Traveling to Find the Way Back Home: A Review of THE FORGOTTEN WORLD by Nick Courtright

Nick Courtright’s collection The Forgotten World serves as both a travel guide, with the countries he visits indicated in each section, and a collage of connected memories. While the poet seems to invite the reader along, the persona in the poems is a solitary figure, even when a lover or fellow travelers inhabit the poems. What ties the poems together is a sense of alienation. The collection opens with a call to prayer the speaker cannot answer in “Facing Mecca,” juxtaposing images of Walmart and test scores—first world concerns—with dirhams, cobras, and niqabs.

In the first section, titled “Forgotten,” (like the other two divisions of the book), the speaker acknowledges feeling out of place, noting in “I Cannot Enter the Mosque”:

When irreligious
you can only go some places,

like bars, or houses, or heaven.
But I can’t go here . . .

Whether in Morocco, Ecuador, Paris or London, the speaker finds himself in mosques, chapels and cathedrals, never places of comfort for him. Likewise, the focus on the culture and the history of each place visited seems to highlight guilt as “a spoiled American / who is a voyeur on the. heritage of those / who have heritage. . . .”

Courtright chronicles the time “Before Falling Out of Love,” telling his lover:

I couldn’t really make sense
of my happiness . . .

. . . You were there
and I couldn’t make sense of it.

Through the poem, though, he moves from his incredulity at “fucking in Africa” amid warthogs and zebras to his ironic observation, “Eventually I’ll be back / in my bed in America after having / set my family on fire…” Courtright follows with “Falling Out of Love,” bearing images of a house afire, a setting in stark contrast to Africa:

The flame moves in on the house this weekend,
the clever box and its faux wood flooring
and whitewash cabinets, too many white
cabinets, the flame moving in and through,

the flame brandishing its sad ancient dance
of romance and boyish extravagance . . .

The former lover—the you, half of we—has barely a presence.

Courtright also invokes the presence of artists and writers in the places he travels. In “Frida Kahlo Atop the Pyramid of the Sun,” he finds himself thinking of the artist, finding himself “a spy in her bedroom” as he sees “the dresses she wore, / the mirrors in which she became real.”

In “American Idiot,” the speaker, feeling out of place in South America, recalls Orwell’s autobiographical short story “Shooting an Elephant” in which he finally understands Orwell’s observation “that a colonist is always in a battle / not to be laughed at.” He notes that “the role of every white man in this world / is to shut up and take it / because so much of this bed you for yourself have made.”

The second section, set across Europe and Asia, opens with “Airplane to Bangkok,” on an overseas flight, the characters in the in-flight movie as real as the flight attendant, “Thirty years older and thirty for popularity” or the “aggressively elderly woman . . . / [who] did not smile at me when I smiled at her / Her fingers . . . twisted like the branches of desert trees . . .”

Some of the poems examine the seeming absurdity of sights he witnesses, the poverty and stacks of skulls in “Inside Everyone is a Skull,” as well as the repeated image of “A monkey [pulling] over the rope railing protecting a priceless / work of stone-carved temple art.”

Others are set in the artificial world of opulent airports, images of wealth and privilege that weigh on this lone traveler. In “Inside Everyone is a Wallet,” he finds himself in ‘The United Lounge for the wealthy and privileged.” He observes:

It’s difficult to decline such opportunity

As if that opulence weren’t enough to make anyone feel
awful 

There’s an elevator with golden sheen going up to a room
reserved for the Global First Class.

Ill at ease, the speaker continues to find himself in places of worship, considering transubstantiation and confession, the sacred and profane. He finds himself weeping, “God, please help me” in “the prayer-only section” of Notre Dame in “Happy New Year” or in Westminster Abbey, confessing to the reader, “I took the holy sacrament without belief” in “Insanity.”

Throughout this leg of the virtual tour through The Forgotten World, the poems conjure disparate images of literary figures. In Prague, he evokes images of “Good Kind Wenceslas”:

. . . boots in the snow,
like two bird in the snow,
striding with purpose
toward his aim, on the day-
of the feast of Stephen.”

The imaged conjured causes the speaker to “tear up / in an all-you-can-eat all-you-can / drink buffet in Budapest,” until he considers the king’s page, along on the wintry journey “with no agency.”

He imagines “Dracula’s Last Day,” as an anachronism, as he “gets up and responds to some emails, / texts a girl or two he’s been after,” ending the poem with a woman “stake in hand” knocking at his door.

In the final section of the collection, Courtright returns to the United States. The poems still echo with travel images but focus more on the domestic—fathers, mothers, and sons. Both as  son and as father of sons, the speaker bears the guilt of not loving his mother enough, not knowing how to offer his father consolation.

In “My Mother Shaving Her Legs,” he observes, “In time all children are disappointments . . . because they don’t love back the way they should.” Then he turns the tables, addressing his son in with images from his own travels in “Oblique Letter to Young Son as He Confronts Adolescent Loneliness for the First Time”:

When the water is all around you
you know you are the land, son.
. . . .
But
let’s not be bleak; you, son,

are the land, the firmament
filled with surprise. . .

Though the collection moves from travels abroad back to home, in the final section, Courtright draws on the motif of travel to unify this body of work. In “Apples,” he writes, “To travel the world is one thing / and to travel the mind / is the same thing” before declaring, “The time to wander prodigal / may be over but I’ll wonder / where wandering led.”

As Courtright concludes the third section of The Forgotten World, back in America, his readers are faced with timely cultural references as the poet unpacks the experiences, images, and conflicted feelings from his journey, until at last, in “We Can’t Leave the House,” the speaker finds himself with his children in the bubble that is home, “wait[ing] out the virus” with time to come to terms with who he is, who we are.

Permission to Hope: Every Living Species by Erin Stalcup

Erin Stalcup’s Every Living Species was included in “What to Read When it’s been a Hell of a Year” in The Rumpus as a book that “might set a fountain of radical hope a-burble inside you.” And yet, when I began reading the book it had been so long since I felt hopeful that I couldn’t quite bring myself to believe the radical hope fountain within me could even be found, let alone set to bubbling. I’m pleased to say I was wrong. Somehow, while reading this book, my hope fountain flourished and even burbled—radical and glorious (and quite possibly purple).

The narrative weaves the voices and stories of various perspectives involved in the creation and visitation of the Birds of the World Timed Birding Contest exhibition brought to us by Canon and Cabela’s—a domed enclosure manufactured to hold every species of bird in the world. The perspectives in the book were wonderfully diverse, even including a chapter exploring the point of view of a rebel-spirited bird, brilliantly enough. The novel focuses mainly on the narratives of Arrow and Ivan Ríos. Arrow, a purple-haired young woman from Flagstaff, Arizona is participating in the birding contest with her father, while Ivan Ríos, creator of a Hitchcockian-ish film involving the rise of zombie Passenger Pigeons is participating with fashion designer Alistair Askgold.

Arrow’s story, in particular, captured my attention as she struggled with the loss of much of her family land after a fire and the realization she is pregnant during a time when her child will likely have to contend with extreme environmental catastrophe such as the end of the planet’s viability to support human life. However, while Arrow’s story resonated most deeply, the thoughtful depiction of diverse perspectives interspersed throughout the novel widened the scope of the story as these voices combined to give understanding, compassion, space, love, and respect to every living species—bird, bush, tree, and human being.

I gravitated toward Arrow more than the other characters in the book simply because we had more in common. Like Arrow, I began the novel in a space of hopelessness, unsure of my place in the world. In many ways, Arrow is nothing like me, but the way she goes about describing the world she lives in, the attention to detail she pays, and the absolute wonder she finds in the flora and fauna of the world reminded me of the wonder of my childhood. Arrow pays attention to what’s around her. She loves the land she grew up on with a fierceness that is difficult to match, though I certainly hope that I might rise to the occasion. I could taste, touch, and especially smell the world Stalcup rendered. I was transported back to a childhood spent with the places and plants Arrow describes. Places I mapped as a barefoot child running about the forests of the Rocky Mountains and the low desert of Arizona. I felt as if I were at home while I read, though I could also never forget neither Arrow nor I were really in a natural space. Instead, we were in a giant dome full of fake sky. Still, when Arrow pressed her nose against the trunk of a ponderosa pine to inhale vanilla, butterscotch, caramel, cupcake, or sugar cookie, I could feel the rough reddish bark scrape the skin of nostrils. I could feel the ache in my lungs as I chased my grandmother along the dirt road of her neighborhood street lined in ponderosas. And then, just as quickly, I was in the desert I grew up in, hunting for birds or anything else I might find, avoiding fallen cactus bits that might spike my bare toes. Though when I read the book, I was sitting on a futon in Ohio, I could still feel the slender waxy crush of creosote between two fingers, transferring the scent of rain onto my fingerprints.

Hope is the not the emotion I expected when finishing this book, but it came anyhow. As the characters in this book chose love, as Arrow chose hope, I found myself thinking I could join them. I could choose. I have a choice. When I put down this book, for the first time in a while, I felt I was being given permission to make a hopeful choice, even if that choice was simply allowing myself to feel hopeful in the midst of environmental strife and climate change. I am reminded of a quote from Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks: “Language is fundamental to the possibility of re-wonderment, for language does not just register experience, it produces it.” This novel is absolutely an experience of re-wonderment. Stalcup has intertwined political concerns with stunning descriptions of setting, diverse characters, powerful voice, and her own sense of wonder to tell a story that is bold, beautiful, and above all hopeful. I am left with a sense that even amidst our own fraught climate we may yet manage to make this world as beautiful as we hope it could be.

In Slot's New Book, Poetry Becomes Both An Homage To Tradition And An Intervention

Andrea Witzke Slot’s finely crafted first book echoes with the voices of writers past and present.  H.D., David Baker, and John Keats are only a few of the poets whose work informs this refreshingly well-read debut. With that in mind, Slot’s poems raise compelling questions about the role of the individual in an established literary tradition:  If poetry is a conversation, how does one define originality? Does it exist only as variation, refinement of what’s been written before? To what extent does homage blur into destruction? As Slot teases out possible answers, her haunted and haunting poems allow myriad literary influences to coexist gracefully in the same narrative space.

Slot’s treatment of her Modernist predecessors proves to be especially fascinating as the book unfolds. Frequently drawing attention to female figures whose work has escaped the widespread recognition seen by such male writers as Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, and James Joyce, Slot suggests that poetry may redirect the focus of our discussions of literary tradition. In many ways, poetry affords the opportunity to revise the cannon, redefining its terms to suit a changing cultural landscape. In Slot’s new book, poetry becomes both an homage to tradition and an intervention. It is this blend of reverence and destruction that makes her work so intriguing. Consider “Hawks Nest, St. John, USVI,”

The hills tongue their way to sea
as if the sea begs the land to slide
into its waiting, open mouth.
The slick blue mirror
is deceiving… (13)

Here Slot appropriates numerous tropes of Imagist poetry. The poetic image becomes a point of entry to complex philosophical and emotional questions, which it is the reader’s job to unravel. In many ways, the structure of the book is especially significant. By prefacing this poem with a line from H.D.’s “Sea Gods,” and placing this piece at the front of the collection, Slot jostles the hierarchies that have been imposed upon the literary cannon. Likewise, the placement of the stylistic tropes associated with Imagism at the forefront of the collection suggests their largely overlooked influence on contemporary poetry.

With that said, Slot’s use of epigraphs to comment on prevailing interpretations of the cannon is equally impressive. Frequently excavating overlooked gems—a phrase, an image, a metaphor—Slot cautions us against becoming entangled in the sweeping manifestoes and ambitious claims that populate literary history. Rather, she highlights the value of the smallest, but often most dazzling, accomplishments of her predecessors. It is these modest masterpieces that provide some of the most valuable material for contemporary poets. She writes in “Ode to a Bear:  Part I,”

That night we slept curled in one sleeping bag.
I dreamt of Ben, saw Boon’s knife slash his throat.
Lion was ripped to shreds.  But in this dream
the bear did not die; he moved to the forest’s edge
and turned to stare with yellowed eyes.  In fear,
I clung to you—and realized why you brought me here. (17)

Prefaced by a quotation from Faulkner, this poem is fascinating in that it presents the landscapes of his novels through the eyes of a female protagonist. The epigraph is effective in situating the poem within an existing literary tradition, which the text proceeds to revise, adapting Faulkner’s aesthetic to a rapidly shifting social terrain. Slot’s epigraphs frequently exist at the intersection of homage and revision. But this is what makes her work so fascinating. She envisions literary tradition as being constantly in flux, a work in progress that is always subject to revision.

For Slot, the past does not limit us, but rather, serves as the starting point for one’s own contribution to an artistic conversation. Appropriation, reinvention, and dialogue afford exciting possibilities, which are not available to those working outside of an established literary tradition. It is her liberal approach to this received source material that renders her work so rich from an interpretational standpoint. With that in mind, the poems in this collection lend themselves to careful attention, and reward re-reading. To find a new beauty is a book that’s as well-read as it is engaging. This is a wonderful debut from a talented poet.

Seven Days: A Review of Nick Courtright's Let There Be Light

Mourning lost divinity is hard to tire of. Repetition only demonstrates its relevance. Thus the chiaroscuro longing of “Assomption de la Vierge,” sets a fitting mood for a book that starts in the modern moment and traces back through cosmo-biblical time.

The Virgin Mary has left the frame of Earth. Rapacious hands remain. Granted, the Virgin is not the Godhead. She is the goose that laid the golden egg. There are other egg-layings in this book. Beings emerge into the now, as if laying their own eggs, chrysalis-like, but with a mathematical stop-animation immediacy, as the time-step goes to zero. An egret begets itself from one moment to the next. We are asked to ponder its ontology through the infinite parcels of time.

In his latest book, Let There Be Light, Nick Courtright takes the time step beyond zero, going into negative intervals. This narrative traces back through 14 billion years and 7 biblical days in a varied collection of verse, discussing the death of stray cats, lyrical bridge crossings, cosmic background radiation, animal hunger, and the like.

Some stylistic choices provide obstacles in that path: endings are often unsatisfactory and ellipses are serially inserted. But these frustrations withstanding, the body of work provides a compelling meditation on the inflorescence of time and the senescent circumstances of modernity, in a cosmo-eco-biblical fullness found few places in verse.

Particularly satisfying are the lyrical modes pushing out against the time-conscious themes of this book. For example, the flagship poem “The Big Bang”, features “a finch making its sound from inside of joy,” an occurrence which only arises after the quanta of days, hours, seconds, weeks have been abandoned. “I thought, this, a day, is not a fraction I have to recognize / … nor the other products of separation.” The tweeting is brief, and its sound is enveloped by the surrounding rush of time, as if a wind. But still, it fights against that wind.

This is what good poems do, like finches: they expand the realm of the now, pushing out against the flow of time. Courtright does that in a poem about departure:

I walk through the front door, and you say
One day you will wake to find yourself finished.

I walk through the front door. Look at the time,
you say. Look at the time.

Your bags and my thousand flaming trees are full.
Hills fall over each other, rumpling their outfits.

“Look at the time” works ironically: the season and this relationship are late in their course, yes, but the moment commands more than its allotted span of minutes. In that sense, “Look at the time” says: I’d rather not talk to you anymore. Departures such as this become a part of the eternal present-moment for the grieving remnant. In this way, endings in this book can serve as fundamental lyric: when a sequence is cut short, it enters into a timelessness where all the preceding events are enshrined.

But the lyric that holds most prominence in this book occurs at the beginning of time. It is the ineffable presence of super-compressed proto-matter that exists before the big bang. This reservoir, immune to time’s arrow, mirrors a pre-expulsion Eden, mirrors the first day of a child’s life where everything is new, mirrors and presages every other lyric which pauses in the present while future potencies bide their time.

This Edenic lyric persists in fragments: angelic egrets stand guard as symbol and flag; a traveler pauses mid-bridge and sings reassurance to herself; riparian thought abides in black-faced gulls and barges that “pour their enormous stomachs across the river.” Time still flows in these echo-lyrics, but at a pace that suggests infinitude and continuity with all previous moments. It is worth dwelling in such moments, and Courtright’s incessant reminder of time’s cruelty empowers us to do just that.

The scientific perspective is key to knowing such cruelty, and Courtright uses it efficiently for that purpose. In a poem titled “Intelligent Design,” Courtright maps the age of the Universe against the metric of human existence. In “Lost on Planet Earth,” Earthworms move the terrain beneath our feet, making it suddenly new and alien when we look down again. This is what Courtright calls us to do repeatedly: to look down at the Earth that has changed and ask, “Is this okay?”  instead of “and God saw that it was good.”

Consider, in turn, the romantic longing that the cosmic in this collection provokes. In “The Deep,” the faint electromagnetic hum from the big bang – i.e. cosmic background radiation – is presented as “a phone ring[ing] unanswered into the vast universe.”

“Please, please eternity, leave your message –” the speaker pleads.

In this despair, Courtright’s own plea for the lyric rings out in the space of this collection. It is a thrilling meditation on the form, one which presents many sounds of the immutable and the corrupted.

He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

I have been trying to write a book review of this X Marks the Dress: A Registry for months. I’ve been nervous about writing this book review. This is a complicated book, intentionally and fruitfully complicated, but rewarding. It’s an incredible mash-up of voices, perspectives, forms.

Kristina Marie Darling and Carol Guess have written a book and written a book and written a book. What I mean is, they are getting at the problematic idea of marriage in a variety of ways. The poems are written from varying perspectives, and later include footnotes and then erasures that serve to render the former poems skewed and different. All of this accumulates into what feels like more than one book. Though compact it is certainly a multitude of voices. Marriage isn’t one thing. It isn’t just that.

In Appendix C an earlier poem is almost entirely erased to leave the remaining words:

I can’t decide between/ a candy bride/ a glass cabinet

And neither can the reader. I don’t want to decide. I want to hold all of this book in my  head at once, but I can’t. I want all the contradictions and restatements. I want to understand it all as a truth, because the truth is varied and layered.

Reading this book felt like a kind of game. I flipped between the poems and their erasures to see what actually got erased. What were these words’ original contexts? On page eighty-one, the only words left behind are “I was stolen.” From what, I wondered? I flipped to page seventeen to find its original context. “On Wednesdays she says I was stolen, not birthed. On Thursday, no talking. Weekends are for orphans. I’m so many men in the back of a cab. Husband or lover? Plastic or paper? Sometimes I’m a woman, too…” But if I flip back to the near empty page containing only the words “I was stolen,” I find a different narrative is created. The words lead right into the next page, which reads, “stashed between/my mother/clawing.” I spent a lot of time flipping back and forth between the sections, thinking about the words on their own and in the different contexts this book creates for them.

This book made me think about marriage, about how easily I have accepted its conventions. I’m not married, but it looms as this standard that I haven’t often questioned. It simply is. It is an absolute. It possesses authority. Marriage is and no one can stop it. But that’s not true. I think Darling and Guess are doing important work to look at marriage, what it is, how it’s perceived, what’s wrong with it, what it’s doing to everyone, and the dangers inherent in these assumptions.

We get a lot of information from the footnoted sections, which are footnotes to blank pages. I imagine them as instructions for reading this book. A section of footnote five reads, “The autobiographical novel depicts a heroine’s pursuit of an alternative to marriage, particularly the social conventions governing the ceremony itself.” This points at the book, points at marriage and the idea of a marriage as the standard.

Marriage feels like a kind of intrusion, a thing forcing itself into the picture. My favorite poem in the book is Pizza:

How odd, I said, that a stranger ended up in so many of our photos. He’s even in the photos we took at home. Look, I said, he’s petting our dog. He’s cutting our cake. He’s hugging your mom.

Look. Here’s marriage. It’s in the home. It’s in my head. I didn’t even notice it before. This complicated book with its erasures and footnotes to blank pages and quickly changing perspectives demands a close read and a good deal of thought. As a reader, we are forced to involve ourselves in the work of the text. We’re doing more than simply reading and are therein implicated, held responsible. This isn’t a book to read and put on the shelf and never think of again. This is a book to be read carefully again and again, to be talked about and then leant to friends.

*

Carol Guess is an American novelist and poet. Her books Femme’s Dictionary and Gaslight were nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. Switch was a finalist for the American Library Association’s Stonewall Book Award.

One Can Feel His Presence and Hear His Voice: On Kathleen Rooney's Robinson Alone

In 1955, Weldon Kees — poet, filmmaker, musician, and artist — disappeared. His car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge. Kees’ body has yet to be found, but one can still feel his presence and hear his voice in Robinson Alone, a novel-in-poems written by Kathleen Rooney.

Rooney spent ten years working on the collection, as evidenced by its historical and biographical detail. Interspersed are snippets of poems, letters, and popular advertisement jingles:

A peach looks good

                                                            with lots

                                                of fuzz

                                    but man’s no peach

                        and never was

            Burma Shave

However, equally impressive is the collection’s skillful musicality and the complete picture Rooney paints of Robinson’s complex and contradictory interior life: his desperation to leave the Midwest and his disillusioned view of the city; his love for his wife and his growing frustration with her drinking; his haunting despair and his nagging dream of escaping into a bright new life:

Aware that to be a functional human being means
to deny death, but having lately suffered a loss

of interest in that fact, Robinson has taken to staying
inside — curtains drawn, phone off the hook.

Who was Robinson really? And whatever has become of him? In this collection, Rooney provides proof that “poetry” and “page-turner” can mutually exist, and that the best books don’t “set the score straight.”

They set our unanswerable questions to music.