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amaldae's review
4.0
How rare to finish a book of poetry on the same day it is started. How rare, then, to return to it immediately. This is something I wish to internalize and then spit out again (if possible); resolutely depressing, yet begging to be heard the world over.
I'm not making much sense, am I? I hope this is not making you-the-collective-of-potential-readers afraid, the box being more than references, and knowable to all. I think? (but at root, black, and queer, and most familiar to bodies deemed female.)
I wish I could do it more justice - & say things other than modern poetry really, really isn't so intimidating once the right collection is found. I wish someone hesistant out there will give this one a chance. But you kind of knew that already.
I'm not making much sense, am I? I hope this is not making you-the-collective-of-potential-readers afraid, the box being more than references, and knowable to all. I think? (but at root, black, and queer, and most familiar to bodies deemed female.)
To be in memory, destructive impulses,
a worship in the side room of the mind.
--
Survival skills liturgy:
Except, who was taken? We want to imagine our connections like sweet water.
Except, the possibility of complete missingness of the person. [...]
Sometimes, in spite of myself, the word, God.
A book is nothing, they say.
A want to theorize this phrase but then flesh just gone.
Tisa tells me about the coming dirt shortage. (p. 51)
I wish I could do it more justice - & say things other than modern poetry really, really isn't so intimidating once the right collection is found. I wish someone hesistant out there will give this one a chance. But you kind of knew that already.
benplatt's review against another edition
4.0
A formally interesting collection that pokes at frames, boxes, and categories while purposefully refusing to cohere on any recognizable terms of its own. It's a book of fragments and pieces that don't fit together, and a number of the pieces are compelling in their own right. I wish the "structured absences" of blackness and the way sin which limitations simultaneously generate and constrain, both of which are touched on here, were more of a focus; I guess I wanted deeper, not wider. What do we do once we recognize the box, the limitation, the social constructedness and the absence that lies in opposition to that construction? What comes after deconstruction? How does it interact with the material reality of the world (which again is touched on in this collection's focus on bodies, containers in their own right, but that I wanted more of)?
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.
Maybe I need to sit with the frustration of the absence this collection intentionally creates for longer, prod at what that absence is doing (I upgraded my rating by a star in the process of writing this review), what about Martin's experience can't be articulated within the boxes that exist within the world and the lack of an intelligible, coherent self within these pages is an expression of that, but I also think I maybe just read this in a place where I want something more than deconstruction, as wonderful an illustration of the concept as this collection seems to be. Or at least, I want deconstruction that goes as far as Derrida advocated, that identifies the dualistic oppositions and then proposes a third, new term that opposes the dualism in the first place as the necessary end of this kind of analysis. Maybe this collection does that and I need to revisit it, but I'm not there yet, I suppose.
rettaroo's review against another edition
A woman stands naked in the corner of an art studio. She is leaning into the crevice, surrounded by the sharp ninety-degree angles of the white walls – far from passive, her arm is arched over her head, one knee slightly bent. She is posing gracefully, sensually. A man is in the foreground. He is clothed. He holds his head in his hands or, he looks straight ahead, hand on hip. Paintings fill much of the space between the man and the woman, implying that the man is an artist, that this woman is his subject. It is impossible to argue that, although the woman inhabits the distant corner of this image, she is at its center. She is what pulls the observer’s gaze – even, this moment implies, the gaze of the man who is turned away from her. And yet, in actuality, the tableaux I describe is the work of performance based artist, Carrie Mae Weems. She is, in fact, the nude woman in the corner, impossible to ignore. Who, then, is framing whom? Who is the model and who is the artist? Can the violence of the male gaze, particularly directed at women of color, be subverted, perhaps through the more productive and reciprocal relationship of staring? It is this visual text Dawn Lindy Martin doesn’t merely evoke, but places squarely in front of the mind’s eye of her readers.
In the first poem of her collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life Martin begins:
“MO[DERN] [FRAME] OR A PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE ON
WHAT REMAINS BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE LIVING
BREATHING BLACK HUMAN FEMALE
After Carrie Mae Weem’s Framed by Modernism (1996)” (1).
Martin cries out to her readers in all caps, asking them to see the black human female, how living breathing women of color have carved out their own space despite attempts to confine both their bodies and their minds, addressing systemic and individual attempts to reduce black human females to bodies made of muscle, bone, sexual organs. Most importantly, Martin teachers her readers how to read her work. Martin goes on to write, “To feel a presence, they say, can be like a haunting” (1). This line introduces an ambiguity that permeates her work. Whose haunting presence is Martin addressing? The living, breathing white human male? Perhaps. The question, who is haunting who, is couched in the lines, “What would we do without her? How would we know ourselves?” (1). Martin stares back from the male gaze with these questions.
The critic and poet, Sueyeun Juliette Lee accurately describes Martin’s work as, “challenging, evocative, necessary.” Most challenging is Dawn Lundy Martins ability to provoke her reader, to make them feel uncomfortable and yet strangely satisfied upon reading her poems. The use of parataxis in many of her poems builds a momentum that doesn’t let up. And the boxed form of many of the poems in the collection can give the reader an almost claustrophobic feeling at times. However, this claustrophobic feeling is paradoxically liberating for what it does not allow to be said. In one of her poems published on the Poetry Society of America website, she writes of “The hardness of silence, its tremendous matter, the nothing that is some thing, and of its coming.” This, I think, is what the occasional un-pretty repetition of the form did to and for me.
Her work is containment within containment created through the use of quotes, for example – “black”, “brown”, “blackness”, “poor” – and the brackets that contain phrases and sentences such as “[The body in the basement is bobbled with welts. It cries and cries in a wet corner. We must leave this in the well]” (14). Or, even more striking are the brackets that contain blacked out words or nothing at all. This effect is not one that seems to replicate a series of nested boxes but, rather, a tesseract. With language, Martin makes moves from representation to perception, turning into systemic repression, turning outward into resistance, turning vertically into history, turning horizontally into the present moment into erasure, into what needs to be written. These moves ultimately force what is not said to seep out of the edges.
Throughout the text, Martin’s incorporation of language from texts such as “The Degeneracy of the American Negro”; “The Negro Question”; and Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro are not called out explicitly, as she does with the work of Carrie Mae Weem. An intentional and self conscious calling attention to the way language is used in an attempt to disembody women of color –the way the humanity, dignity, sexual autonomy, safety is compromised, of course, by violent acts, but also by and through language, Particularly the written word. The texts she incorporates were written to indoctrinate, to weave an anthropological and historical narrative. But, beneath Martin’s pen, the racist, paternalistic language of these texts then is repurposed. She writes, “For thousands of/years there lies/behind the race one/dreary, unrelieved,/ monotonous chapter/of ignorance, nakedness,/superstition, savagery” (55). The speaker in the next line exclaims, “When we encounter the savage, we are in reverie” (55). She calls out the authors of these texts as well as the larger white “we” and turns their own language on them, pointing out their need for daydreaming and conjuring an other, again, in order to define themselves as “pristine.”
It is particularly poignant to me that words such as “white” and “whiteness” are absent. However, the words and their connotations loom around the poems. The white space pushing up against the neatly boxed poems make Martin’s resistance and empowerment all the more impactful.
In the first poem of her collection, Life in a Box is a Pretty Life Martin begins:
“MO[DERN] [FRAME] OR A PHILOSOPHICAL TREATISE ON
WHAT REMAINS BETWEEN HISTORY AND THE LIVING
BREATHING BLACK HUMAN FEMALE
After Carrie Mae Weem’s Framed by Modernism (1996)” (1).
Martin cries out to her readers in all caps, asking them to see the black human female, how living breathing women of color have carved out their own space despite attempts to confine both their bodies and their minds, addressing systemic and individual attempts to reduce black human females to bodies made of muscle, bone, sexual organs. Most importantly, Martin teachers her readers how to read her work. Martin goes on to write, “To feel a presence, they say, can be like a haunting” (1). This line introduces an ambiguity that permeates her work. Whose haunting presence is Martin addressing? The living, breathing white human male? Perhaps. The question, who is haunting who, is couched in the lines, “What would we do without her? How would we know ourselves?” (1). Martin stares back from the male gaze with these questions.
The critic and poet, Sueyeun Juliette Lee accurately describes Martin’s work as, “challenging, evocative, necessary.” Most challenging is Dawn Lundy Martins ability to provoke her reader, to make them feel uncomfortable and yet strangely satisfied upon reading her poems. The use of parataxis in many of her poems builds a momentum that doesn’t let up. And the boxed form of many of the poems in the collection can give the reader an almost claustrophobic feeling at times. However, this claustrophobic feeling is paradoxically liberating for what it does not allow to be said. In one of her poems published on the Poetry Society of America website, she writes of “The hardness of silence, its tremendous matter, the nothing that is some thing, and of its coming.” This, I think, is what the occasional un-pretty repetition of the form did to and for me.
Her work is containment within containment created through the use of quotes, for example – “black”, “brown”, “blackness”, “poor” – and the brackets that contain phrases and sentences such as “[The body in the basement is bobbled with welts. It cries and cries in a wet corner. We must leave this in the well]” (14). Or, even more striking are the brackets that contain blacked out words or nothing at all. This effect is not one that seems to replicate a series of nested boxes but, rather, a tesseract. With language, Martin makes moves from representation to perception, turning into systemic repression, turning outward into resistance, turning vertically into history, turning horizontally into the present moment into erasure, into what needs to be written. These moves ultimately force what is not said to seep out of the edges.
Throughout the text, Martin’s incorporation of language from texts such as “The Degeneracy of the American Negro”; “The Negro Question”; and Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro are not called out explicitly, as she does with the work of Carrie Mae Weem. An intentional and self conscious calling attention to the way language is used in an attempt to disembody women of color –the way the humanity, dignity, sexual autonomy, safety is compromised, of course, by violent acts, but also by and through language, Particularly the written word. The texts she incorporates were written to indoctrinate, to weave an anthropological and historical narrative. But, beneath Martin’s pen, the racist, paternalistic language of these texts then is repurposed. She writes, “For thousands of/years there lies/behind the race one/dreary, unrelieved,/ monotonous chapter/of ignorance, nakedness,/superstition, savagery” (55). The speaker in the next line exclaims, “When we encounter the savage, we are in reverie” (55). She calls out the authors of these texts as well as the larger white “we” and turns their own language on them, pointing out their need for daydreaming and conjuring an other, again, in order to define themselves as “pristine.”
It is particularly poignant to me that words such as “white” and “whiteness” are absent. However, the words and their connotations loom around the poems. The white space pushing up against the neatly boxed poems make Martin’s resistance and empowerment all the more impactful.
meghan_is_reading's review
I'm not saying I understood every thing exactly but it feels important to keep reading, and rereading.
jacob_wren's review against another edition
5.0
"Indeed, we need something against which the pristine can manifest itself, can create its artifice of pristineness."
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