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Everything is Quiet
Everything is Quiet is a full-length poetry book comprised of individual poems about love, life, and loss. Just kidding. Everything is Quiet is a woman sitting calmly near a glass window, hungover and smoking a cigarette in the aftermath of dealing with strange lovers who shush her, smack her, ask her to be more vocal, and for some reason, really enjoy dirty period sex. Everything is Quiet is a person riding a train alone in a big world with an open sky, trying to remember what happened last night, but not really caring.
- GenresPoetry
75 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2010
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
January 23, 2011
Oh, oh, oh! This is splendid. It brought a tear to the eye of an old man, reading it hungover with my kids crawling all over me. A kind of strange generosity shines out from its pages. It's a book I will keep returning to, yeeha!
March 25, 2012
This is one of the best poetry books I've read in the past few years. I liked the book by Matthew Savoca paired with Malone's book, but in this review I'm only addressing the Malone side of the flip-book since that's the one I just reread.
Malone's poems are way more than "at least as well-written as prose"--if we're going to use Pound's acerbic and funny dictum to judge them. This poet isn't really interested in the flashier rhetorical devices. Her poetry might even seem like chopped prose if you don't realize the poet follows another Poundian dictum to the letter. I mean his even better "Dichten=condensare." "To write poetry is to condense."
Malone's poems may appear, prima facie, to be confessionalism. But that term is best reserved for confessions in poetry that don't rise to the level of great art. Her ear and her images are way too careful not to do that. If Malone has the immediacy of a poet like Bukowski, she also has a gift for making poems that condense thought and emotion as carefully as William Carlos Williams ever did with his most celebrated shorter poems. I'm speaking of those poems written early in his career, when Imagism was in full ferment and W.C.W. was such a vital part of it, if not the fulcrum.
Here is "Speak Softer Please, I Can't Hear you" by Malone in its entirety: "dismemberment arouses / me / the thought of it / happening." The poem is like a sleeve of snow laying itself on a roadway in the middle of the night when no one is around. There's no context for the statement and it makes the head spin. We don't know if the poet is the one who wants to dismember or the one wanting to be dismembered. We don't know if she's talking about murder or some dismemberment that occurs in nature, in plants, anything. We have to question why our mind goes after certain readings of the poem. The poem creates a hypnotic ambiguity reminiscent of the figure-ground problem in visual art. The poem has a sensuousness that won't orient us. In this, it's very much like W.C.W.'s plums poem or the one with his cat stepping so carefully down into that flowerpot. Or perhaps it's even more like the tiny Williams poem in which the only thing that happens is the reader learning that a bottle lies trapped and forgotten between walls.
Kendra Grant Malone does these sorts of transcendentally simple moments to perfection in so many of these poems.
The poet is often quite funny, but there's usually a shiv that comes with that humor which is going to stick you when you're not looking. This is from "Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful": "metaphysically speaking / i feel very big and sturdy / like a refrigerator / yes / my metaphysical self is / a large white frigidaire."
This is a poem about power relations. She could be talking about the way art operates or the way romantic relationships work or something else entirely. The poem has enough negative capability to adjust itself to many different settings. But it's clearly about the destabilization that the feeling of unequal power engenders. And in that, it's a universal poem and every bit as interesting to me as a poem by any other master of the art form, say Szymborska.
The genius of Malone's poetry is that she realizes the child in every one of us is immortal. And immortally frightened. This tension is what keeps her poetry a high-wire act--and one I can never resist following with my mind's eye.
If you have a fondness for the "skinny poem" done to perfection (say in the manner of Eileen Myles) you're going to love this book. It's actually a little scary how much of a nerve act the book is. O'Hara said "You go by your nerve." Malone took him at his word. And at hers.
Malone's poems are way more than "at least as well-written as prose"--if we're going to use Pound's acerbic and funny dictum to judge them. This poet isn't really interested in the flashier rhetorical devices. Her poetry might even seem like chopped prose if you don't realize the poet follows another Poundian dictum to the letter. I mean his even better "Dichten=condensare." "To write poetry is to condense."
Malone's poems may appear, prima facie, to be confessionalism. But that term is best reserved for confessions in poetry that don't rise to the level of great art. Her ear and her images are way too careful not to do that. If Malone has the immediacy of a poet like Bukowski, she also has a gift for making poems that condense thought and emotion as carefully as William Carlos Williams ever did with his most celebrated shorter poems. I'm speaking of those poems written early in his career, when Imagism was in full ferment and W.C.W. was such a vital part of it, if not the fulcrum.
Here is "Speak Softer Please, I Can't Hear you" by Malone in its entirety: "dismemberment arouses / me / the thought of it / happening." The poem is like a sleeve of snow laying itself on a roadway in the middle of the night when no one is around. There's no context for the statement and it makes the head spin. We don't know if the poet is the one who wants to dismember or the one wanting to be dismembered. We don't know if she's talking about murder or some dismemberment that occurs in nature, in plants, anything. We have to question why our mind goes after certain readings of the poem. The poem creates a hypnotic ambiguity reminiscent of the figure-ground problem in visual art. The poem has a sensuousness that won't orient us. In this, it's very much like W.C.W.'s plums poem or the one with his cat stepping so carefully down into that flowerpot. Or perhaps it's even more like the tiny Williams poem in which the only thing that happens is the reader learning that a bottle lies trapped and forgotten between walls.
Kendra Grant Malone does these sorts of transcendentally simple moments to perfection in so many of these poems.
The poet is often quite funny, but there's usually a shiv that comes with that humor which is going to stick you when you're not looking. This is from "Chasing Pigeons Makes Me Feel More Powerful": "metaphysically speaking / i feel very big and sturdy / like a refrigerator / yes / my metaphysical self is / a large white frigidaire."
This is a poem about power relations. She could be talking about the way art operates or the way romantic relationships work or something else entirely. The poem has enough negative capability to adjust itself to many different settings. But it's clearly about the destabilization that the feeling of unequal power engenders. And in that, it's a universal poem and every bit as interesting to me as a poem by any other master of the art form, say Szymborska.
The genius of Malone's poetry is that she realizes the child in every one of us is immortal. And immortally frightened. This tension is what keeps her poetry a high-wire act--and one I can never resist following with my mind's eye.
If you have a fondness for the "skinny poem" done to perfection (say in the manner of Eileen Myles) you're going to love this book. It's actually a little scary how much of a nerve act the book is. O'Hara said "You go by your nerve." Malone took him at his word. And at hers.
August 20, 2010
this book is my book's lover. that should tell you some things. read them both!!!!
January 27, 2011
A really strong collection of poems that are refreshingly naked and deeply felt despite the fact that they look like simple short line emo poems. Well actually, they are simple short line emo poems. But really good ones that make you want to hug someone close, or your cat. She mentioned that she used to live in Minnesota in one poem but I think she lives around New York these days. In a weird way, her poems somehow convey the jarring emotional and geographical differences between those two places.
January 29, 2011
Brave, honest, unique collection of poetry. Poetry of the anecdote, but not in vain, because the anecdote becomes trascendent. The anecdote shows the little flaws of our life, because we can all relate to them in some way or another. The anecdote helps us become stronger, fight the world, and, in the end, laugh about it and say, "well, what else can we do?". An amazing new voice.
January 26, 2011
i couldn't stop reading it. the poems make you go back into the world feeling that little bit stroger, like your big brother just looked at you angrily what he really meant was: come on, man. you can do it.
November 17, 2012
I inhaled these, like I do with most poetry books, but these were different than the poems I usually read and like. They were very real and raw, I felt like I was peering down into her apartment and spying on her life.
October 5, 2010
Most excellent poetry collection I have read recently. Raw, unabashed and written from the heart. A woman writing about the conversation being held with herself.Unafraid of admitting the fear.
October 7, 2010
Probably my favorite modern poet. Buy this. These poems are incredible.
January 28, 2011
Kendra Grant Malone is one of those poets who is honest in a way that many of us could only hope to be.
She bares it all, and never once flinches.
She bares it all, and never once flinches.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews