Editors’ Notes (Posit 34)

 

Welcome to Posit 34!

The singularly powerful literature and art in this issue challenges conventional dualities of appropriate and inappropriate, beautiful and unbeautiful – as well as the props of avoidance and aversion on which they lean. These ingenious and accomplished artists and writers find the through-line from body to beauty by celebrating the glory of unglorified physicality. It is a privilege and a pleasure to offer works of courage, conviction and love that are as profound as they are liberating.

What happens when a terrifically charismatic personage walks into a room? Galen Cheney’s dynamic paintings are that personage. These large and intricate abstractions of color and energy combine past with present as the artist reuses, rediscovers and recombines materials from past works to make new and exciting compositions. Her life-long interest in graffiti and other works that show the hand of the artist is reflected in the exhilarating movement and sure and brilliant color work in these passionate pieces. Her process involves collage, “fragments and strips of paintings that I have ripped or cut up” woven and painted into new compositions with a seize-the-day attitude that reminds us, as she says, “there is no time to make anything that is not true.”

Derek Coulombe’s musical and wildly imaginative ekphrastic poems are an exuberant and pointedly unglorified celebration of materiality. The graphic detail of his poetic reportage challenges standard notions of nature and artifice, beauty and disgust. Umberto Boccioni’s bronze sculptures (among other influences) come joyously to life in a very bronze way: “Three bronze-all-the-way-through runners running at speed under heavy sun and all atop these extremely green lawns. Bronze-all-the-way-through means bronze outers and bronze inners, bronze skin, blood, mucus, bronzy organs, bronze lungs blowing in and out all heavy under all the running, bronze colon moves bronze stool, and bronze urine comes out wet in bronze jets.” Coulombe invents a surprising, almost exhilarating moment in imaginary time: shrieking bronze runners “running heavy beneath a smiling and hot sunshine smile widely too, all three smile with smiles of bronze too, big and wide, toothy, with bronze tongues, bronze teeth and gums, and all with shrieks ringing out and upwards always.” To go further, some of the sculptures are torsoless, “and so every low roundness of every soft bronze part is a sort of smiling line, a big torsoless grin from all the hard running parts and all three times over.” Coulombe, too, details the bronze “meatuses” and “feces, mucus, spittle, wax;” in short, every anatomical organ and its concurrent actions and reactions that are strangely, yet familiarly, human. This delightful and joyous tour-de-force all takes place “under the big warmth of the sun and the kind color of the powdered blue sky.”

The queerness of Steve DeFrank’s painting defies assimilation into the stale dichotomies of conventional aesthetics in favor of a joyful and ambitious syncretism. With their orifices flowering, melting, and exploding in cartoon shapes, toy-like textures, and colors reminiscent of neon, play-dough, and bubblegum, these works combine the irreverent humor of a Shakespearian fool with a surrealistic visual vocabulary reminiscent of Dali’s dripping clocks and a graphic eroticism that brings to mind O’Keefe’s flowering genitalia. This is joyful work that challenges received ideas of beauty and humor with graceful and accomplished painterly technique.

The aural, visual, and conceptual elements of Jared Fagen’s poems operate in concert. His short, frequently one-word lines are austere in their spareness yet breathlessly urgent, enacting, in the poet’s words, “delay, deferral, suddenness, and respiratory performance” in order to reach and utter “the essential.” The “lapidary lilt” of Fagen’s prosody not only offers “a viaduct / to an / interior” via an “aria / of waves” but it operates on a visual level as well: these long, narrow poems lead the reader’s eye headlong down the (virtual) page like plumblines searching the metaphysical depths. Engaging the multiplicity (or non-existence) of identity, art’s quest for “agape” and “Tarkovsky’s gold,” and the ineluctable pre-eminence of time (“we lose / to what passes” until “we / shatter abruptly”) — these chiseled verses decline facile notions of closure with disciplined attention.

Thomas Fink’s “Yinglish Strophes” invoke the back-and-forth flow of the ancient Greek chorus to and from a point of origin to enact a dialogue with the poet’s immigrant roots. The “yinglish” of these poems channels the wry irreverence and blunt, evaluative stance of their Yiddish-speaking narrators, capturing the tension between the Old and New Country generations with humor but not condescension — or romanticization. These verses capture the economy and inspiration of their speakers’ admonitions, despite and because of their imperfect grasp of their adopted tongue: “Is brisket / shopping this?” captures every ogled woman’s sentiment in four words as efficiently as “[f]inds / the take with the / give” captures a realistic attitude towards marriage. These narrators may be dispensing advice in a new world, but their old world wisdom is clearly applicable, whether it be to love or politics, social trends or the manipulations of our market system (“would fib lots stores / from label truth”), poetry (“[t]o make / a living doesn’t flow // that river”), or popular culture. With unmistakable fondness and a poet’s ear, these verses take up the challenge: “Why not / of your origin be civil?”

Maxwell Gontarek’s intricate vision reacts to Vallejo and Lorca, language and “the stippling of science” through “lattices” that explore the idea of envelopes, and question what “envelopes” us, including history and politics, guns and antelopes; a history of the Americas where “my godmother worked at the envelope factory for 50 years + she still wakes up at 3:00 AM / you asked if she liked it I said I didn’t think it crossed her mind.” In this poet’s clear-eyed view, we may be living in “a hemisphere that is actually an envelope.” And Gontarek says outright what all poets sometimes think: that even “after the revolutionists stop for orangeade / . . . the most your poem can do to support a movement is to give someone a papercut.” Thankfully, Gontarek perseveres, giving us verses that show us hidden layers of the world we live in, slightly askew and loved: “It is such a cool night / No matter what our heads will remain cow-shaped and we will try not to tip.”

Jessica Grim looks through a green lens, sometimes dark, always compassionate, at our relationship with language, the natural world, and ultimately ourselves. We have little real control and sometimes great sadness: “west of here where / sun rises later you / could weep for the dark / compression of your thoughts.” Grim suggests we share this kinship with nature: “tiny bird / dislodging dessicated / leaves from the / smallest branch // as might become / a past we / have little relation to / outside / of having lived it.” Our own lived experience is narrow, but the vastness of our unknowing is compensated by this realization, and in unlooked for, unexpected joy: “Sky through shades / of green / defining color / screed / as it finally wanders into song.”

Heikki Huotari’s prose poems interweave internal references as well as concepts from science, mythology, philosophy, contemporary politics, and popular culture. Individually and as a group, these poems highlight the absurd yet melodious music of existence. At the same time, these “flights of fancy seek to serve.” With erudition, grace, and humor, they offer an incisive commentary on the complexities and contradictions of our lives. This work is concerned with the relationship between reality and our account of it, in which “reality is flowing and reality is ebbing on an oblique mile-wide boundary of misinformation,” and “what one knows with 90% certainty is 95% cliché.” Facing such a mismatch with our shibboleths, the speaker is sensible to “jealously . . . guard my wave state,” even as he undertakes to “sing the feedback loop into existence.”

In R.J. Lambert’s alchemical ekphrastic poems, the work of an unknown artist is addressed in the language of art criticism reminiscent of the 19th century writing of John Ruskin. But it’s as if Ruskin has been transported to a strange new realm where the membrane between poetry and art is transcended: “The draw of broken art, domi—— / The vitality. His p—— / his color—transcen——.” The work itself transforms during the course of the poem to an ecstatic and unexpected embodiment: “Minor color, L’art ancien / reports no brown ink. / Also, a mixture closer / to feathered time / which, in print / the bodily structure reveals.” The poet asks us to reflect on these marvels induced by art (“The future’s graphic/drawing of drawings / impacts the personal”) with sober joy, even wonder: “An artist playing artist, / filling out the forms / All of this is mine? / Even the cobwebbed moth / Even the flattened lizard.”

Brendan Lorber’s militant poems about the “not normal times” of the pandemic train a sharp eye and attentive ear on the exploitive underlying logic of capitalism, which makes us hope “that the economy / might not be totally over . . . despite / only ever having been a chasm we participate in by screaming.” The distress informing Lorber’s verses is balanced by the spirit of resistance animating his witty but urgent warning against the “oligarchs’ dark arts” tricking us into “driving [ourselves] down / a boulevard of faschy schemes.” These poems offer a wake-up call against the “self-lethality” of complicity. “Like someone full of sparkle in the form of batteries / and marbles they ought not to have swallowed,” we are urged not to surrender to the dominant narrative and let “ulterior neglect” become “a principle come to life within its victims.”

Suzanne Maxson’s poems are full-throated celebrations of life, even as they cast an unflinching eye on the artist’s struggle to “savor / life on two feet” and access “the catalog we call myself” after devastating damage to “those / neural threads where in the pons perception, attention, / and memory entangle.” Astoundingly, these poems find meaning even at the moment of loss: while a stroke renders “the air a bright translucent dimensional density / of motion,” the speaker finds herself “distracted and absorbed / by every beauty even in the form and utility / of that green plastic hospital mug.” These poems celebrate “the visible the tangible and the intangible / . . . this impermanent placement on the ground / called home” — the “sufficiency of beauty and feeling” of “what is.” Although “the day is only white noise / to which we dance a jerky jig // while above the birds that day / pours into itself as night,” Maxson proves that “everything is all right . . . even in the unjust / and violent world unfurling always into / chaos” because everywhere there is beauty to be found, if we know how to look: in those birds and that jig, in Rothko’s silence and Frankenthaler’s “fifty-one colors,” in a Welsh farmer’s “broken / brown teeth” and a mother calling “out to my children / Here I am for you, imperfect / but present,” and above all, in these powerful elegies to the gift of existence.

Mikey Swanberg’s poems can make you cry. They are full of humility, joy, and love serendipitously found in the details of the dailiness of life. “I knew I knew nothing / The dog of kindness / pressed her paw hard / on my hip / Wild blackberries / scratched the shit / out of my arms, but later / I couldn’t find a mark.” There’s a Frank O’Hara spontaneity and sweetness to these poems: “did birds once fly in and out of you / or was that me.” Swanberg has abundant love for the past in all of us: “my god I liked to stay up late / in the kitchen talking shit / being sweet and noisy / in those blue cat hours,” and old loves are not forgotten: “I’ve been wearing as a winter coat / what someone I love once said to me.” Along with love and life, these poems celebrate art, including poetry: “only half of the calls the birds make come with a purpose / the experts all agree / that they just really like to sing.”

Ken Taylor’s richly allusive poems combine echoes of Benjamin’s aesthetic theory, the nostalgic Americana of Western player pianos and tintypes, and Tintoretto’s “gay” depiction of Maundy Thursday, with a more personal evocation of the unsatisfying fragility of modern life, especially during the pandemic, “when the calendars quit” and “the sun rose and fell but nothing advanced.” Taylor exposes a hollow repetitiveness underlying the tales we tell ourselves, “framed as a constant stickup,” and the need to believe otherwise, “tightly bound in the chords of a pitched belief that i’d escape the lassoing abyss.” But he also celebrates defiance of stale norms, suggesting an overlap between the Holy Trinity and an anonymous, nonbinary protagonist, X (“the many unfolding as one”) who wants “to say what it is not what it means,” and “aims to make fibrous smooth — / returning to the grid of viscous promise” in the hopes of “moving closer to a feast they can almost taste.”

Kukuli Velarde’s ceramic sculptures contain multitudes and span millennia. With fertile imagination and impressive technique, she undertakes an ambitious investigation of, in the artist’s own words, “aesthetics, cultural survival, and inheritance . . . revolv[ing] around the consequences of colonization in Latin American contemporary culture.” These works bring humor, anger, love, joie de vivre, and aesthetic pleasure to the complexities of “colonization and coloniality, contemporary history, social injustice and racism” – capturing and exploring colonialism’s generative as well as destructive impact on aesthetic expression. Velarde combines indigenous and Christian, ancient and contemporary iconographies to invent an oeuvre as organically rooted as it is original.

Mary Wilson blends lyrical images with a stunning and sensitive clarity about our response to the political and natural world. “It’s raining in the news / a storm or congress of box / jellies on the artificial reef / where some “they” sank / ships, planes and concrete.” In striking metaphors, Wilson notes some machine-like qualities in us, “Before the house stands a small girl / whose face, obscured in the rubble of / the foreground has been blurred / by some precision. It’s like, “look / here, you’re a tense lens mounted / to a vehicle.” Behind these original and somewhat disconcerting perceptions where “we get the very weight of looking,” there’s a deep understanding of who we are and what we could be, “[w]hen at last we’re hopeful / Secure from our want.”

We hope you enjoy these as much as we have!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann

Editor’s Notes (Posit 33)

 

Hello, and welcome to the Spring, 2023 issue of Posit! In keeping with the season, this issue is alive with generative intensity. The work collected here manages, like alchemy, “to mix / transformation into transformation” until “from lead: gold’s blood // pulses” and “sequence becomes epiphany” (Elizabeth Robinson, “The Voynich Manuscript”). These accomplished and provocative pieces derive their energy from the determination to transform surprise into recognition, mystery into insight, and suffering into resolve. It is a pleasure and an honor to present innovative literature and art that can engage the pain and puzzlement of our lives with such grace and depth.

Carrie Bennett’s powerful poems move from descriptions of familiar objects and daily tasks to the deep secrets of our fears, our histories, and their embedment in our bodies. We “want words to grow into something / green with leaves and it is never so easy / for the wound to close. / When I say rain is it the sound / of a chainsaw or how a father can drink / until his eyes are lost in his face?” But, as painful as it is to be alive when “[e]ach house is encased in its own danger,” there is always more to uncover: “[a]ny moment can be a pointed flashlight.” A poem considering the difference between poetry generated by men and women ends up comparing poetry to life and exposing the gap: “my body isn’t a leaf or a thought though it did make another body,” one that “is full of milk and shit and spit-up.” Reality may be “nothing like an idea of something else,” but we need poetry like this to bring the idea to life.

Zoe Darsee’s intricate poetry builds and dismantles structures in our lives, both actual and emotional. The structure of the poems themselves models the emotional experience, beginning as a bleak observation, and building to a spiritual plane, as if the object has ignited the emotion. In “House of Dandelion,” the description of a house starts with the impossibility of description: the house is gone. But it’s not just the house, lies and promises are at stake: “To promise described house, let it quiver in mouth like frame of word. // If I have ever once lied, describe promised house I said to you.” As the poem progresses, the narrator describes another impossibility, a place where they are “trapped, in which I describe myself with the vocabulary of a construction site.” The end of the poem finally names the problem: “To describe said house is to trap a lie in four or more walls.” Another poem, slyly titled “This is not about you, love, or your bride,” contains a poem within a poem, and begins with actual disaster: “There’s a house on fire in the avenue.” Loss, of place, love, and life take the breath away, but the narrator reads the mind of the lover: “You love the tree because it breathes opposite air. You think, the tree is all that is left of me. . . // There’s truth and then there’s tree.”

Jasper Glen’s poems apply a unique and muscular lyricism to grapple with the ‘watershed’ between artifice and nature, whether embodied by poetry as opposed to “its / Absence, all earth and forgettable body,” or a florist’s attempt to “replicate an outcrop reaching natural capability” with a “fine mirage” as opposed to the “[i]intoxicating green complex” of a “[v]eridical / coniferous / rainforest.” Cartesian doubt (“If not at the skin does speculation end / Somewhere?”) and psychic pain (“But if the body is practice, / Do I love this place?”) lend breadth as well as depth to Glen’s quest to “[h]ave an open focus,” “[f]orget the body,” and “spar in a dark field” for poetry.

Kylie Hough returns to Posit with three prose poems about the dark side of conventionality and the falsity with which it represents itself with “[a] kiss, a hug, a dozen lies swallowed.” In these satirical, bracingly painful poems, the “monotony rampant in the suburbs” is contrasted with the “Disney endings” and “castles made from yellow bricks” that might make “high school sweethearts” expect “all we hoped for. Except it’s not.” Instead, the narrator entrapped by these false narratives is “an unrealised nobody moulded from midnight,” for whom “freedom looks like walking fully clothed into salted black water.” The angst at the heart of these pieces insures that Hough’s prose is “not akin to some field trip to the zoo. No, this is warfare. This is sculpting a tin man with gloved hands.” Her penetrating wit and pitch-perfect pacing not only confer meaning, but offer the possibility of a better alternative to the wasteland they confront.

In keeping with Jane Kent’s practice of layering her compositions from a foundation of what she calls “bland forms” in order to “uncover the oddness,” the prints featured in this issue take mirrors, frames, and windows as points of departure from which to explore the nature of reflection. These works cast light on the notion of “reflection” in multiple senses: not only the self-consideration of any self/viewer, or the self-reflectivity of the artist contemplating her own practice and its constituent elements like light, color, and the nature of the frame, but the contemplative thought inspired by these bold, pared-down, almost sculptural illuminations of the liminal zone between representation and abstraction. Just as mirroring entails alteration and reversal, these works invite the viewer to reverse the artist’s exploratory process, probing the deceptive simplicity of their graphic power to unpeel their layers of implication and insight. Even Kent’s transformation of reflected light into bands of solid, almost metallic-seeming color is a comment upon the transformative nature of the act of looking – a truth whose relevance extends from the human psyche to the building blocks of matter itself.

Returning to Posit with works of deceptive Dickinsonian simplicity, Kevin McLellan displays wit and pathos simultaneously in these new poems. Honest about himself, that to be “tired of /my own / company / also means / a deficit,” and that he might “kick-in / my defenses /so i don’t / hear / the good / explanation,” McLellan is no less blunt about his relationship with language: “more / truth / in hyphens / in / emphases: /please / let them / be.” There’s an intrinsic deepening of each observation, as cryptic as they may be. The very sparsity of language in these one- and two-word lines integrates silence, as well as one of their preoccupations, solitude, into their fabric. McLellan’s wry takes on the hard, sad things we discover/remember about others, and all too often, about ourselves, resonate. “[N]ot the same/people—were we?” “so now / the climb / must happen / again.”

David James Miller’s “Burn Accord” flows with tidal rhythms and the rhythms of breathing, combining elements of sea, sky and fire into a wondrous if “indistinct” whole. But what is indistinct? Images of light and dark in a controlled burn have the import of a vision. The elements exchange and re-exchange to become “an evening psalmic / accord a listening light” and remind us how even “an indistinct sign night / can articulate(s) in listening.” In a recurring lyrical field of language, Miller’s poem moves “as sea become grasses an un / knowing breath calls into / manifest shadows mnemic.” It’s as if we are standing on a vast hill in the night, listening, watching, both remembering earth’s history and experiencing it as “a horizon evening empties / of listening” and “become(s) skies.”

Pat Nolan’s poetry juggles the Gorgiasian conviction that “nothing exists” with what “Heraclitus reminds:” that “in the end all I can do is point / at the way things are.” Ranging in their inquiry from the nature and purpose of poetry itself (including “the poetry memo of poetry // “abbreviate” ) to the delicate everyday glory of “the steady glazing rain’s / constant splash murmur[ing] at the eaves” or the “setting sun’s rich / light buttering / an upturned face,” to the “fine white grains of information” that make up everything in a universe in which “information is physical” and the physical is information, Nolan’s “surprising / tangents and keen insights” offer “a travel in time” narrated by a dedicated, supremely thoughtful observer searching for meaning in the “incipient enigma” of existence.

Elizabeth Robinson returns to Posit with a transformative ‘translation’ of the mysterious Voynich Manuscript, accompanied by original illustrations of its notorious asemic “script that will bear no translation.” These haunting verses make us believe in a magical book of origin written by “[w]e women with our tiny, upright nipples” that both explains the document’s imagined content and interweaves it with images of the manuscript as a made thing, yet one that we inhabit. Thus, after a history of “page after page of bloodletting and vowels” in a “[s]equence wandering without shoes, then without feet / To renege on delirium,” we find that “s]orcery says / what we shall never understand can, at least / be beautiful.” But the authors of this quasi-religious history/tale (which is very like the structure of the earliest histories in English) maintain that “[s]urely no evil can attend when magic / cannot be attributed to any source / that evil is only a salutation, a spell / in preparation” — a miracle most devoutly to be wished for our world as well as for this delightfully depicted one.

Jeanne Silverthorne’s sculpture concretizes her engagement with the impenetrable mystery at the core of the physical world, both animate and inanimate, organic and synthetic — dichotomies which are challenged and undermined by this provocative and playful work. With wry humor and deadly seriousness, Silverthorne’s sculptures devise concrete and tactile expression of the abstract, the subconscious, and the ineffable. Her spare, almost minimalistic depictions of humble, quotidian subjects like tennis shoes and wood planks, children’s books and bubble wrap, office chairs and dollies, plumb the depths of the psyche and the existential questions at the heart of mortality. For instance, Silverthorne reconstructs that almost trivializing icon of the unknown, the question mark, making it literally weighty and impossible to ignore, despite our laughable attempts to subdue it beneath layers of bubble wrap, or suspended from a meat hook. Challenging the viewer to contemplate the fleeting nature of the physical and the murky depths of the psyche (that is, to confront the known-unknown), Silverthorne, in the artist’s own description of Louise Bourgeois, “wants to rip off the lid of latency under which art boils and steams,” whose “desublimation, an art of personal risk, offers raw power as a way out of the present deadlocked, postformal situation,” using “drama or theatricality,” “viscerality,” and “startling juxtaposition” to disturbing and profound effect.

Grace Smith’s writing captures the tragicomedy of the human condition with both empathy and irony, mining the liminal zone in which sorrow and humor, disappointment and appreciation mingle. Smith’s language is as surprising in its formulations and juxtapositions as it is spare and direct, leaving much of the crux of the matter to emerge from the unspoken: that reality is “Sadder and Deeper” for all of us struggling to reconcile what we find and lose with what we hope for, the “new / Lives” planned while drinking “a 5 PM can in the shower.” The deep sadness in these works is warmed by admiration for the heart and grace of those with the courage to keep trying, like the people who “have a bright pail of blood balanced on / the air above them, always about to topple . . . [who] laugh so easily,” or the homeowner able to admire the family home being taken by the city, whose “beautiful eyes . . . were gold like fall and trying.”

Jeneva Burroughs Stone’s advocacy and personal experience with disability informs, but does not limit, the scope and depth of her poetry. The poems featured in this issue grapple with the nature of mortality and the intense drive for knowledge. “Rapture” reacts to a child’s photograph to mourn the fragility of life, in which “[b]reath, a fabric washed too many times, wears thin” and “[e]verything evaporates.” “MRI” evokes the ability of medical science to concretize the “imagistic jazz” and “dark areas, danger zones” of a son’s brain condition which the mother already knows all too well: “[m]y anticipation . . . itself a form of knowledge.” And “Numinous” wrestles with the relationship between divinity and scientific truth, the “clean clear talk of mathematics” and the “body of eternity encoded like a closed door. I, too, want to knock and come in.”

David Storey creates self-contained worlds that stand apart from what we know, or think we know, of our own exteriorities and interiorities, even as they echo with its resonances. This work makes a persuasive case for the abandonment of common distinctions between the abstract and the representational, the observed and the imagined, the mechanical and the biomorphic, the animal and the human. Semi-abstract forms weave in and out of these paintings; design tropes that are as simple as they are irreducible to any one referent, be they scissors, surgical clamps, or eyeglasses (“Regulator”); fish or visors (“Big Sunset”); dragonfly wings or leaves (“Revolver”); fingers or tentacles (“Aquapiper”). These works offer a mind-opening sense of possibility: post-reality worlds in which physical and perceptual boundaries are transcended, making new forms of flowering — and mutuality — possible. Storey’s sharply delineated forms in bold, complementary, primary colors depict an energetic coexistence of opposites. Their complex layering creates the impression of multiple two-dimensional planes clamoring for the foreground. But the energy of their competition suggests an effusion of exuberance rather than aggression. The viewer is tempted, like Jack in the fairytale, to climb the “Ladder” of Storey’s proto-beanstalks and explore these alternative worlds, to encounter his wondrous beings firsthand, and perhaps even learn a thing or two about how to collectively thrive.

In Myles Taylor’s beautifully observed poems, different personae address our complicity in navigating the complexity of modern life: the skill and grace of the labor we take for granted, the forced secrecy of some lives, and the way we try to subsume sorrow in getting and spending. In “Unskilled Labor,” we are asked to notice how “the house painter’s pants /match every few buildings he passes, as if the city / were trying to copy them.” We observe behind the scenes at a restaurant, where “[i]t looks nothing short of telepathy, the slide / through narrow spaces like wrong sides of magnets” by “unskilled” laborers who also “has(have) a paper / to write, who’s playing a show later, who was up / until 4 am at their other job.” With justifiable pride, the narrator declares: “I only dream of labor if I can make it beautiful, / so I slice every scallion like a gift-wrap ribbon,” challenging the privilege and emptiness of consumerism: “What do you do? You take. / And you hold what you take. What a skill, / being handed things.” “Ode to the Mirror” exposes the pain of having to hide: “I take selfies in bathrooms / I could die in and keep doing / my makeup on the train. I have to limit my futures / based on where the corners/are darkest. / No one can see me because no one is looking. / But you.” And in a reminder of the line between wanting and having, the Patron Saint of Retail mourns: “the people flock to me / like a possession / could hold their grief for them.”

Nam Tran has gleaned old biographies and science books to make found poems that mirror the human psyche. The yellowed pages and the fonts themselves indicate the age of his source materials, as well as the language and syntax; but Tran has mined these works to match contemporary thought. These Zen-like aphoristic observations of “the restless waters of babble” bring to mind John Cage’s brilliant musical experiments with listening and attention. In “Primal,” selections from a chapter on How Animals Develop cleverly take the “im” in “animals” to turn the direction from a so-called objective view of other species to something very personal: “I’m an animal constantly on the move, running, breathing, catching food, eating it and so on.” And in “Child Memories,” we find an inspired conundrum about the nature of both childhood and courage: “the importance of heroism was hand delivered neatly to me in a half-whisper.”

Thank you so much for being here!

Susan Lewis, Carol Ciavonne, and Bernd Sauermann