Stephen Vincent writes to Jack Spicer

Stephen Vincent. After Language: Letters to Jack Spicer (BlazeVOX [books] 2011).

After Language is an act of homage that also seeks to take some of Jack Spicer’s interventions into conventional lyric poetics further along the lines he laid out in both his After Lorca & Language, the latter of which had a huge impact on Vincent when it first appeared in 1965, & reached Vincent in Nigeria in 1966. Interestingly, Vincent has just about reversed Spicer’s mix of poetry & prose in After Lorca in his response to Spicer: After Language is mostly prose, the ‘letters’ addressed to Spicer, plus a fascinating ‘A Walk Toward Spicer – An Introduction,’ in which Vincent carries out in prose a central part of his poetics (as demonstrated in his earlier books, Walking (1993) & Walking Theory (2007).

Vincent’s Introduction, then, takes him & his readers ‘toward’ Spicer by carefully denoting the spaces in San Francisco he inhabited & Vincent now walks through, describing both geography & history. Vincent’s descriptions are full & complex perceptions that also metaphorically connect to the life he is slowly gaining ground on, as in this take on the beach at Aquatic Park:

The thin sand beach is partially covered with large gray-and-black stones, remnants from the construction of the sea wall and breakwater. Their odd wet shapes, some full of myriad angles and planes, were once broken apart by steam shovel, sledge hammers, picks. Directly in front of us a number of the stones are precariously balanced, one on one – sometimes there are three – standing end upon end, creating improbable geometric figures, a feather-touch from falling.

He will later introduce the man who creates these fragile figures, & then, as he walks further into the sites of Spicer’s life, the full text will slowly comprehend a similar fragility in that poet, & thus how easily he was broken down.

The Letters follow, & they do something special, for they are both memoir & theoretical poetics, & by filling his prose with aspects of his life, Vincent sidesteps conventional lyric approaches while still achieving something of a lyric memorialization of his life, & of Spicer’s influence on it. It begins with the appearance of that book. Language, in Africa, a book he both loved immediately & could not ‘understand.’ ‘No one – not even my friends – was in a rush to understand or interpret your poem. Though others come to suffer from not listening – whether to poems or anything else – sometimes it is an invisible code that saves us.’ Nigeria was about to descend into civil war, Vincent was in danger, & this book appeared, partly, so it now seems, that many years later he could write a reply to it, & to Spicer.

It is said that on your deathbed in the hospital you claimed it was your “vocabulary” that killed you. Ironically, in Nigeria – at that point about to suffer a major implosion, genocide and more – it was your vocabulary, those poems, those structures, that compelled my attention, that, indeed, saved me.

Thus endeth the first Letter, & thus are we swept into Vincent’s engagement with his own past & with Spicer, his poetry & his life. At the end of each Letter, Vincent lays in a poem, each of which achieves its own Spicer-like obdurateness & obscurity. They do not offer up easy interpretation as one line veers off from another:

That river casual to its lovers
Soft as the concept of nothing
Each listen to the song. The river
Supplies the bent ear. A mountain
Or crush libidinous. One swells
Across another:
What is transparent oil in the Italian glass vase
Bread cuts in a white ceramic cup
What birth that women look for
Direction compels the choir
Blue and transcendent her dress
The song a quadrant
The silver square
Within each ripple.

‘That river’ looks forward to Vincent’s later Letter excavating Spicer’s poem from Language that begins ‘This ocean.’ As he says at one point: ‘While we have, at least, a faint signal – as you and Lorca would have it – I am haunted by wanting to pose several questions.’ And, in a sense, that is what this whole, richly expansive, book does, &, in the posing it also enters into a dialogue with not only Spicer’s work, but many others’ works, & with a number of poetic & artistic traditions. After Language is no simple work of poetry; it is an amalgam of autobiography, biography, criticism & theory, poetics & poetry, all wrapped up in a deeply felt & honest parodic homage. Spicer would have approved.

Jenna Butler’s beautifully difficult remembering

Jenna Butler. Wells (University of Alberta Press 2012).
Jenna Butler. Spindle (Snowapple Press 2012).

Wells, Jenna Butler’s second full length book, takes on a difficult & grand subject, that of memory, slowly disappearing & then fully lost in a loved relative (in this case her grandmother). Butler has a sharp eye & a sensitive ear, which she here puts to work in a series of prose poems that find their way back into a past she knew only through the memories of another person: her grandmother remembered remembering – when she still could do so. Although not a typical lyric text, Wells asserts, at least on one level, that the poet is present in the writing.

On the other hand, Butler is fully aware that memory is fiction, so she constructs each of the eight sections of this volume with great care – to tell some stories that would or might have happened, & were probably told that way. The first, title, section, sets some formal rules, especially as regards narrators. The poems speak of a ‘she’ & address a ‘you’ who seems obviously to be the author’s grandmother, here losing the words with which she built her world. Yet there is a rather slippery ‘I’ throughout too, who does seem to be the poet remembering another’s memories but who might subtly actually be that other upon occasion.

However slippery the pronouns are, Butler’s language is clear, sharp, but not transparent. The poems use a rich, sensual vocabulary of flora & fauna, delineating each separate item of once loved & now lost local life, now retrieved by the poet to make manifest the world the remembered grandmother can no longer say into being.
In the first section, ‘she’ remembers an aunt who ‘found herself deconstructed word by word until housebound, where only muscle memory told her how to poach fish, and that she did, after all, take sugar with tea.’ But later in the section, ‘you’

Loved this beach once. The wind, the way it rips off the sea on a blustery day, what it drives up onto the sand. Whelks, polished stones, gull feathers battered like spindles. Bottle glass, bright colours scarifed, filmed over. The same look in your eyes now when you turn to me, unsure, not wanting to ask.

Later in ‘Garden,’ the poem searches through remembered tales to find the names now lost to ‘she,’ but once given to her by her father (& the deeper into Wells we go the further back the memories, those fictions, take us): ‘Larkspur, he named , its ultraviolet bells agog with bees. Love-in-a-mist, punch of blue in a jacksnipe of prickles.’ And for a time the names alone, so many & so rich in history, seem enough to carry another’s memory for her. The careful reproduction of these names of flowers & birds helps materialize this lost world.

But that mind losing its memories has many other stories, not all of them gentle, though all mean. There’s the young brother (whose?) who runs through a field of barley where ‘the ground itself was heaving with hornets.’ The final piece of this section, ‘Grain,’ who exactly heard how

All through the autumn, his voice rasped from the hornets’ poison, battered windpipe slow to heal. He wheezed deep in his chest, his voice skittering like something small and angry and winged.

This is fine, minimalist writing, not overdoing anything, catching the horror felt by others, & passed on as remembered story.

In the penultimate sections, which seem to be about the author’s (perhaps ‘implied author’s’ is the better term here) grandmother’s grandparents, the feeling is of how the last memories to go are the earliest ones, these tales, often perhaps of others’ memories she only heard, of her parents’ & grandparents’ live in the 1920s & 1930s. the final section, ‘Flesh,’ returns to the poet & her grandmother, who ‘couldn’t always recall my name, but you knew my touch.’ But even this goes:

Finer and finer the things that hold us. until one day, whatever keeps you here slips. Anchorless, your silver head bobbing toward sleep. My hand on your shoulder, your blue eyes vacant as sea, as sky.

Butler utilizes a powerful grammar throughout to suggest how the loss works, sentence fragments reflect the fragmenting of memory & sense.

Wells is a beautifully sad acknowledgement of the losses all must face, made deeply personal & universal through its sharply observed images of a life now gone. It’s a fine example of how to take lyric & shake it into something beyond the merely personal.

Butler’s chapbook, Spindle, is a series of fragmented ghazals that invite us into a strange place of love (perhaps) & loss (most certainly). These are ghazals in the North American manner, but with a twist. The couplets stand alone, connected only, as John Thompson argued, by a ‘clandestine’ order. Yet that clandestine order is hard at work within each couplet too:

what do i                                 k(no)w
should’ve stayed wallflower            hindsight                     figures

Lots of ways one can read that.

I like the way the spaces, the long pauses in the lines, frustrate the possibility of any narrative, partly because these openings act as lacunae, offering the possibilities of what simply cannot be said, must stay silent between the words & phrases that did make it out onto the page. These are beautifully unsettling poems.

Nancy Mattson’s Finns and Amazons: the personal tie to history

Nancy Mattson. Finns and Amazons (UK: Arrowhead Press 2012).
Nancy Mattson. Lines from Karelia (with letters by Lisi Hirvonen, translated by Iiris Pursiainen) (UK: Arrowhead Press 2011).

Finns and Amazons is a large book, both in size & in vision, especially of the author’s Finnish forbears, mostly lost, definitely minor, but still caught up in some of the major crises of the 20th century. It begins with Mattson’s interest in the ‘Amazons of the Avant-Garde,’ six Russian women artists shown at London’s Royal Academy, & then in Sonia Delaunay, who was born in Ukraine but with Finnish connections. Somehow their work as artists in the first half of the 20th century connected in her mind with the life of her great-aunt, Lisi Hirvonen, whose letters from the USSR to her sister, Mattson’s grandmother, turned up in 2009. Lines from Karelia tells that story, & feeds much of the poetry in Finns and Amazons.

But Finns and Amazons begins with a section of poems dedicated to those artists, who worked in multi-media, & were part of that in initial dedication to experimental art-making that they felt connected to the Revolution (until Stalinism killed that idea). The very first poem, ‘Simultaneity I,’ sets up a series of trans-temporal connections that will be fulfilled throughout the rest of the book, as the poems seek through documents of the past & explorations in the present to construct some sense of the lost life of Mattson’s great-aunt & the world of those avant-garde artists as it turned to dust.

Thus ‘Simultaneity I’ shifts through various times through the smallest connectives to

that moment in Paris
when 1909 flung itself
outward a century and caught me
in Sonia Delaunay’s painted web
that captured a Finnish girl
defiant surprised wary obedient

like

that moment I opened
the door to Sonia’s studio
and caught her committing
my great-aunt Lisi to canvas

And this sets the whole book into motion. The rest of ‘I, Back to the Avant-Garde,’ constructs intriguingly personal ekphrases of paintings & other art works by those women, as well as some of their male companions in art & little narratives of their lives through various personae.

‘II, Loss’ begins with ‘What Can Be translated,’ which mainly tells us what cannot be translated, & implies that many translations of even the plainest writing might be necessary to get some flavor of the original. In many of the poems about Lisi, & even in the verions of some of the letters found in Lines from Karelia, there are differences that subtly suggest how Mattson’s involvement with them has led her to deeper interpretation in the representation of what her great-aunt wrote. Feeling her way into that then allows her to construct a series of representations & narratives about both her great-aunt’s life in Karelia & Petroskoi. She also writes about her own quest for whatever information she can gather at those places & in the archives. Thus the book opens up into a series of sequences that reveal what has been veiled by time, memory-loss, & historical & archival lacunae.

I found the most inventive poems to be the most interesting, like ‘Parsing the Ancestors,’ & its fantastical imaginings, ‘Missing Letters’ in its two columns, or ‘Night Train, Petroskoi to Petersburg’ & ‘Double’ with their magic-realist visions. As she says in the last, ‘History goes so far, then story and wish leap over. / I’ve never been to Moscow, yet the pinafore girl // on page 219 is my photographic twin, staring at the painting as I stare at her.’ Still, those two poems, the final ones in the book, would not have the power they do were it not for the slow accumulation of historical & personal knowledge the other poems & letters have built. ‘Simultaneity II,’ like ‘Simultaneity I,’ reminds us that one mind having seen both the art of those Amazons & the letters of that Finn, will, must, bring them into explosively bright contact across both space & time.

Finns and Amazons is not a book you can just dip into for a poem or two; it’s a carefully assembled construct designed to bring into the light the lives of some powerful women, whose lives & work meant & still mean. Read as a sequence, it delivers far more than any single one of its poems would suggest.

Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table

Michael Ondaatje. The Cat’s Table (McClelland & Stewart 2011).

Highly enjoyable, The Cat’s Table is a sort of Comedy of Manners cum Boy’s Own Adventure cum mystery, told mostly from the point of view of an eleven year old boy traveling by ship from Ceylon to England in 1954. He & a number of other apparently unimportant people, including two other boys about his own age, end up at ‘the Cat’s Table,’ the farthest from the Captain’s Table, & he & his 2 newfound friends soon start exploring the ship, getting into trouble, playing dangerous games, & spying on many of the other passengers.

This is Ondaatje’s first novel in the first person, & his narrator, looking back on his adventures as a boy just on the cusp of growing into a teenager, is interestingly uncertain because as a writer he knows just how much he does not know about what he remembers. Ondaatje still plays with fragmented narrative, little bits of story, sometimes whole separate stories in themselves, slowly accumulate into a larger story of both what happened on that voyage & how it & what followed changed him into the man & writer he is as he tells us all about it.

Michael (Mynah as he was known on the ship) encounters many different adults, two of whom he knew beforehand. One, an older lady in First Class who knows his uncle, is supposed to watch out for him but fails to keep him & angry Cassius & quiet Ramadhin (with his heart problem) from running all over the ship, discovering all kinds of odd places, & becoming obsessed with the prisoner who’s brought out only late at night. That man becomes the centre of a plot that eventually involves some others at the Cat’s Table, members of the Jankla Troupe, & Michael’s slightly older cousin, Emily. She & the other two boys remain important if also distanced from the older narrator, whose life, with both its successes as an author (implied) & failures in intimacy (partly told but more implied) was deeply influenced by what he experienced during this journey.

The writing is full of those lovely moments of perceptive imagery that we associate with Ondaatje, but because he is also trying to represent the feelings & comprehensions of a young & still unformed mind, it is often much more straightforward than readers are used to with his work. Still, because the older mind is trying to figure out what his memories are really telling him, & also why he has acted as he has in his adult years, there’s a depth to his recalling & some confessional arguments that, as they appear, cast new light upon those actions he & his 2 pals participated in on that voyage.

The view of many of the adults’ activities & conversations, from that innocent eye, does make for some highly sophisticated comedy, even as it’s shadowed by darker motives among those he observes, & moves to a startling & violent conclusion. There are some stunning set-pieces, such as the passage through the Suez Canal, but they settle into the careful rigging the slowly exfoliating main story provides. And so The Cat’s Table becomes a sly & subtle thriller of sorts, one of those books you want to keep reading right to the end to find out what actually happened &, as much as possible, given the narrator’s implication in it all, what it means. It’s a great entertainment, & that is meant as high praise.

Collaborative poetics: Beyond the Bother of Sunlight

Lewis LaCook & Sheila E Murphy. Beyond the Bother of Sunlight (BlazeVOX [books] 2011).

Poetic collaborations make for interesting reading (& I speak as another collaborator with Sheila E Murphy): the actual form the collaboration takes makes demands on both authors, especially in the way it asks them to submerse their own writing egos to the new author(ing). I don’t know exactly how Lewis LaCook & Murphy split their writing duties in Beyond the Bother of Sunlight, but the result is an often challenging, engaging, entertaining, & linguistically playful work in 52 sections.

As a long-time reader of Sheila E Murphy’s startling poetry, I do see occasional swerves of language that I suspect come from her lively imagination. Nevertheless, the I who often speaks here is clearly someone else (than either her or LaCook), & that I has much to say, in a slowly gathering series of fragmented sequiturs, about art, life, politics (social & sexual), & the ways language can both open & occlude one’s understanding of them all.
Whoever is writing here, s/he has lots to say. There’s a neat physicality to this language of thinking through: ‘How she bleeds impulsively / In the dry burn of too early Sunday / Pressed between voices writing on gods / Ungraspable the more they sing’. And here’s the sly poetics of politics: ‘Our land is white awaiting –isms / Verging on the foreign act of conquering,’ even though ‘We’re a conquered people, servants / In our own land.’ I’d say this collaboration is pretty recent.

There’s a spiritual dimension too: ‘Eternity grows hypothetical in talk,’ however, given ‘The precipice that guides our faith.’ This speaker is tough: ‘I remain your gentle militant.’ The poem moves across a wide range of perceptions & situations. Although much of it will seem a kind of intellectual exploration, it can also turn suddenly to what feels deeply personal (but to whom?) or to a natural imagery that hums with the new: ‘Speaking of November, / Scorpions scald fear of the desert blue / Furs limit cadence.’ The collaborative writer clearly loves the play of sound & image, letting ‘meaning’ follow in their footsteps.

As often happens in such collaborative efforts, the poem often turns to the act of writing, thinking through the possibilities. Murphy tends to work with male collaborators. This can lead them to some delightful apercus: ‘Apology is as male as narration / We change colors into paths to favorites on the hard drive // Peppered with the tone poem of unrest, each composition / Stokes each pending composition.’ One way of naming the process by which this book came into being. When ‘I try to pretend I am imaginary’ (as this doubled single speaker certainly is), ‘I like to imagine // A rationale for international boundaries’ or almost anything else. So s/he can tell us ‘I pretend to know where I am going / But, like you, the way I’m going / Seems to know me more.’ That’s we readers addressed there, & Beyond the Bother of Sunlight offers us a way to go reading through a journey that can show us more. It’s a striking example of the new collaborative poetry.

Don Thompson demonstrates the definitely curious economics of contemporary art

Don Thompson. The $12 Million Stuffed Shark (Doubleday Canada 2008).

This book, as thoroughly entertaining & as spiritually disheartening as Seven Days in the Art World, takes a much broader view of the high end art world & the economics thereof, as its subtitle, ‘The Curious Economics of Contemporary Art,’ implies. F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing in another gilded age when that .1% had most of the money, got it right in his portraits of the rich, whether or not he actually said they were different from you and me. Certainly, the rich portrayed in this book are definitely different, if only in their ability to spend far more on art, especially contemporary art, than the rest off us, but also in the way their competitive natures drives the ever-upward market. Thompson is an economist, & he constructs his overview of the world of auctions, dealers, fairs, &, oh yes, ‘artists,’ wholly in economic terms; but his point is that those are now pretty well the only terms active. Like Seven Days, The $12 Million Stuffed Shark was written before the Great Recession of 2008, but, as his rather depressing final chapter, ‘End Game,’ suggests, & as the obscene bonuses still paid to the Wall Street bankers etc show, these people can still play the games Thompson tells us about here.

The title piece is of course the break-through work for Damien Hirst, one of the great marketers (sorry, conceptual artists) of recent years. The shark’s tale is both highly informative & full of warning signals. For this is a book about ‘branding’ & its power, most of which lies with the major dealers, auction houses, & collectors, &, oh yes, a few very slick artist-marketers such as Hirst, Jeff Koons (who began as ‘the most successful salesman in the Museum [of Modern Art]’s history’ & then worked as a Wall Street commodities broker for five years), Tracey Emin, & the grand progenitor, Andy Warhol. Still, only a few chapters are devoted to them; most of the book explores the relationships among the other players, whose brands are even more important than those of the artists they sell (especially as their lack of interest can pretty well kill an artist’s economic life in this rarefied atmosphere).

The sales of some earlier art remains important, given ‘the shrinking supply of traditional art’ (54), as the rising top prices for certain works, such as, among others, Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I, which went for $135 million, demonstrate (& just this Fall a Klimt landscape went for over $40 million, so that market seems just fine, as that is a bit above the price for one back when the Portrait sold). Indeed, that sale provokes this comment: ‘The price illustrates the ease with which art history is now rewritten with a checkbook’ (57). And it’s comments like these that give this narrative journey its necessary light (comedic) touch. Still, ‘Another result of scarcity of branded work is that the role of aesthetics in judging art decreases’ (54).

The big, that is ‘branded,’ names fall easily into place, Sotheby’s & Christie’s, Charles Saatchi & Larry Gagosian, to mention just a few. The artists mentioned above, along with a few other contemporary ones, & then the great names of the past, are also reduced to ‘brands’ today. At least when it comes to buying & selling their works. Many collectors buy by ear, without even looking at the art, trusting in the power of the branded seller. I find that strange, since I like to look at the art I like & admire. But then, as Thompson point out, ‘It is easier to appreciate art when what is required is not an understanding of art history, just your memory of a recent article about high auction prices’ (178).

Rather than give us close-up stories of particular events, as Sarah Thornton does in her lively ethnography, Thompson stands back a bit & offers overviews of the workings of the various aspects of this art world. As an economist, he finds it fascinating & deliberately or not reveals that in the art market’s upper tiers, brutal capitalism operates at full throttle, &, especially at auctions, the money wars are furious. But: ‘When the auction hammer falls, price becomes equated with value, and this is written into art history’ (178); & ‘Prices reflect the size of a work, not its quality or artistic merit’ (190). For anyone who actually cares, those are sad comments, indeed.

Thompson covers the whole field, even unto the critics, whose power is practically nil. He quotes Robert Hughes to this effect: ‘One gets tired of the role critics are supposed to have in this culture. It’s like being the piano player in a whorehouse, you don’t have any control over the action going on upstairs’ (209). Sometimes critics write positive reviews that, if they appear in the right place, are nice, but the auction houses & dealers really don’t bother much with them unless they are positive. He sums up one economic circle in his chapter on museums, the poor relations at the market: ‘The museum can influence an artist’s career path by accepting a no-strings-attached painting as a donation and immediately flipping it at auction — and yes, it does happen. The painting commands a higher auction price because part of its provenance is “Consigned by the Chicago Museum of Modern Art.” The donor gets a higher charitable donation, because valuation for tax purposes is based on the gross auction value . . . . The donor may also benefit from higher values for other of the artist’s works in her collection. The auction house’s other lots benefit from being associated with a work deaccessioned by a branded museum. The museum acquires funds for future acquisitions. If everybody gains, what is the harm? I will leave that question to the reader.’

He leaves many such questions up to us, but many of his little asides point our way. One artist not mentioned much here, though he was central to Seven Days, is Takashi Murakami. It seems that Gagosian, who ‘also tries to control the context in which his artists appear’ (222), refused Thompson rights to reproduce his work alongside that of other artists discussed in the text.

As an economist, Thompson offers up in his final chapter, ‘Contemporary Art as an Investment,’ a rather sobering view of how monetarily useful such collecting really is. As he quotes Mary Boone, an art dealer, ‘There are more people collecting for the wrong reasons, basically as the latest get-rich-quick scheme. They buy art like lottery tickets.’ This is slyly funny, putting the super rich alongside all the other gamblers in the larger culture. His facts show that, with the few exceptions mentioned in the book, ‘In the overwhelming majority of cases, art is neither a good investment nor an efficient investment vehicle’ (239).

The $12 Million Stuffed Shark is a fascinating book. Still, it’s also, in one important way, utterly meaningless, except as dark comic relief, to someone like me. Living in a small backwater of the empire of capital, where various artists work & display their art, sometimes reaching out to certain important venues & showing in lesser mainstream galleries (where the collectors featured in Thompson’s book would never even poke their noses in), what is one to do? Look for, & at, art as you find it, often by artists you know, that speaks to your aesthetic not economic spirit. Live with it & enjoy it. That works for me.

The Luskville Reductions: another fine work from Monty Reid

Monty Reid. The Luskville Reductions (Brick Books 2008).

Good poetry doesn’t age, so reading The Luskville Reductions now, admittedly a little late, I find it to be a superb serial poem, each page a single (anti-)lyric cry, but the whole a unified exploration of a broken relationship. Questions of memory & loss, or loss & remembering, haunt this book. The poems connect the world & the body, past & present, what the broken couple once shared & what the singular writer recalls in the midst of separation. The text utilizes pronouns carefully, the ‘I’ intended to be read as ‘the writer’ but also then as a constructed figure, while the ‘you’ usually stands for the missing partner but sometimes slips into that addressee who is the self speaking.

The poems are minimal, but sharply edged, witty, & subtle in their allusive argument. Reid allows the perceived world to act as metaphor. Therefore he never needs to push allusions too hard or obviously. The images simply do the work, quietly, on their own:

The rain is finished

but the way rain beads on the dented fenders
of what has been loved

isn’t.

The rain is finished

but the sheen of rain still on the concrete
isn’t.

. . . . . .

The rain is finished
but there is always something

in the lid of the body
that resists

and something with bigger holes in it
than the holes in rain.

Reid’s sense of the line, & of spacing, reminds me a bit of Creeley, who also explored love & its loss in his finely tuned poems.

The book moves from Summer through Fall to Spring, but most of the poems seem set in the Fall, the time of all things collapsing into winter, into loss. As usual, & even in a poem of loss, Reid demonstrates his deft comic touch, which only deepens the feeling of sad acceptance the book achieves:

One hard morning
red blows out of the trees

too fast and loose for anything
with one good leg to keep up to

and the fall foliage tours
are off

just like that.

In the rescheduled afternoon
sunlight the leaves gather

in drifts along Chemin
de la Montagne

and agree they never wanted
celebrity status anyway.

It’s what the trees say too
now that they’re standing

there, arm in arm
naked.

Still, certain images, the rain & a black dress for example, return, & help to open & close the book. The Luskville Reductions holds together as a single sequence, not simply a collection of lyrics but a carefully organized poetic argument, each piece a necessary addition to a writerly quest of sad discovery. It’s well worth joining Reid for the journey.