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mattdube 's review for:
Angle of Yaw
by Ben Lerner
I'll admit to being kind of a sucker for liking this book as much as I do, but reading these poems, after a couple books that didn't take risks and didn't seem to have a motivating purpose, really electrified me in the best possible ways.
This book alternates beyond "lyrical" poems-- basically, long lineated poems in sections, one section per page-- and sections made up of short, untitled prose poems (so, maybe one long prose poem? But I didn't read them that way). The "lyric" poems are laughably dry and anti-lyric, if you think that they'd have something emotional in them. They read, at first blush, like a philosophical argument boiled down to it's essence, something like a mathematical proof, though there are funny asides squeezed in there, like in a poem reckoning with Regan's legacy, we read "Blood is a vegetable when it forms part of a lunch." But each line here and in the other "lyrics" are dry, almost axiomatic statements, stacked on each other.
The prose poems, by contrast, were more fluid, slipping through voices and moods. Sometimes allusive, sometimes funny, almost confessional in moments, we might get full sentences or phrases, puns or weird asides. One after another, they twist and jostle against each other and you as the reader as you try to follow the train of thought that brought these ideas into contact. Tight, to gloss them takes five times as many words as the poem uses. In spite of these challenges, the poems are warm and funny and seem to emerge from a specific personality; they are not abstract, but very personal. Not all of them are great; some reach for a stupid punchline and are a little too aware of a reader. But still, what a read.
Good stuff.
This book alternates beyond "lyrical" poems-- basically, long lineated poems in sections, one section per page-- and sections made up of short, untitled prose poems (so, maybe one long prose poem? But I didn't read them that way). The "lyric" poems are laughably dry and anti-lyric, if you think that they'd have something emotional in them. They read, at first blush, like a philosophical argument boiled down to it's essence, something like a mathematical proof, though there are funny asides squeezed in there, like in a poem reckoning with Regan's legacy, we read "Blood is a vegetable when it forms part of a lunch." But each line here and in the other "lyrics" are dry, almost axiomatic statements, stacked on each other.
The prose poems, by contrast, were more fluid, slipping through voices and moods. Sometimes allusive, sometimes funny, almost confessional in moments, we might get full sentences or phrases, puns or weird asides. One after another, they twist and jostle against each other and you as the reader as you try to follow the train of thought that brought these ideas into contact. Tight, to gloss them takes five times as many words as the poem uses. In spite of these challenges, the poems are warm and funny and seem to emerge from a specific personality; they are not abstract, but very personal. Not all of them are great; some reach for a stupid punchline and are a little too aware of a reader. But still, what a read.
Good stuff.