The Octopus Museum, by Brenda Shaughnessy.
Knopf. $25.00.

In five books across two decades, Brenda Shaughnessy has juggled manners and materials while always returning to the same miffed, baffled axiom: this body, this family, this nation, this reality—this can’t be it, can it? Her first two books offered portrait galleries of bisexual womanhood in every pose, butch and femme, from rug rat to “Czarina!” The speakers in her first book, Interior with Sudden Joy (1999), were cryptic, witchy, will-they-won’t-they with beloveds and standard English alike (its titles include “Arachnolescence,” “Sleptember”). The speakers in her next book, Human Dark with Sugar (2008), gravitated toward disillusionment, deadpan, all smack talk and clapback (her titles now: “I’m Perfect at Feelings,” “Replaceable until You’re Not.”). Her crushing third book set course for an alternate, do-over galaxy, Our Andromeda (2012), where her first pregnancy proceeded free of complications, her son not left with serious disabilities—“a secret world, the  hidden draft, the tumor-sibling,//the ‘there-are-no-accidents’ plane we could learn to fly” (“Why Should Only Cheaters and Liars Get Double Lives?”). So Much Synth (2016)—an indispensable yet underappreciated collection of the #MeToo era, arriving avant le hashtag—uncovered alternate  lives retrospectively throughout Shaughnessy’s past: the twentysomething frozen in an abusive relationship (“Why I Stayed, 1997–2001”), the teen turning on desire, and tuning out patriarchal demands, by singing along to eighties pop (“there’s truth in synth”). Whatever PR-in-verse Keats did for nightingales, Shaughnessy did for Duran Duran.

Recently, a metropolis block of museum-themed collections—Susan Elmslie’s Museum of Kindness, Daljit Nagra’s British Museum, J. Michael Martinez’s Museum of the Americas—has played curatorial catch-up with a contemporary culture racing several unimaginable steps ahead. Shaughnessy’s The Octopus Museum compiles prose forms both past (prayer, folktale, dream journal) and present (pop quiz, how-to, cover letter, research report), but it holds out no hope of preserving life as it is: “life,” Shaughnessy fears, won’t be “as it is” for long. “Don’t try to remember this. Don’t document it,” Shaughnessy jots down in her first poem, committing these poems to wary opacity, to imagining otherwise: “Remember: write down to not-document it.” The Octopus Museum’s exhibition spaces—laid out in her table of contents’ “Visitor’s Guide,” given headings like “Gallery of a Dreaming Species” and “‘To Serve Man’: Rituals of the Late Anthropocene Colony”—branch radially to possible futures for our civilization and planet, nearly all of them sharp downturns, quick ends. Shaughnessy’s past collections were taxonomies of alternative paths; to stock The Octopus Museum, she sorts, labels, lights up, and displays our alternative endings. “What is a new way to learn? Could I ever answer and still keep my question?” she wonders in “Thinking Lessons,” the book’s reflection on its speculative indecisions. “What are the most important questions, other than this one?”

Reading The Octopus Museum straight through can feel like flipping through a Choose Your Own Adventure book, every new outcome clamped shut with an ironclad “The End.” And yet: within these draining hypotheticals, nearly nothing is for you to choose; the upheavals in view are not your own, they’re our collective conditions, and far from an adventure, the future Shaughnessy dreads will creep up, imperceptibly, inside the slow slog of everyday life. In one future, even our collective waste has gone corporate: “I love this local company,” confesses a loyal customer, “especially because for every order—and this is so cool—they make a tax-deductible contribution to honor and support the world-famous Pacific Garbage Patch, in your name.” In “Dream of Brown”—whose monomania for monochrome  suggests an internment camp, a dust-dry wasteland, an Amazon warehouse—we are dressed in brown, take our assigned seats at “a long brown wooden table,” and dig our brown utensils into brown food. “Everything”—brown air included—“is ragged, old-looking, except for the Invisible Watchers, who enforce the rules and, I get the sense, are brand-new.” Another poem, “I Want the World,” starts flip, rerouting end-of-the-world terror (“Every time is the last”) into a guilt-trip sprung on a daughter, “complaining, as usual”: “The chicken nuggets are too hot? Just wait. They’ll cool and by then, I hope she can learn to like lizard blood and shoelace chewing gum, because that’s what’s coming.” There will be a last time for chicken nuggets, a last time for childlike faith that the world generously bends toward our wants, a last time for this six-year-old’s near-invisible hope—“A thread of hope wound, inextricable, all around and through her very person”—to hold taut, before it snaps.

And then there’s the octopi. The funny thing is they’re real; if you’d prefer they stand for something, they can represent nature at its most adaptably rubbery, plainly inhuman but disarmingly smart. The unfunny thing—however ludicrous it sounds—is this: faced with oceans we’ve polluted and soured to uninhabitable conditions, the octopi have crawled out, acquired “land mobility,” and overthrown humankind. I quote at length from their splashy debut, the five-page prose poem “There Was No Before (Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles),” not least because it takes its leisurely time explaining the octopi takeover—why rush, too late to stop them now:

Before our COO learned how to communicate electronically, we thought they were merely naively excited about “life on land” (LOL) so we equally naively helped them build COOPS (Cephalo-Octopodal Oceanostomy Pods).

Soon we realized we’d been doubly naive and they’d been zero naive because they used their new land mobility to access the world’s Electronic Communication Operation Systems (ECOS) and boy could they type fast.

It became clear that they, the COO (Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords) were taking over. While we were still marveling at the cuteness of YouTube videos showing early COO antics and enjoying the adorableness of their eight-legged smartypants brand,

they had reconfigured the ECOS language, and took over every computer, grid, and control center. We still do not know their language.

As for our language? The octopi not only know it, they’ve commandeered it, letter by letter. Their life on land becomes nothing to LOL about: the animal kingdom’s coo-worthy “cuteness” has upgraded to Cephalopod Octopoid Overlords; ecosystems once thought fragile infiltrate our digital ECOSystems, in only a few keystrokes of a tentacle.

Out of context (and even in it), all this must sound absurd, which Shaughnessy readily acknowledges: “Sure it’s metaphoric. Also true.” That acknowledgment comes in the poem’s first paragraph, right after Shaughnessy remembers a time “before the weird paper-cut-on-the-neck had you eventually getting around in a wheelbarrow pulled by a gentle mule named Sinister.” Writing about civilizations that have gone too far, Shaughnessy hazards going too far herself. A daring to overshoot propels this book’s comic highs, as when Shaughnessy populates Hamlet’s metaphorical sea with troubles Hamlet never anticipated: plastics, species driven into extinction, cephalopods evolving toward revenge. That same daring yields the book’s real horror. Octopi or no octopi, the apocalypse will convince us that “there was no before,” obliterating our naïveté and adorableness, Shakespeare and YouTube videos, and anyone nostalgic for our emotional and cultural heritage: “Me, I’m thinking of all the Befores, like all old people who have no future.”

“I dwell in Possibility —/A fairer House than Prose —.” For years, I’ve copied and pasted those lines of Emily Dickinson’s whenever I need a clear case of poetry (for which Dickinson swaps in another polysyllabic p-word, possibility) dunking on prose. Until reading The Octopus Museum—where Shaughnessy trades in sidewinding verse-lines for claustrophobic prose blocks, clotting the page with ink—I never considered Dickinson’s lines could justify turning against verse, toward prose, when dwelling in conditions of pent-up impossibility. (Dickinson’s metaphor suits a book whose most common figure is a woman confined: “No matter how far I travel on earth I wind up sitting in rooms.”) When one of Shaughnessy’s dreamt-up impossibilities doesn’t sway you, it can feel like someone else’s problem, a nightmare described but never undergone. But when a poem hooks you, it seems to choreograph your panic attack, one agonizingly prescient sentence at a time. For me, that poem has been the book’s last, “Our Family on the Run.” Over two pages, it imagines what would happen if some undisclosed emergency sent Shaughnessy’s family (herself and her husband, the poet-critic Craig Morgan Teicher, and their two children, Cal and Simone) on the run from suburbia, from civilization, from everything. Within two paragraphs, we’re already resorting to last-ditch efforts: “Maybe spray paint a Super Soaker metallic silver to look like a real weapon?” Scrolling through her mental checklist of necessities—Cal’s wheelchair, transportation, gas, food, water, money, “one stuffed animal” for Simone—Shaughnessy repeatedly comes up empty-handed. She’s stripped of all solutions. They’re doomed, unless someone improbably superheroic intervenes, or the most vulnerable among us bear us into the future. Or both:

Eventually out of water and arms shredded, I carry Cal, Craig  carries me, and Simone carries us all. Almost seven years old, she is so strong and has some Clif bars stuffed in a bag. The notebook with all our information is long lost.

She knows where she’s going. How does she know that? She runs ahead and carries us, her heart pounding and breaking with the weight and strain of all of us in there.

Sure it’s metaphoric. Also true.

—

Deaf Republic, by Ilya Kaminsky.
Graywolf Press. $16.00.

Skim too many headlines and the past years seem kind to deafness—kind, more exactly, to “deafness,” the mindlessly ableist metaphor. Protests “falling on deaf ears.” Administrations “deaf” (willfully, apparently) to suffering worldwide. “Tone-deaf” apologies, salting wounds they ought to salve. Ilya Kaminsky—Odessa-born; hard of hearing since age four; granted asylum in the United States at sixteen; before long, a poet in his second language of English—understands the disregard this metaphorical “deafness” inflicts. But he also seizes the opportunity that expansive metaphor presents: a chance to stage a mutiny on the language, an unmissable opening for a  hierarchy-capsizing question: What if deafness were our universal condition?

Whatever else Kaminsky’s long-gestating Deaf Republic may be—a closet drama in two acts; a documentary on the crisis gripping Nowhere, or Everywhere; a fable teleporting the wars on terror and drugs to the imagined Eastern European town of Vasenka—it’s a wrestling match with the metaphor of “deafness,” and a wresting-back. Early on, “deafness passes through us like a police whistle”; later it congregates an insurgency, a contagious solidarity: “Someone has given her a sign, which she holds high above her head: the people are deaf.” “Deafness is suspended above blue tin roofs/and copper eaves,” like painterly weather; “deafness nails us into our bodies,” shutting us up, or holding us together; or perhaps it catalyzes our  self-possession of, even our pleasure in, our bodies: “Deafness isn’t an illness! It’s a sexual position! ” Deafness, in all its guises, undergirds the moving pieces of Deaf Republic. This astonishing parable in poems unfolds episodically, its narrative provoked by a tragic opening scene: while breaking up a protest, a soldier shoots and kills a young deaf boy—and the gunshot  renders the entire town deaf.

If that last sentence sounds familiar, it’s because I cheated off Deaf Republic’s back cover, the only page that believes, for a second, that linear, undisputed storytelling can capture an entire nation. Every other page of Deaf Republic topples the false idols of omniscient narrators and know-it-all authors clicking causes into effects. It proceeds, instead, in lyric heaves and hurts, crosscutting retrospect’s fogged-up panes with trauma’s splinterings. In one representatively scattered stretch, a first-person testimony (“4 a.m. Bombardment”) gives way to diaristic notations of a baby’s “Arrival” (“You arrive at noon, little daughter, weighing only six pounds”); after that, language is set to a tinkling “Lullaby” (“Little daughter/rainwater”; “little earth of/six pounds”), the birth is rephrased impersonally, quasi-rabbinically,  as a “Question”:

What is a child?
A quiet between two bombardments.

Note in Kaminsky’s two acts—“The Townspeople Tell the Story of Sonya and Alfonso,” “The Townspeople Tell the Story of Momma Galya”—the telling emphasis on telling. A chorus of Vasenka’s nameless townspeople (the book’s witnessing “we”) is as much a protagonist as Alfonso (Act One’s “I”) and the pregnant Sonya, two newlywed puppeteers, and Momma Galya (Act Two’s “I”), the puppet theater’s owner and late-in-life insurgent. Deaf Republic is the rare recent collection that comes trip-wired with spoiler alerts (I’ve steered clear), but the truest story is how the story is told, if—as Deaf Republic’s final pages speed toward our present, and Vasenka’s deafness vaporizes to folklore—it’s told at all.

Take that “tragic opening scene,” or the nearest thing to it. Act One opens on the prose poem “Gunshot,” titled after a sound no one hears. “Our country is the stage,” explain the townspeople. Upon that national stage sits the town’s stage, Vasenka’s Central Square, where martial law has outlawed public assembly—yet upon the most miniature stage of all, Sonya and Alfonso’s puppet show goes on, their piercing parody disguised as child’s play. When Petya, Sonya’s deaf nephew, sneezes, an army-sergeant puppet collapses, shrieks, recovers, and “shakes his fist at the laughing audience.” A real-life Sergeant, lending credence to this lampooning portrayal, interrupts with shrieks of his own:

Disperse immediately!
Disperse immediately! the puppet mimics in a wooden falsetto.
Everyone freezes except Petya, who keeps giggling. Someone claps a hand over his mouth. The Sergeant turns toward the boy, raising his finger.
You!
You! the puppet raises a finger.
Sonya watches her puppet, the puppet watches the Sergeant, the Sergeant watches Sonya and Alfonso, but the rest of us watch Petya lean back, gather all the spit in his throat, and launch it at the Sergeant.

Caught in this crossfire of sightlines—everyone “watches” someone, only the boy acts—is a parable about poetry, but where is it? Is poetry like that puppet, diminishing the powers it mimics? Or does poetry slosh around with the spit in our throats, elemental as bodily fluids, a physical heft to “launch” (like projectiles, instead of projectiles) in tyranny’s face? Poetry makes something happen—at best, giggles; at worst, gunshots: “The sound we do not hear lifts the gulls off the water.”

Collections, we hope, amount to more than what they collect, like museums made roomier by the artworks they house. The peculiar achievement of Deaf Republic—echoey with calls and responses, song and clamor—is that the whole is not simply greater than its parts: it is their counterargument, their antidote. Any one page captures a shattered, shuddered utterance, like (in the poem following “Gunshot”) Sonya’s grief, “her shout a hole//torn in the sky,” or (in the next poem) Alfonso’s soliloquy, a man greeting his own resolve: “You are alive, I whisper to myself, therefore something in you listens.” (Between poems, Deaf Republic includes illustrations by Jennifer Whitten of Vasenka’s sign language, demonstrated by ghostly hands. Taken in isolation, Whitten’s illustrations and Kaminsky’s poems alike are signs ripped from their contexts, language severed from time. “Arrival,” quoted earlier, ends in Sonya and Alfonso’s now-occupied nursery, where “quiet hisses like a match dropped in water.” Beneath “Arrival” is the illustration of a single vibrant sign, captioned “Match”: the literal birth has been lost in translation, but the simile endures.)

An illustration of an ASL sign. A left hand is open, palm facing forward. A right hand uses an index finger to point or touch the center of the palm.

Read together, Deaf Republic’s fragments and ruins shore each other up: bereft cries reach first responders, love songs reciprocate. Hope, once communicated, flourishes. On one early page, Sonya and Alfonso “teach signs in Central Square” to Vasenka’s townspeople, now deaf; on a facing page, the two newlyweds rehearse another coded vocabulary:

Her trembling lips
meant come to bed.
Her hair waterfalling in the middle

of the conversation meant
come to bed.
—From Before the War, We Made a Child

Despair, conversely, reigns when silences—of speech, gesture, generosity—are no longer weaponized against propaganda and diktat but wedge themselves between us, or when our language, recklessly shot off, ricochets back at us:

At the trial of God, we will ask: why did you allow all this?
And the answer will be an echo: why did you allow all this?
—From A City Like a Guillotine Shivers on Its Way to the Neck

Since his first book, Dancing in Odessa (2004), Kaminsky’s poems have moved to a mercurial music. In his long lines, fleet-footed triple rhythms—often reserved, in English metrics, for limericky, higgledy-piggledy buoyancy—assume a tragic gallop, inexorably pushing onward; in his short lines, time stills, stresses clench tight. (Listen back to the already well-anthologized “We Lived Happily during the War,” Deaf Republic’s present-day prologue: “in the city of money in the country of money/our great country of money”). In Deaf Republic he tunes in to other musics, plays speech in new registers. Pages from its lowest points, Kaminsky gathers the lung power for light-headed exclamation—“the heart needs a little foolishness!”—and snaps at any solipsistic poet who lets art eclipse life, or love-life: “(Stop talking while we are kissing!)” No new music is sparser, more letter-perfect, than Kaminsky’s contribution to the micro-tradition of minimalist counters to the great minimizer, death. There’s that six-word melodrama, too Hemingway-esque to be written by the real Ernest Hemingway: “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” In his forties, the late W.S. Merwin whittled all of “Elegy” to one six-word line: “Who would I show it to.” Now, Kaminsky offers an “Elegy” of his own:

Six words,
Lord:

please ease
of song

my tongue.

“Elegy” seizes on loss itself as a patterning principle. “Please,” with wishful simplicity, sheds two letters to reveal “ease”; “song,” held for a split-second, clangs against its flat half-rhyme, “tongue”; Kaminsky scales back from a two-line to a one-line stanza, with boundless no-line stanzas to come. Lamenting loss, this singer pleads to his Lord for yet more loss, daring to forfeit song itself if song’s wellspring, suffering, runs out with it.

The boldest gamble Kaminsky takes as Deaf Republic’s stage-managing inventor is to cast you, dear reader, in every role of his production. After you’re Sonya and Alfonso, kindling heroism on marital and parental passion, you become Momma Galya, prankish instigator, cousin to Lady Godiva and Pussy Riot. Taking as her props her own unbuttoned, scatological excesses (“She just pooped on the park bench, marvelous cretins!”), she discovers that the most elaborate production of all is putting a foster child to bed: “Anushka, your pajamas—/they are the final meanings of my life.” Again and again, you fall back to Vasenka’s chorus, watching everything, doing nothing. “Now each of us is/a witness stand”—but how many of us testify? Deaf Republic’s epilogue, “In a Time of Peace,” resurfaces in the present, in Kaminsky’s adopted country—“a country in which a boy shot by police lies on the pavement/for hours.” As routinely as we “pick up the kids from school” or “buy shampoo/and basil,” we open our phones:

We see in his open mouth
the nakedness
of the whole nation.

We watch. Watch
others watch.

The body of a boy lies on the pavement exactly like the body of a boy—

It is a peaceful country.

Lucky for us, they’re staging Deaf Republic in our peaceful country, and the  chorus is auditioning new members.

—

The Tradition, by Jericho Brown.
Copper Canyon Press. $17.00

What review of The Tradition could be any sharper than the reviews The Tradition writes for itself? Jericho Brown’s third book hacks away at its own evasions and excuses, stabs right into the soft spots. “I am sick of your sadness,/Jericho Brown, your blackness,/Your books.” That’s from “Dark,” which throws its shade first on the poet, snidely singled out, and finally on everyone a shade too blue or bluesy, too blackly comic, too plain “black”:

I’m sick
Of your hurting. I see that
You’re blue. You may be ugly,
But that ain’t new.
Everyone you know is
Just as cracked. Everyone you love is
As dark, or at least as black.

Sick of it all, this persona—part of the book’s occasional chorus of close-but-not-quite Jericho Browns, rinsing their mouths with their haters’ venom, then spitting it back—rants with the raving momentum of a moderator-free comments section, tinged with a studio exec’s contempt: haven’t we seen this “black” thing before? Listen close to this persona, and you can hear Brown maneuvering behind it, barricading himself behind his gamesmanship, his internal rhymes muffled like giggles. Another new poem, “The Card Tables,” spares no time for fooling around—it opens: “Stop playing.” Do you remember that reprimand from your childhood, how it cleared the oxygen from a room? It resounds still for Brown, whose poetry has always wagered on the life-preserving properties of “playing”: playing dress-up as Diana Ross and Janis Joplin in Please (2008); playing variations on scripture in The New Testament (2014); playing the chromatic scale of feeling—all the keys, black and white—on his well-tempered verse lines.

Guarded self-consciousness is a necessity in Brown’s work. It’s his duet partner, his tether to reality, his survival kit in a country where queer Black men must vigilantly ask how they are seen, or overseen, or overlooked. “I am a they in most of America,” Brown recognizes, defeatedly; his prismatic singularity has been pluralized beyond recognition, put down to prop up some insecure “we”: “Someone feels lost in the forest/Of we, so he can’t imagine/A single tree. He can’t bear it.” Self-consciousness, we’re sometimes told, is an inhibition to expression, a phlegmy obstruction to cough up and then it’s all full-throated, decongested ease. Brown gets so much said, paradoxically, because he compulsively listens back to every line, chancing on half- or  double meanings dangling over the margins, letting his silences speak. Brown can wield his enjambments maliciously, prolonging the torture he describes, as in “The Virus,” where HIV speaks: “I want them dying, and I want/To do the killing”; “If I can’t leave you/Dead, I’ll have/You vexed.” Or he can seduce via suspense, metering out his lines just so; with every come-hither break, you’re leaning a little closer in:

we
Say please with our mouths
Full of each other, no one
Hungry as me against this
Tree.
—From After Essex Hemphill

Brown’s second-by-second reassessments, gauging each line as soon as it’s spoken, crystallize into The Tradition’s demanding new form, the duplex. Formal verse, when it’s rote, is organized the way crime is organized (smothering dissent, entrenched with generations-old habits). Bending rules, jumbling forms, Brown devises a hybrid form that adapts to his cumulative autobiography: a self-contradicting wholeness, obscurely patterned. Stringent repetitions—every couplet’s second line repeats, all but exactly, to begin the next couplet—replay the corrections and confrontations that jostle a trauma, this way and that, to make it settle. Brown’s second “Duplex” begins:

The opposite of rape is understanding
A field of flowers called paintbrushes—

A field of flowers called paintbrushes,
Though the spring be less than actual.

Though the spring be less than actual,
Men roam shirtless as if none ever hurt me.

Men roam that myth. In truth, one hurt me.

Waiting for Godot, distilled in Vivian Mercier’s accurate quip, is “a play in which nothing happens, twice.” In the duplexes, what happens twice is the unspeakable, the indigestible, the impossible to get definitively right. If “understanding” means “agreement, consent,” then, yes, by some cheerless, legalistic logic, “The opposite of rape is understanding.” Driving toward some more profound understanding—toward a habitable world before or beyond rape, where the paintbrushes are ours to hold—Brown finds himself in some prelapsarian field, luridly lit with Indian paintbrushes (a member of the broomrape family). No sooner does Brown step inside that uncanny valley, too fantastic to be “actual,” than he dispels it as mere “myth,” and stumbles back into memory: “In truth, one hurt me.” So long to that “flowered field,” paved over by Brown’s steamrolling ingenuity:

  I want to obliterate the flowered field,

To obliterate my need for the field
And raise a building above the grasses,

  A building of prayer against the grasses,
  My body a temple in disrepair.

My body is a temple in disrepair.
The opposite of rape is understanding.

In its seventh and last couplet, every duplex revisits its opening line, repeated verbatim or just about, but none comes securely full circle. “Understanding,” now, appears to accumulate haphazardly, in small, cautious efforts of reconstruction. Only over time will Brown raise the mind’s edifices “against the grasses” of his Edenic vision, or patch up that “temple” carried around everywhere, the body. The phrase “temple in disrepair” first slips out as an afterthought, an antithesis to that dreamt-up “building of prayer,” but Brown reiterates it with astonished conviction: “My body is a temple in  disrepair.” Even in two-letter alterations, Brown remodels his duplex, a structure of language where opposites—rape and understanding, want and need, prayer and obliteration—can live on, stably, side by side.

The duplex, Brown has explained, “merges the sonnet, the ghazal, and the blues,” stitching close continents and centuries; as the T.S. Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” would appreciate, Brown pulls forward a world tradition that reorders itself in his wake. Reading The Tradition,  I was reminded both of Eliot’s essay (judging from interviews, a favorite of Brown’s) and of Kevin Young’s gut-punch line about Langston Hughes  (judging from the cagey blues coursing through all of Brown’s books, another favorite): “Hughes stands, if not alone, then out, creating something new, vernacular, blues based, as American as lynching and apple pie.” The provocation booby-trapped inside Brown’s title isn’t only the question of which longstanding traditions persist today—channels of music or myth, patterns of love or brutality, recipes for lynching or apple pie—but the insinuation that all those legacies intertwine into a single braid: the tradition.

Brown’s title poem compresses that very insinuation into a bifocal Americanized sonnet—one lens clarifies the distant poetic past, one sharpens  the up-close political present. It opens with “men like me and my brothers” taking hold of classical tradition, cataloguing flowers in the manner of pastoral elegy—“Aster. Nasturtium. Delphinium. We thought/Fingers in dirt meant it was our dirt, learning/Names in heat”—and then fast-forwards, in a closing glimpse, to blossoms the hue of bloodshed, flowers in “colors you expect in poems/Where the world ends, everything cut down./John Crawford. Eric Garner. Mike Brown.” Even amid pastoral ease, Brown can’t escape the sight of America’s police, perfecting a tradition of murdering Black men in summer daylight. Brown’s final pentameter draws out an iambic dignity pulsing through these three men’s “names in heat”—but it too is “cut down,” one syllable too soon.

Never satisfied with any flat, fixed image of the tradition, Brown tests out every slant and its reverse: us and them, survivor and victimizer, past and present. One poem, “Dear Whiteness,” coos Fleetwood Mac to that spineless lover (“Tell me lies. Tell me sweet little lies”); another poem, “Riddle,” plays puppeteer with imperial whiteness itself, coolly logical and insatiable: “We see/A sea so cross it. We see a moon/So land there. We love land so/Long as we can take it.” (“Riddle” ends unanswered: “What on Earth are we? What?” Next poem: “Good White People.”) If The Tradition, Brown’s rangiest, riskiest collection yet, can hear the clipped music menace makes, it also finds long, sturdy lines to hold gratitude up high. “I love black women/Who plant flowers as sheepish as their sons,” professes one sheepish son, all grown up. “I’ll never know who started the lie that we are lazy,” but when Brown finds “that bastard,” does he have a sight in store:

I’d love to wake that bastard up
At foreday in the morning, toss him in a truck, and drive him under God
Past every bus stop in America to see all those black folk
Waiting to go work for whatever they want. A house? A boy
To keep the lawn cut? Some color in the yard? My God, we leave things green.
—From Foreday in the Morning

Green as in freshness, as in greenbacks well earned, as in yet-to-blossom futures rooted in black soil. The tradition comes in every color.

—

Space Struck, by Paige Lewis.
Sarabande Books. $15.95.

Online, month by month, I watched it happen: a new genre of poem was emerging, but I had no clue who was responsible. These brainy poems didn’t wait to spout off trivia, historical and scientific—“Pavlov Was the Son of a Priest” (a characteristically quotable title) recalls that “the moon smells like spent gunpowder,” then divulges some smoldering self-knowledge: “I’m sorry/I couldn’t hide my joy when you said lonely.” With the batty composure of a GPS gone glitchy, the poems guided you down this or that linear path before steering you—surprise!—off the cliff-edge of normalcy. They conscripted bands of oddballs—astronauts, diamond thieves, illusionists,  martyrs, “God’s Secretary, Overworked”—and proved their worth with close-up magic of their own, miracles in plain sight. Even at a loss, these poems were fluent in funniness, retweetably jokey: “I’m//the vice president of panic, and the president is/missing.” But once the play subsided, you found yourself moved—unaccountably, almost, until you discovered, reading back up the poem, that even the zaniest elements had several parts to play. What looked like a genre, I soon realized, was all the handiwork of one poet. Their name is Paige Lewis.

The title of Lewis’s first full-length collection, Space Struck, suggests someone who knows better than to fritter attention on the moon and the stars, those aristocrats of the night sky—both outer space and inner space have myriad more marvels in store. It comes to suggest the multiple senses and sensations of being struck—awestruck, horrorstruck, wonderstruck—by the mere matter of inhabiting space: inside houses of worship whose layouts mismatch the funhouses of your mind; in ecosystems at once overstuffed and dying off; along social and literary plots where gender roles are fixed, pushing nonbinary people to pick a side.

The phrase “space struck” becomes literal, even slapstick, in Lewis’s title poem, a dramatic monologue that takes on the voice of Ann Hodges, “the first confirmed meteorite victim.” Out of the statistically all-but-impossible, Lewis extrapolates a model for any body inspected and projected-on, miniaturized and fetishized:

I remember the doctor lifting my nightgown
to see how high the bruise climbed. He seemed

disappointed—A thinner woman would’ve died. I was
small when I was young. Didn’t take up much space.

What looks like rapture (at last!) is only rapacity: “I thought it was God,//since I’d been told it’s painful to bear witness.” At least, Hodges bargains, “it was a blessing to my husband,//who pretends the bruise is still there,” and proves himself as chilly, as clinical, as her doctor: kneading her thigh, “He says, How deep, like he’s reaching into a galaxy./He says, How full, and looks up to see if I wince.” Rotate our vertical yearning for deep space ninety degrees, Lewis implies, and you arrive at these men’s self-serving expeditions,  annexing Hodges’s chance run-in with the sublime, turning her now-invisible traumas into their deep, full specimens. In Lewis’s fourteen-line poem (a sonnet sorted into couplets, those space-saving compartments), attraction is a matter not of who we are but of which unreachable mental expanses we are made, willingly or not, to represent.

Like “the first confirmed meteorite victim” it remembers, “Space Struck” is an exception within a book full of exceptions, every poem representatively unrepresentative. Far more of Lewis’s poems view love as a cosmic lottery they’ve somehow won, chattily bewildered that a universe where we can feel, at times, like such misfits could also generate, at times, corresponding misfits who meet our rough edges so seamlessly. Five poems in Space Struck mention, but not one restricts its attention to, “my beloved”—a term of endearment, equal parts throwback and tease, that Lewis tosses about with kiss-and-tell nonchalance. Always a reported-on “he,” never an idealized “you,” “my beloved” emerges as a character just as loopily in love as Lewis, someone Lewis can dish on to their other intimates, their readers. “When we//stretch our shadows across the bed,” they confide, “we get so tangled/my beloved grips his own wrist,//certain it’s mine, and kisses it.”

Lewis’s skyrocketing mind runs on novelty, and when they aren’t finding that novelty in the people closest to them, they’re busy scouring for curiosities, skeletons for the metaphysical conceits on which they drape their patchwork feelings. “On Distance”—our millennium’s “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” its astronomical authority less Copernicus than Bill Nye the Science Guy—dispenses with its subject two words in. Distance? “It’s nothing.” Seasons pass, the sun swoops millions of miles toward us, “and we are still//alive.” In case their beloved can’t follow their knotty instructions (“Make the dirt//spit its watermelon seeds back between/children’s teeth”), Lewis puts it as exactly as they know how:

What I mean is,
in California, a city celebrates the life

of a firehouse light that’s been burning
for over a century. The citizens throw
parades, they take photos, and they share

this light live through websites. What I mean
is, this one light can reach as many people
as the sun, and you only have to reach me.

A reader with no intention of receiving love poems anytime soon could object that what Lewis “means,” really, is their last words: reach me. Yet “On Distance” would be less fun and less seductive, less true to the emotions its winding sentences disentangle, without the centuries-old “firehouse light” within which Lewis spots their own enduring, shareable ardor; without the methodical logic that takes this staircase-shaped stanza one step at a time; and without that undissociated sensibility that could ford the solar system but wants, more than anything, for you to come to me.

I have no idea how Lewis assembles their poems, but Space Struck  suggests the work of a collector who amasses anecdotes, inside jokes, observations, and stock images taken from alarming angles: “I’m going to show you some photos,” the book opens, “extreme close-ups of normal, everyday/creatures.” Most of their poems pick one stanza shape, then stick to it—a regular timekeeping within which Lewis works comic syncopations. Their sonic variety originates, instead, from their bouncy-ball speakers, pinging between opposing tones: pre-K pipsqueak to postapocalyptic wheeze, Planet Earth voiceover to otherworldly transmission. Some speakers, like overstudied conversationalists, deploy every tactic (one-liner, thought experiment, party trick) to keep their addressees hooked. Others are overdriven amplifiers, making distorted fuzz out of macho authorities, guys being dudes, kings and strongmen and the bro of bros, the Christian God. It’s on-again, off-again with the Almighty; “God Stops By,” in the poem of that title, like one more exploitative ex, back “to show me how healthy He’s been. He’s/sleeping more. He built his own gym.” Yet Lewis often yearns for divine interventions and irrefutable epiphanies, the very certainties their doubting comedy prevails in puncturing. It’s one thing to claim to discover, with definitional clarity, what makes a miracle. It’s another to alight on that discovery as Lewis does, in a poem whose title runs over into the text: “The Moment I Saw a Pelican Devour”

a seagull—wings swallowing wings—I learned
that a miracle is anything that God forgot
to forbid.

Another poet would reserve that balanced aphorism for an ending; Lewis, yanking it out of a cartoonish dust cloud of wrenched wings and stray feathers, makes it the poem’s first waystation, with a dozen more to follow.

“The real is only the base,” wrote Wallace Stevens—like Lewis, a  cosmonaut of an interstellar imagination. His adage continues: “But it is the base.” Lewis never leaves that base for good; even at their outlandish extremes, Lewis’s comic routines are fingerprinted with social routines and practicality’s dictates: “My ghost drops by so often/I no longer feel obligated to offer//it our good coffee.” But their most adventurous poems are not imagination alone; their space explorations complete, they turn around, land back on the base, and drill down into the real, the reason they started exploring at all. “I believe those who believe that the greatest comedians/are the ones who’ve suffered most,” Lewis admits, midway through “Turn Me Over, I’m Done on This Side”—the last words of Saint Lawrence, patron of cooks and comedians, to the men roasting him alive. That poem, Lewis’s cross-examination with their own funniness and its limits, finds suffering outnumbering comedy, both in a climate-scorched present and in a childhood less than innocent:

After Hurricane Andrew,
I watched from the porch as my brother canoed into
a downed wire. I wonder if we name storms because
naming is the only power we’re left with. Give me more time

and I’m sure I could make this funny.

Don’t doubt them. The next lines turn up the Looney Tunes–grade image of prayers lifted by helium balloons, a pun on “inflated prices,” and a wrecking ball to the fourth wall: “Was that a good joke?” But don’t miss the plea perched atop a stanza break, one of the rare betrayals of frankness halting the breath of Lewis’s perpetually moving poems. Give me more time.

July/August 2019

From this Issue

poetry-magazineIntroduction

poetry-magazineFreedom

Table of Contents

Introduction

Freedom