Book Review: The Year of the Rooster by Noah Eli Gordon

The Year of the Rooster
Poems by Noah Eli Gordon
Ahsahta Press, May 2013
ISBN-13: 978-1934103401
$18; 144pp.
Reviewed by Alyse Bensel

Noah Eli Gordon takes the epic narrative and runs with it in through sinuous, winding, and oftentimes self-deprecating poetry. Embodied in engaging and shifting persona, Gordon’s variegated collection The Year of the Rooster interrogates meaning through an oftentimes seemingly nonsensical yet vibrant and ever-oscillating language. Bookended by two sections of compacted individual poems that serve as a few short breaks from the collection’s two significant call and response poems, “The Year of the Rooster” and “The Next Year: Did you Drop This Word,” the entire collection coheres together through the sheer strength and drive of its narrative voice. Readers can appreciate the ease of off-kilter juxtaposition and continuously shifting and changing forms this collection possesses to carry both sustained and shortened explorations in language.

With descriptive and long-winded titles, the collection’s shorter poems investigate the so-called inherent logic within the poem as machine, such as in “Obliterating History in the Pleasure of Holding Forth,” where the speaker tracks the movement of how “Whorled, lance-shaped leaves smear / the window. Windy instrument, windy agency. Active principles everywhere // changing inertia.” Steeped in a mixture of swirling and transient bodies, these abstract and yet highly specific images continue to simultaneously coalesce and break apart. “The Glue Holds the Gutters In. The Rhetoric’s Loose-Leaf Apprentice.” begins “Cracks in the oracular self I’m splitting open, splicing states of conscious- / ness onto what? Locomotive sound wings?” This forced grafting of the wings onto locomotive and the “oracular self” pushes boundaries in how the reader visualizes these carefully pasted together assemblages. Taken in their entirety, these shorter poems, while tonally more condense, fit into the larger exploration of the two centerpiece poems, where Gordon skillfully sustains shifting speakers and forms for dozens of pages.

In the title poem, Roo (the rooster) enacts a performance into language. Constantly questioning and mocking, Roo considers the “Bantam hypothesis: history’s gone a half step into human verbs // Gutted architecture, global compliance” even though “It’s easy to erase him / tending landscapes a rusting battery accentuates // A smidge of ambition” even as the narrator claims “I prefer boredom & its subtle filigree / working the ceiling into something memorable.” This poem consistently stays in motion but rapidly changes pace, a key asset to this collection. Less important than Roo and the shifting “I” within the poem is the ability to constantly enact language through the blending of narrative voices. A commentary of the process of creating itself, of being unsure but still pushing forward, fills the fragmentary lines and deft use of space throughout. This always seems to be the poetic project, which Gordon has attempted to capture through these poems that always continue long after the final line.

Alyse Bensel is the Book Review Editor at The Los Angeles Review and Co-Editor of Beecher’s. 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 recently appeared in Cold Mountain Review, Blue Earth Review, Ruminate, and The Fourth River, among others. She is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas.