Book Reviews: January 2014
Decomp, Poems by Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott
Moth; or, how I came to be with you again, A Novel by Thomas Heise
The Polymers, Poems by Adam Dickinson
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Decomp
Poems by Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott
Coach House Books, October 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1552452820
$22.95; 144pp.
Reviewed by Michael Luke Benedetto
Stephen Collis and Jordan Scott’s Decomp is best approached with the unique concept that spawned the text firmly in mind. In 2009 both poets took five copies of Charles Darwin’s seminal book, On the Origin of Species, and left them in different locations in the wilderness of British Columbia. After a year of being exposed to the elements, the books were retrieved and the process documented. Decomp is comprised of equal parts photo-journal, original prose poetry by Collis and Jordan, and works of erasure created from Darwin’s deteriorated writing. But there is not often a clear delineation between these elements, which creates a surreal experience befitting the collection’s origins.
Collis described the idea behind his and Scott’s project quite well when he stated in 2009, “I’m not going to put the natural into the text, I’m going to put the text out into the natural world and see what happens to it.” However, there is a great deal of the natural world in Decomp, both in the stunning pictures and the poetry throughout. This collection’s five sections are titled after the ecological zones in which the books were left and are introduced by pictures of the texts when they were reclaimed. British Columbia’s diverse climates interact with each book in different ways, leaving each copy in a unique state of decomposition.
From Darwin’s remaining words and the experience of navigating the Canadian landscape, Collis’s and Scott’s prose poems are born, and the text’s arrangement often evokes the haphazard degradation of the source material. The language transitions from the poetic to the scientific and almost always feels disjointed. At the start of each section, a veritable poet’s log describes the journey to rediscover the abandoned text as the natural world is catalogued in sweeping detail: “From the north wind entering spruce, rung the hemisphere for common loons, lynx or hermit thrush to flirt with song and seed—crossbills cutting up cones or spores of spruce broom, rust blow, through kinnikinnick pattern” (“Selections from the Sub-boreal/Englemann Spruce Zone”).
In contrast to the poetic explorations of British Columbia’s flora and fauna, footnotes are included that range in subject from Charles Darwin’s disrespect toward printed material to accounts of those accompanying Collis and Scott on their journeys into the wilderness. In a self-reflective moment within a recurring sequence titled “GLOSS” that appears throughout the collection, we are told, “That there are no messages, no poetry after decomposition, but a minute ecological process in which we have no part but intrusion, or at best no part but the donation of raw materials for becoming dirt.” Through this contemplation, and others like it, insights into Decomps’s purpose and meaning are alluded to and begin to coalesce into the greater project surrounding the text.
While the five copies of On the Origin of Species slowly decomposed in the Canadian wilds, a pseudo-natural selection took place as pages, and the words along with them, began to dissolve amid the surrounding ecosystems. From what remained, erasure poems were created and are included in a repeating sequence throughout the book entitled “THE READABLE.” As the readable material becomes more convoluted while Decomp progresses, the line between poetry and scientific collage begins to blur, leaving the reader with an intriguing and engrossing hybrid that must be fully explored to be understood and appreciated.
Moth; or, how I came to be with you again
A Novel by Thomas Heise
Sarabande Books, July 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1936747573
$15.95; 192pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel
Thomas Heise’s mesmerizing novel shifts between lyric essay, imagined account, and litany. Although fragmented, Moth; or, how I came to be with you again remains coherent through its organization and markers for the reader (and narrator) to cling onto. Even in the preface, the narrator notes how he was diagnosed “with a strange, unclassified condition that makes my experience of time markedly different from others.” While under the influence of this condition, he wrote the original Moth in German, then translated it into English and burned the original manuscript. This is important to note due to the acts of transference that are constantly taking place within the text as it collapses and rebuilds itself through each section, trying to recollect.
While incredibly dense, Moth has smaller, distinct sections that provide date and location to help orient the reader. Taking place across Europe in Oslo, Berlin, Copenhagen, Prague, and in New York City, this compilation contains a multitude of accounts from the speaker, some of which transform into surreal moments rendered in large blocks of prose and winding sentences. Each section tries to piece together a chronology, meditating on sleep, on waking, and on walking through the world and observing. Contemplating time, the narrator recounts “Whether early into the night or late toward morning, whether the day had already passed, had turned with a half-twist clockwise or counter like a Mobius strip and begun anew to repeat itself I could not tell.” This moment of stasis and of waiting continues to permeate the text, as the speaker moves between places and time.
Consistently lyrical and filled with intense turns of phrase, the sections titled “New York City (lyric)” highlight these meandering sentences to captivate the surreal nature of the text:
These days, the intricate architecture of our past lives, the rhythm and beauty of it, the way you could walk into a stanza at midnight and surprised to find me at my desk, our home, it was an idea I grew inside of, and if asked to describe these days, what I would say would fail, as does every poem at the title.
Continuing onward, these lyrical turns of phrase captivate and pull forward. Similarly, sections interspersed throughout the various locales, titled “Recollection,” evoke a litany of “I remember.” Each fragment builds upon the last. The narrator recounts “I remember the description of the bright interior archive was torn, the understory would remain unspoken – I remember the poets year after year praising the amaryllis – I remember red was the colour of circle, red was the color of being looked at.”
Always returning to the process of memory and to remembering (or sometimes imagining), Moth leads the reader through a consciousness at once hyper aware and lost in time.
The Polymers
Poems by Adam Dickinson
House of Anansi Press, April 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1770892170
$19.95; 128pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel
Plastic is everywhere. It makes up nearly every facet of life, binding North American existence to its reliance on fast food, oil. On a thin piece of cellophane paper, Adam Dickinson lays out his manifesto for this hybrid poetry collection:
This book direct its attention to sequencing the seven principle resins that predominate in Western petroleum culture. If DNA is the digital memory of a species passed forward through time, then the social polymers of iterative behaviour, including their flammable appendices and polluting precipitates, constitute a plastic shovel with which the analogue body digs its own grave.
As much commentary on our cultural obsession with the disposable as it is a guide to how poetry can fuse structures to build upon itself, The Polymers asks the reader to make the cognitive leap from the objects of everyday existence to what lies latent within them.
The Polymers, a substantial collection, is mapped into sections according to the seven plastic types. The molecular structure of each polymer prefaces the section, and lines pointing to the structure lead to each poem title. In section “1. Polyester,” (polyethylene terephthalate), this diagram provides molecular structure, poem title, and page number to locate the poem. This intricate arrangement of form creates an interactive text between reader and poem and plastics.
While some poems make larger cognitive leaps between plastic and culture, others directly engage and coalesce disparate pop culture references and the “invention” of various plastics. In “Careering,” the lines appear stacked on top of one another, forming a ladder. In a single, careening sentence, the poem opens “After the introduction / of polyurethane // the unexpected comebacks / collapsed and today” and then continues onward, its cascading form much like the “expanding memory foam / for any change in fortune.” In tightened and condensed language, “Cups and Knives and Forks and Spoons” proliferates in objects where “the kiddy pools / are sad refrigerators, seashells / urethaned with cocktail mix” and where “…we sneak drinks / on plastic-covered furniture / in off-limits living rooms.” Here, plastic is named and it is always present.
By the seventh section, “Other,” the pages are filled with more 2D drawings, 3D molecular renderings, and blocks of prose exploring, in part essay and part line the examination of objects and the plastics they contain and how these plastics influence language. It begins with Darwin’s The Origin of the Species, which “has long been rumored to contain a specialized synthetic polymer believed to be responsible for much of the work’s seminal elasticity, bestial viscosity, and political ganglion.” While perhaps speculative in its account, this section is engaging in its exploratory nature and its elasticity of language, as the section moves from tonally scholarly prose to fragments that act as an index. In combining words with atoms, sentences with molecules, Dickinson creates his manifesto through enacting the bonds between, demonstrating the connectivity and fragility of our world.
Reviewer Bios:
Michael Luke Benedetto hails from New England but currently lives and writes in San Diego. His work has appeared in the Long River Review and The Essay Connection.
Alyse Bensel is the Book Review Editor at the Los Angeles Review. She is the author of the poetry chapbooks Shift (Plan B Press, 2012) and Not of Their Own Making (dancing girl press, forthcoming 2014). Her poetry has appeared in MAYDAY Magazine, Cold Mountain Review, Blue Earth Review, and Word Riot, among others. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas.