Love and Rejection In An Era of Cocksucking and Gmail: Ariana Reines's Coeur de Lion

There is a fine line drawn between the intimate thoughts shared by a writer in their poetry and what the civil courts could determine to be “libel.” The balance between the type of raw, personal language that emotions like love and heartbreak demand and one that may effectuate a universal experience with which the reader can and will identify is intricate. If ever there were a book that teetered precariously (and perfectly) on that line, it would be Ariana Reines’ Coeur de Lion.

Coeur de Lion is a detailed account of the range of feelings involved in falling out of love. Composed of a series of segmented reflections written almost entirely in second person – addressed directly to Jake, the narrator’s former object of affection – Coeur de Lionweaves seamlessly between an utterly personal narration of this love and a more objective examination of the writing process itself.

At its most seemingly candid, it is the ramblings of a madwoman hacking into Gmail accounts, describing various sexual encounters with blunt force, recounting run-ins with mutual friends and whining about old habits that annoyed her; countering this are meditations on what the narrator desires, the nature of being a woman, the schism between “you” (her former lover) and “you” (the reader of the text – quite certainly a different person than the first “you”) and running allusions to famous works of literature and art, the motifs that grant Ariana an understanding of her own relationship.

Early in the book this delicate balance begins to display itself quite clearly. At one moment the narrator actively questions who the “you” she is addressing in her poems truly is:

I thought about you and how scary it is

The way you keep your distance

And I thought about the cherishing feeling

I sometimes have for you.

Thinking about a person.  Surely

That act releases something

Into the atmosphere.  A toxin?

Now that I am not addressing you

But the “you” of poetry

I am probably doing something horrible and destructive.

But this “I” is the I of poetry

And it should be able to do more than I can do.

In simple discourse like this, what was between Ariana and Jake instantly becomes a deeper reflection on the nature of the love poem and the disparity between the poetic “I” or “you” and the referents that these pronouns are supposed to be signifying. Moments later the text returns to a sexual encounter in Venice.  Here the narration turns back to the intimate experiences unique to Ariana and Jake:

You fucked me

You came somewhere on me

I had a painful zit on my upper lip

And we were covered in dust

Constantly, Ariana speaks so bluntly about her relationship that she seems to trivialize it. The effect is that, at times, she is trivializing Jake as well. That is why, at its most malicious, people could interpret the collection as libelous, an ill-willed revelation of just how awful Jake is, or at the very least an attempt to perturb him over his shortcomings and warn other women. But I think the intellectuality and those moments of uncertain introspection lend themselves to a better understanding of Coeur de Lion as a poet’s catharsis, wherein the narrator was able to exorcise her feelings for this boy through writing about them. Furthermore, Ariana’s concern is not centered on destroying Jake, but lending a voice to those who cannot express so poignantly the wrongs they have suffered.  That is, after all, the poet’s job.

This is why that poetic “I” could inflict much more pain and damage than the real “I,” for the narrator speaks not just for Ariana, but also for every wronged woman, mistreated and marginalized for love.

Any review of Coeur de Lion would not be complete without further mention of its unabashed contemporariness. The theme of love in modern society runs prevalent, as Gmail espionage plays a central role and we barely reach page three before we hear about jpeg’s of other women. Reines uses this unambiguously modern setting to examine the role of women in an era where they are supposedly equal to men. Early on Reines speaks of being the “Gallery Girl” and what that entails: being interested in proximity to rich artists and buyers, or “acting pretty and disdainful,” despite being neither of those things.

In another poem, she compares her own writing to that of the medieval chivalric genre:

All that medieval love poetry

With its military metaphors

The woman as the fortress

The errancies of gallant knights.

Maybe long ago things were too

Too solid, and now we live in an ether

Of ex-sentiments, impossible

To make sense of. . .

This scrutiny of what it means to be a woman today and how a woman may be strong without coming of as “petty” or a “bitch” is essential to legitimizing Ariana’s right to defiantly publicize her and Jake’s intimacies in the first place. After all, some readers might see her as a madwoman for hacking Gmail, or a slut for fucking on a sidewalk in Venice, but this realness makes the text unquestionably relatable to the contemporary reader. Poems about love and failed relationships are not a new thing, but there is something about Ariana’s syntax and word choice, her blend of metaphysical reflection and sex without condoms, of words that are Greek to the contemporary reader and everyday swear words (“perfidy” and “cocksucking” need no distance between them in this epic), that makes Coeur de Lion impossible to shake off.

Its unique exploration of writing, romance and gender roles make Coeur de Lion an essential read. While the original Mal-O-Mar edition was out of print for a while, Fence Book’s newly edited version is out now, so there is no excuse to not have this in your library.

Searching For Burlee: A Review of Burlee Vang's The Dead I Know

I should tell you, I know Burlee Vang. However, it’s been a long time since we’ve spoken or even been within a glance. So I should say, I knew Burlee Vang, because of that slight technicality and because it feels okay to talk about him in the past — that’s how we talk about people who are important.

I should also tell you that I’m not writing this recommendation because I knew him. Actually, here I write about a Burlee Vang that I didn’t even know — Burlee Vang the poet. I never met this part of him. For half a year, we were in the same fiction workshop. I caught glimpses of his poetry in his prose, but it wasn’t until this, The Dead I Know: Incantation for Rebirth, that I held poems of his.

The Burlee Vang that I did know and I didn’t talk much. I didn’t know him the way most people can say of their friends. Didn’t know where he lived. Didn’t have his phone number. Didn’t know his wife. Didn’t know the things that upset him (I never even saw him upset). But I did know his favorite writers and that we liked the same ones — their pains and their ability to love despite it, perhaps because of it — and that was enough to begin a friendship, the kind that had small and few conversations, like poems actually, that briefly say a lot.

He was a serious writer, more than anyone I knew, so after our short conversations I imagined him running to the house I didn’t know, and writing with the things I did know — a spiral notebook that he folded like a newspaper under an arm, and a Bic. Still, I wondered if I had been right. Had he gone into a room to write all day? Had he committed every minute of his day to writing? Was he having the same problems that I was experiencing — loneliness, frustration? Those were things I always wondered, and still do, so I read this book of poems like answers. As if this Burlee, the poet, was telling me about the other.

In his poem, “Eating Without the Poet,” I found a possible answer to my previous questions. The wife of a poet calls her husband to dinner, pleading with him to join his family. “Again, husband: how many hours have you/ spent with your poems? Come sit beside us now./ Look, the sun is bleeding outside our kitchen. . . .” The husband responds, “Still too much beauty to speak of . . .” And she replies, “Do you know that letting go is a kind of beauty?”

But I still don’t know. Was he the poet missing from the table? Was he searching for peace through his writing? Did he refuse to eat in an unsettled state? Why did he write? In his ars poetica, I hear him say, “Maybe because I’m dying,” and “Perhaps I desire too much/ the things I’ll never have/ Or the things I’ve lost.”

I had these questions for Burlee because the prose of his that I read during our workshop gave me the feeling that we had the same blues — diaspora blues. Mine, the Mexican-American blues. His, the Hmong-American blues. Now I know that I probably didn’t see much of him because he was putting this book together — writing his blues into songs. In these poems, Burlee Vang welcomes us into a pain he has kept honest while crafting for us to enter and walk away with truth and history without suffering its consequences (the way the people in his poems have). We will not know what it feels like to be a Hmong man living in hiding, shot when searching for food, and then begging to be carried by the living things in the river where he lays half-dead. We won’t know what it’s like for a Hmong woman and her son to leave a war-torn country, only to enter a new kind of battle and struggle in the U.S. We won’t know what it is like to be a poet writing about an ongoing war while his brother dies in that war. But we do exit hurting differently — a pain that comes with understanding a truth, a secret, kept away from us as is the story of the Hmong.

The last time I saw Burlee was in our English department’s hallway. We knew it would likely be the last time we saw each other, so we stopped to exchange our final words. I can’t tell you what we said to each other. I’ve tried to remember but can only recall some words. I can tell you that after reading this book, I now put lines of his poems into the missing dialogue of that memory. When I enter that last conversation in my mind, I tell him of my sadness, how I feel like I die as I see my aging parents fade with their work, and he says, “spread your shadow as if in flight.” When I tell him about my writing and the sacrifices I’m making make for it, he understands, and says, “I’ve told the dead to let me sleep—/ they can talk forever.”

This is a book for everyone searching for answers. The answers are here.

Submission Is the Only Window: On Amy King's I Want To Make You Safe

Amy King’s I Want To Make You Safe is densely packed with “the songs of undiscovered tribes” extant by way of versions of an urban feminist tonguing. Led by a brand of narrative that is not traditional at all, these poems are “an eye to cancel [a] planet’s core out.”

In this book I experienced pleasant dislocations. A slow suddenness wherein what had previously been my own light was replaced (not squelched or snuffed out but strategically altered).  This happened by way of the quality of the language (rich with shock and jolt regarding sound: (“this immersion has made me a model / for your captivity digest, a cavity” and “she used to dive the veins / for other steeds closer to the bone” and “milk is a mythical moth” and “scream on fire, sirened).

The sound in these poems interacted with their content (“submission is the only window” and “the grief of winter without seed” and “I cry/ to remember what I saw” and “the destiny you choose is the one you live through” and “to torment your undone sin”) in ways that created in me a very specific sense of non-ease. Non-ease was existent in me because — how am I to integrate this manifold confession? There are so many inclusions (“are we still talking to the same god”) that I would argue are certainly necessary) and so many diversions in these poems (“I don’t want to hide my wine” [. . .] “the wine from which we drink free will” [. . .] “please reattach the orifice if / I’m ever to hold your love”). Gorgeous diversions to fill the space as I try to reach to meet this work and then to divulge.

How best to divulge from something so gorgeously divergent?

This sense of non-ease that I describe above made me vulnerable, which made me able to be swept up and carried off by King’s own core declarative (“I want to make you safe”). I am saying that it is precisely the destabilizations that occurred in this book, that made me vulnerable enough to need to be made safe again — and I let this happen because “to give yourself always keeps / yourself still.”

In this way there is deep alchemy! Alchemy by agency.

Next I have to admit a pleasant exhaustion in reading these poems. This does not surprise me post contact with King’s other books: Slaves to Do These Things, Antidotes for an Alibi, I’m The Man Who Loves You (and other chapbooks). In King’s work I generally find myself being consumed by a vast and incremental longing that is rooted in examinations that are current, and I find that that longing presents itself in such beautiful curves of language (“follow stigmata for dust” [. . .]“we have always been the first fruit and the first to rot”).

Stasis is impossible in King’s I Want To Make You Safe. In this book there were so many figures (Natalie Portman, Oedipus, Tim Modotti, God/s, Roman Jakobson, Mahler, Popeye, Ossian) and pledges (David Wojnarowicz) and presences and pronouns. In fact, there felt to me like an extreme importance of pronouns as bridges throughout the poems (“you think I am she. She is you and everyone who adjusts too well” [. . .]“here am I / is he” [. . .] “how much we want we”). Yes, truly, a system of wes conducted my read of this juicy and taxing book!

The poems also rubbed me as feminist via their obsessions with women and women speaking and the vulnerabilities of gender positions and what is taken during the performance of those (“I miss my DNA” [. . .] “I practice identity” [. . .] “I am that love you light yourself with / and my gender is powerless in this”). But regarding this aspect I saw King’s poems’ interests in the large spectrum of woman, not only (though certainly not excluding) in fringe communities where women fuck women. I sense these poems have obsession with “a branch [that takes] root/ and gulp[s] the sleeve of the planet in signature orgasm / Eve.”

The poems in I Want To Make You Safe felt to me like anything could exist in them, and though that is true they did not feel like poems of surplus or excess or even secretion. They felt very whittled and scripted by way of the correlation that I have mentioned throughout this review — the precise correlation between sound and content. I almost hear some spoken word in these poems and this makes a longing in me to hear them performed. I wonder if King has ever considered making a CD of this inherent amass and awash?

Like Sirens Singing, Waiting To Wreck You On The Rocks Of Their Sisters: A Review of Kat Dixon's Don't Go Fish

Sometimes you read something and you enjoy it. Sometimes you read something and fall in love and know, know, that it’s only the beginning. That’s the experience I had when reading Kat Dixon’s chapbook, Don’t Go Fish. I had read her e-book, Kississippi, and was hooked, but if that was just a taste, Don’t Go Fish was a few good bites.

It’s not easy to describe Dixon’s poetry. I’ve read my share of poetry, over a range of schools and styles, and while her work shows influences, schools of verse, etc., she writes in a way uniquely her own. And it seems so effortless, you can only imagine this woman was born with her voice intact. Her poetry isn’t confessional, per se, but each line feels personal, intimate. As if she’s whispering to you in a language she made up and gave you the only decoder ring for.

And she has such a way of drawing you in. Her first lines are like sirens singing, waiting to wreck you on the rocks of their sisters. Take these first lines for example:

“This is how we sleep in black and white.” (from “scales”)

“It is most surreal when everyone is naked under their gowns” (from “wake them up! I am lovely”)

“I will carry you by your ribcage” (from “after rain on my cartography”)

To be honest it is rare, increasingly so, that I read something that makes me ache with the desire to write. And that is what Don’t Go Fish (and Kat Dixon’s poetry on the whole) does for me. I can think of no better endorsement. I’ve been saying it for over a year, but if you haven’t read Dixon’s poetry yet, you need to do yourself a favor. Before you know it she’ll take the poetry world by storm. The few good bites provided by Don’t Go Fish will be duly rewarded as you continue to read Dixon’s poetry.

Drawn Toward the Portal of the Mirror: A Review of j/j hastain's Verges & Vivisections

For a minute or two in the late 1990s/early 2000s, I played Myst and its first sequel, Riven. I loved the way the games allowed me to closely explore the world on the screen, down to what was then an unheard-of degree of detail. To be honest, I spent more time putting my virtual nose against the pixel-shine of various digital game gewgaws than I did in actually trying to solve the puzzles and complete the games. For me, the point of playing was to prolong the immersive experience as long as I could; completing the game would mean . . . well, it would mean it was over!

Maybe that’s why I enjoy viewing (and making) visual poetry so much. Because visual poetry operates on more than one sensory level, it too can provide an experience of total immersion, in a way that video cannot. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not anti-video (I make video poems myself). But video perpetuates a sort of techno-tyranny, through the device-dependency of its medium and the limited opportunities for viewers to actively influence their own experience of the poem itself. On the other hand, a visual poem lets you choose the nature of your experience with it. Open a collection of visual poems and determine your own trajectory. You can start at the third-to-last one and go backwards, gliding over the pieces to get a brief collective impression. Or you can start on the first poem and gaze at it for half an hour before proceeding to the next, and so on. Hold a poem close to your face, or view it at twenty paces. What you get is different each time.

There are hundreds of visual poets all over the world, but j/j hastain is one of the most interesting and prolific. A recent collection, Verges & Vivisections, is a great choice for anyone who loves to get caught up in other worlds. Any individual poem in this collection is a multi-sensual window onto another place, but viewed amidst its fellows, each piece vibrates with the uncanny harmonics of relationship. There are a lot of relationships in these poems; the eye meanders over and into a given poem, pondering the text, the image upon which it literally rests, and their interaction. And then the page is turned and the experience of the previous poems informs that of the ones to come. Each page in the collection contains a whole untitled poem composed of an abstract photo or photocollage by the author, with lines of text affixed to the image.

For example, one piece presents a wall made of vertical pale boards, gleaming with a satiny shine. The image is composed so that the oval mirror on the wall is just above center.  The mirror reflects more planks of the same wood — but these are horizontally aligned. This creates a pleasant, fascinating disorientation. We are drawn toward the portal of the mirror. The text at the bottom of the poem pulls us even further in:

that this is how i understood an angel

wood holding

what reflects wood

We might let ourselves become trapped in the mirror with the wood’s reflection, and the angel, and our own self-awareness. Or we can turn the page and slide along to the next world. Brave viewers can also experiment with Verges & Vivisections as a single, long poem. The immersive effect is extended across the whole volume. The whole is otherthan the sum of its parts.

A Vocabulary of Alarm: A Review of Emily Pettit's Goat in the Snow

I have always been a sucker for what’s been called UMass surrealism. There’s certainly something in the water up there that gives poets the exact skills and tricks they need to appeal to me. Of the magazines and presses I subscribe to, at least half have some connection to UMass Amherst. So it come as no surprise that Emily Pettit’s debut collection of poems, Goat in the Snow (Birds, LLC, 2011), has become my favorite book of the winter. That’s Emily Pettit, publisher of Jubilat, co-editor of nosnostrums, co-founder of Flying Object, and one of the forces behind Factory Hollow Press. In other words, if something is in the water in Western Massachusetts, Pettit’s got a fire hose — several of them, actually — and they’re aimed right at us.

Did I go into the book expecting to like it? I did. But while you’ll find some of the hallmarks of contemporary surrealism here (wordplay really at play, the Hegelian dialectic run wild, a big heart), what sets Pettit’s collection apart from the rest is that these poems address the two most basic questions of philosophy: What can we know? How should we live?

In “How to Recognize a Stranger” she writes:

“We would like to speak to the operator.
Are we speaking to the operator?
The problem is solved. We etch-a-sketch
the problem being solved. It’s pretty
complicated looking. It looks like a duck,
until we shake it. And when we shake it,
it looks like a new stranger, a fancy glance,
too many telephone poles, a twitching mind.
We are working on recognizing the noise a twitching
mind makes. That we would know this noise,
that we would act accordingly.”

These poems have a graceful movement to them. In fact, I’ve never seen such smooth disassociation. The collection’s closing poem, “How to Build a Fire in the Snow” just carries you along on the strength of its language and the flow of its thought. This often leads to beautiful thought experiments, as in “How to Carefully Consider Interstellar Space Travel”:

“. . . There is a chance that the elasticity
we want will be ours. All there is, is a chance.
And everyone knows chances are strange.
And sometimes chances are like planets
that get too close to their stars.”

At their best, which is often, these poems do not offer cognitive dissonance, but the illusion of cognitive harmony. There is a comfort in the false promise of Pettit’s “How to . . .” titles, a comfort in the false confidence of the speaker’s delivery: “. . . Who needs a map of the friction / when the lightning looks like a plan?” (“Go Airplane, Sway Tree”).

What made this collection truly special to me is that it crystallized why I love this style of poetry so much. I don’t know Pettit, but I think we’re about the same age (I turned 30 earlier this month). Our adult lives began on September 11th. For the past 10 years we’ve been mired in wars with undefined missions. For the past 4 years we’ve seen the world economy on the verge of collapse. Why do I find such comfort in words of those compassionate, raving New Englanders? Because just as the original Surrealists were reacting to the horrors of WWI, Pettit and her clan are reacting to the reversals and uncertainty of the 21st century; uncertainty, not in the sense of “I don’t believe this is reality,” but in that a common construction through which we understand the world, the reality of our assumptions, has fallen apart. What can we know to be true when everything we thought we knew proved false? How should we proceed?

In that sense, these are poems in a state of emergency. These are poems that are going through something and we’re all going through it too, as in “How to Avoid Confronting Most Large Animals”:

“ . . . You know
you know you know. It’s all uncertainty
and your neck. You walk slowly
in a calm voice.”

They are poems distrustful of even the most basic tenets — “It’s like our deal with gravity, / it continually deceives,” from “Your Job Is to Look Both Ways” — but doing their best to carry on. “The world is potentially over and we are interested / in potential. Now go back to where you were / and try not to light everything on fire,” she writes in “Building Smoke Detectors.” First off, damn those are some good lines. Second, this is exactly how I feel a lot of the time. Everything is falling apart, but we’re doing our best to keep things going and not make things worse.

With uncertainty, there is almost always fear, but in Pettit’s hands it’s not the fear you might expect. These poems aren’t quite paranoid — nothing that dark, at least on the surface. You get the sense that the speaker is at the best party, but is somehow disconnected from the rest of the guests. “Someone” is always saying something, but we don’t know who. The fear is of greater disconnection.

When Pettit writes in “Go Airplane, Sway Tree,” “I want to know why I’m not whispering this / in your ear. Why is it that you can’t hear me,” we don’t get the sense that the person the speaker is addressing is dead, as we might in a Poe poem, but rather that they are unreachable, and these poems, or the speakers in these poems, are trying to do nothing if not communicate. They may not know or understand what is to be communicated, what instructions are to be given, but what matters above all else is that the communication continues, that a connection is made, even in confusion, between two people. And that, to me, is poetry.

Falling Asleep With a Kleenex in Your Nose

Once upon a time I was a poet. I listened to music until I cried and read poems until I cried and sat at the edge of any body of water I could find and cried.

Then a few things happened:

1. I went to a writing conference in Prague and some girl said that I only wrote poems about men who didn’t love me.

2. I wrote the worst collection of poems that has ever been written. It was about, one could argue, men who didn’t love me.

After that I didn’t write a poem (or anything) for two years.

When I came back to writing (or did it come back to me?), I wrote fiction. There, I thought. See this? No one can accuse this of being about me.

Of course everything that we write is about us, even if it’s not: the mother who has an affair, the man sitting by his dying wife’s bedside, the child yelling to be heard by her deaf mother. I know this now.

What I came to love most about writing fiction was the space it allowed. I had a poetry professor in college who handed back our poems with lines through every “unnecessary” word — articles, prepositions, conjunctions — until our poems were unrecognizable, as our own and as English.

At the end of our last class he gave us an assignment to write a poem without any unnecessary words. No articles. No prepositions. Nothing that didn’t absolutely have to be there. I came in the next day with a prose poem containing only words he had forbidden. I thought it was an interesting take on the assignment. He didn’t. He thought I was snubbing him. That I was being obstinate. That I was looking for attention.

I wasn’t. I was trying to write a decent goddamn poem.

What I love, then, about Megan Boyle’s Selected Unpublished Blog Posts of a Mexican Panda Express Employee is the space in her poems. There isn’t the compression of syntax or the insistence on figurative language that is present in what most people call “poetic.” The poems lollygag. They travel aimlessly from fleeting thoughts of past lovers to a list of lies she has told in her life.

A poet friend of mine told me that a new trend in poetry is to write poems without purpose. You just write what’s real and what’s happening because it’s real and it’s happening, not because it’s particularly beautiful or poignant. You don’t assign meaning to it. It is on the page because it is happening, and because it is.

Of course, as a student of literature, the premise that words on a page could have no meaning goes against everything I’ve studied and argued and found compelling about literature. But let’s go with this notion for a second. Let’s just let these poems exist because they do. They’re irreverent:

“i want to hang a piñata full of emotionally damaged lobsters between a high school and a pond”

And they’re funny:

“last night I slept next to ‘a good school’ by richard yates. i only wore underpants. i fell asleep with a Kleenex up my right nostril. when I woke up i thought ‘i am fucked’ and ‘this is probably how a lot of lonely computer programmers fall asleep’”

While reading these poems I was reminded of a passage in Michael Cunningham’s By Nightfall about ordinariness and art:

“Gus the [limo] driver is everywhere and yet he appears nowhere, not in portraits or photographs, not even in the stories of men like Barthleme and Carver, who were all about guys with jobs and prospects like Gus’s but who insisted on more sorrow, more angst, than Gus remotely manifests. If Gus weeps sometimes for no reason, if he stands despairing in the aisle of Walmart, it is not apparent in his daily demeanor.”

What is so good about Megan Boyle’s poems is how it captures what “beauty” and “art” purposely leave out: how weird it feels to go down on a girl, cast changes on ER, falling asleep with a Kleenex in your nose, being lactose intolerant. These poems are literal and unexciting, and I mean that in the best way possible. They shirk romanticism and refinement and grandiose depictions of nature or human experience. They capture just how goddamn boring and unsentimental life can be. They exist in the reality of moments that most writers isolate and later manipulate into art.

(I’m doing it right now. I’m not being honest. I’m not telling you, as Megan Boyle would, that I’m sitting on my couch with my dog snoring beside me in his bed that smells because I haven’t washed it in the three years since I’ve had him. No. I’m writing. I’m revising sentences so they sound beautiful. I’m repeating words and images to deepen the emotional resonance of this review. I’m using parallelism in my sentences [right this very minute!] to build to a climax that will be perfectly poignant, rhythmic, repetitive, and, if I’m lucky, connected to the clever anecdote I used at the beginning. Here I go:)

Megan Boyle’s poems are unattractively true. They are courageous and unflaggingly honest. They detail that which poetry shamefully misses: the nose picking, the STI’s, the contents of our daily food consumption. They linger, unabashed, among the articles and prepositions that may not be as beautiful, but are just as much a part of our language and our lives.