem "expansions" of the sonnets, and then finally evocative erasures. A fascinating experiment.