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sdolph's review against another edition
5.0
not what i expected, in a good way! reviewing/writing abt poetry is hard, but duplan is simply just Good At Poetry ™️. so many surprising moments & lines, lots of risk.
kell_xavi's review against another edition
3.0
Favourites were:
The Foyer Forever
The Foyer Forever
Pool Party
Try Not to Smile
Mule, the Only Mule
The Room is Not Cold
The Flying Phalangers
suddenflamingword's review against another edition
3.0
3.5?
"On A Scale of 1-10, How 'Loving' Do You Feel" sets a rambunctious, campy, sensitized tone that the collection as a whole swings in and out of a bit wildly. It makes for a jarring experience. It's not that the poems themselves are bad though, but that I've finished Take This Stallion but have no idea where I took it to. Arguably this is a symptom of its humanist ambition that ends on "do not waste your time trying to find/beauty in all things. Reserve your awe/for mammals in flight." This in the same collection where the poet buries God in the ocean ("For My Undead Father") and makes god a dog ("Tat Tvam Asi"), where beings are buried within beings (as parasites, as unbirthed deer, as reflections, as "the animal's mouth in your mouth," as "kid-killers" in the "wild furrows of my vulva") or are filled with an urge to consume either their "fill/of heroes" or "until hunger" re-orients the poet in "Try Not To Smile (When You're Not Getting Your Picture Taken)" or in the aptly named "Hunger (Motivational State)."
This is all to say the poems are...well, throughout the collection there are recurring characters whose names are the geometric symbols for square, triangle, diamond, star, and circle. They interact throughout in epistolary formatted poems and in poems titled as dialogue but structured as a poem, but to understand them as characters is (imo) to misunderstand what they are. They're characters, maybe, in the word-counting sense. Much like the famous names that splatter across "On A Scale of 1-10..." (with meaningful emphasis on Kim & Yeezus), these are manufactured identities which carry weight by fitting into a nexus of other symbols. The tension of these shapes is exactly in how pervasive their identities are throughout the collection, absent of real faces despite having recognizable shapes, and in how they're the ones who push the reader on. As the collection begins:
△ said to □, "Did I hit an animal back there?"
□ said, "No, don't look back."
And in the end, this is where the tension lies. The title of the poem is taken from the opening lines of the part 8 of "A Fledgling Is A Young Bird That Has Its Feathers And Is Learning To Fly." It goes, "You are in control. Take this stallion and ride it/to your demise. (Read: the sunset, behind the stars,/the green green garden.) Compare my flesh to yours." It's an exasperated landscape tired of idols and longing for nature, the violence of nature, the absence of characters and the return of the flesh. It would be a wonderful study for the intersection of speculative realism and the revival of existentialism, I imagine. It's a bit harder to love as poetry, despite being good poetry.
"On A Scale of 1-10, How 'Loving' Do You Feel" sets a rambunctious, campy, sensitized tone that the collection as a whole swings in and out of a bit wildly. It makes for a jarring experience. It's not that the poems themselves are bad though, but that I've finished Take This Stallion but have no idea where I took it to. Arguably this is a symptom of its humanist ambition that ends on "do not waste your time trying to find/beauty in all things. Reserve your awe/for mammals in flight." This in the same collection where the poet buries God in the ocean ("For My Undead Father") and makes god a dog ("Tat Tvam Asi"), where beings are buried within beings (as parasites, as unbirthed deer, as reflections, as "the animal's mouth in your mouth," as "kid-killers" in the "wild furrows of my vulva") or are filled with an urge to consume either their "fill/of heroes" or "until hunger" re-orients the poet in "Try Not To Smile (When You're Not Getting Your Picture Taken)" or in the aptly named "Hunger (Motivational State)."
This is all to say the poems are...well, throughout the collection there are recurring characters whose names are the geometric symbols for square, triangle, diamond, star, and circle. They interact throughout in epistolary formatted poems and in poems titled as dialogue but structured as a poem, but to understand them as characters is (imo) to misunderstand what they are. They're characters, maybe, in the word-counting sense. Much like the famous names that splatter across "On A Scale of 1-10..." (with meaningful emphasis on Kim & Yeezus), these are manufactured identities which carry weight by fitting into a nexus of other symbols. The tension of these shapes is exactly in how pervasive their identities are throughout the collection, absent of real faces despite having recognizable shapes, and in how they're the ones who push the reader on. As the collection begins:
△ said to □, "Did I hit an animal back there?"
□ said, "No, don't look back."
And in the end, this is where the tension lies. The title of the poem is taken from the opening lines of the part 8 of "A Fledgling Is A Young Bird That Has Its Feathers And Is Learning To Fly." It goes, "You are in control. Take this stallion and ride it/to your demise. (Read: the sunset, behind the stars,/the green green garden.) Compare my flesh to yours." It's an exasperated landscape tired of idols and longing for nature, the violence of nature, the absence of characters and the return of the flesh. It would be a wonderful study for the intersection of speculative realism and the revival of existentialism, I imagine. It's a bit harder to love as poetry, despite being good poetry.
jamesdig's review against another edition
5.0
One of the best single author poetry collection of the last decade. Actually, one of the best ever on post war American poetry. The first poem is maybe not the best, or at least it seems initially off putting in its pop culture references, but it all pays off and then everything after is gold. Kind of like a more politically engaged version of the kind of imagery that Patricia Lockwood does so well.
beyondrecovery's review
2.0
I had high hopes for this collection because I had read "The Room Is Not Cold & It Is Not Dark" and loved it, but unfortunately this just never really did it for me.
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