laura_sackton's reviews
168 reviews

Nomenclature: New and Collected Poems by Dionne Brand

I started this book in April, and read it slowly, an hour or two every weekend, for months. Then I put it aside, and read it sporadically throughout the fall. It’s brilliant. I will need to revisit it. The thing I’m mostly left with, is not just the way Brand uses language to pierce the world, or the way she is constantly interrogating what it means to use language, to be a poet, but the way all of her work is about time: how we are time beings, beings inside time, how we move through time and don’t. So much of her poetry returns to this idea in so many different ways, that we are time beings, and there is something she does with long poems, with lines, with the lack of punctuation, with verbs, with lists—she makes time in her poems. Her work is all about world-building, I think. She creates portals inside it. She is interested, I think, in how we move through time and maybe, too, the limits of time, i.e. what worlds can we build that somehow live outside of time? 

These poems are so often about living through impossible times, about the ending world, about violence and grief, and inside all of this, using poetry and language as we can, to try to make something new.

This is a teeny tiny paltry not-review of a masterwork.

Poem Bitten by a Man by Brian Teare

This is an incredible collage poem made up of fragments from Teare’s notebooks, journals, published work, and the work of many of the artists he writes about, mostly Jasper Johns and Agnes Martin but also others. It is about the dissolution of his relationship, about illness, about being chronically ill and the relationship between illness and creativity, between illness and writing. It’s deeply about the work of Martin and Johns and how these artists have affected him, about queerness and invisibility and what is left out of Johns work, especially in relation to whiteness, about how these artists approached making art. 

There is so much in here about visual art and poetry and space and spatial relationships and the material world and language and if they are the same and how they function, about art-making and queerness and beauty and representation and process, about what it means to make art and be in relationship, with others and with art. It’s a book about mark-making, about the marks we leave, about how we are marked by other people, about how to make marks and how to erase them. It is so dense, the form is amazing, a blend of paragraphs and stanzas, lots of parenthesis and quotations marks that don’t close. 

I read it too fast, and plan to revisit it and really sit with it. It made me think so much about process and outcome and also about artistic lineage and what art and artists we are haunted by. And it made me think so much about the connections between poetry and visual art. I’m still not sure what they all are but this book wrestles so much with language and visual language and living inside language, language at its most basic as mark-making with meaning.

Also there is so much in here about being sick and the impossible systems in this country that make being sick so hard, about how we do and don’t talk about disability, and especially about illness in romantic relationships and how hard it can be to leave a relationship when you’re sick even when your partner is not able to meet your needs. 

This book is so dense with references and other people’s words and thinkings, made me think so much about collage as a form in poetry, something I’ve never really thought about before. 

Advice from the Lights: Poems by Stephanie Burt

I enjoyed this collection but I didn't love it. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry that doesn’t feel image-ful or playful or like it is obsessed with language recently. This book felt a little bit like that, just too many lines that didn’t feel like they messed with and celebrated language the way I want poems to.

There is a series of Stephanie poems, where the poet remembers and reimagines their childhood as girlhood, that I loved. They are funny and sad. They are about both confusion and surety, wondering about what it might have been like if they’d been a girl or people had treated them like a girl or given them more space. 

There are also a bunch of poems like "My 1986", which are these poems about specific years, and what happened during them, what the BUrt remembers, which I liked for their specificity. There is this really lovely play and nostalgia fuckery in the way these poems look at the past. They're about memory and how weird it is and childhood and how weird it can be.

The Amputee's Guide to Sex by Jillian Weise

This is a sharp and searing collection about disability and desire and womanhood. The poems are tight, contained, constrained, they have this formal sharp rhythm that makes them feel solid, like walls, but you get the sense that something is about to burst out of the walls. They are specifically about being an amputee, and specifically about having a prosthetic leg, being a woman dating men and loving men as amputee. There are poems about sex, dates, medical appointments, the ordinary daily movement of life.

What I kept thinking about is how the form of these poems makes their fury burn. Because there is so much fury here, so much rage, and alongside the rage, exhaustion, a kind of fierce resignation that still she’s educating men about her body, still she is fielding these invasive questions. There is something so matter of fact about the neat lines, the lack of flashy punctuation, the tight controlled feeling of the poems that highlights the rage, that makes the rage feel almost too bright to sit with. The rage in these poems is a kind of love, it feels like a love letter to the body and the speaker. It's a rage born of love for her body but not empty love, not love that denies the complex pain. 

These poems are also dry and a bit funny, a humor fueled by their sharpness and sharp lines, by so many declarative statements. They also feel instructional in some ways. The titular poem is literally instructions, but beyond that it feels so much like the poems are trying to explain the realties of life in a disabled body that is so often viewed as not human, this hybrid body that is viewed as fake, not real, disgusting, a toy. Weise is trying to explain the truth of it but she won’t raise her voice, she’ll only use this simmering poetic rage, she won’t shout, she’ll just state these beautiful stark truths: Here, look. You don’t get to walk away. 

“This is my skin, my body and I am too 

alive, electric, meat and metal.” 

She makes of anger something beautiful and burning and bright, something to destroy with but also to build with. She builds poems out of anger but also she’s building her own body on her own terms. 

Modern Poetry: Poems by Diane Seuss

This book is incredible and I will need to reread it because wow. Wow. First of all, Seuss’s language is stunning. I have this feeling, when I pick up her books, that I am now in the hands of someone who is a master, and not in a weird way, just: she makes such beautiful sentences. That's all. She plays with language so beautifully. This book is sparse and spare and sad and wry and it’s mostly about poetry, about language, about making language, about reading and loving reading, words and loving them,  the weirdness of that. There's a poem called "Modern Poetry" and another called "Romantic Poetry", one called "Poetry" and another called "Against Poetry", and they are all brilliant poems about the life of a poet and the life of a human but mostly what they do is hold this contradiction: Why do we make art? How do we keep making it? 

In one poem she talks about uselessness as the essential definition of art which I can’t stop thinking about. It really resonated with me. I think too often people try to make art useful. Throughout this whole book she is poking fun of herself for loving words and books and poetry (she keeps asking what is the point, “a poem can’t love you”). She goes over all of these poets who have made words and what has any of it done? And she goes on doing it. She goes on loving it. She doesn’t resolve the contradiction.

This is also a beautiful book about aging. She keeps talking about how she’s done with love, she’s over that part, and it’s not like I don’t believe her, exactly, but there is this wryness in her tone that feels earnest. I don’t know how to describe it. At one point she talks about how she’s a cynic, but the last poem in the book is called "Romantic Poet", and it’s about a friend telling her she would not like Keats at all, he was horrible and smelled bad, and the last line is “But the nightingale, I said.” 

The whole book is held in that one line. So many words, so many beautiful arrangements of words. There is one poem about a comma and about the sounds of sentences that took my breath away. There are all these poems about living in the world but wanting to be far away from the world, about the poets she has loved and how strange it is to go on loving them. But she does not reign herself in. The proof is the writing. She’s sad and a little lost, maybe, hardened by the world, maybe, but here is this book. But the nightingale. We live in this impossible tension and there is nothing to do about it but go on living in it—or don’t. 

I thought a lot about the Mary Ruefle book about poetry I just read while reading this, the sensibility feels similar, in that both of these poets have this dry humor, they're skeptical of poetry as a disipline, they make fun of themselves and are a bit prickly, and yet they are also earnest. And I think there is something important here about earnestness, because it isn’t just pouring your heart out, although that's part of it. Seuss has a different kind of earnestness. She acknowledges that poetry is useless but she’s still into making beautiful sounds. Which is to be interested in the futility of it, which is to think about the artifice of it, which is to understand what the world of poetry and words and letters and books will never ever bring you, and then, still, to write a line like, “But the nightingale, I said.” The more I think about that line the more it floors me. It cuts through every other thing in the book.

Blade by Blade by Danusha Laméris

Oh, this book is so lovely, so delicate, so open, so heartbreaking. I was so delighted by the flowing, ordinary, reverent, lyrical slowness of these poems. Though they are very different from Ada Limón and Mary Oliver and Ross Gay, I had a similar reaction to them that I have to reading those poets: a sense of a deep sinking into the world, a sense of rootedness and nowness, a sense of wonder and reverence, abiding love, an attention to colors, trees, sunsets, beloved hands, and always, always, everywhere, grief. The inextricable braiding of grief and love. 

Many of these poems are about the ongoing grief of the death of her brother and her young son. They are also about love, gardens, colors, domestic routines, the body. I’m having trouble explaining how gentle I found these poems, how soft. Not in a meaningless or shallow or simple way. No, what I mean is that these poems to me feel like waterfalls, clay mugs, well-woven cloth, a maple leaf: things so deeply themselves you can’t imagine them in another shape. Honest, direct, surprising, yes, but with such a tenderness toward the speaker, toward the ongoing and endless grief of living with loss and loving through it, too. I read this book slowly and found that a good way to enter it, because in some ways it felt easy, smooth, like honey, and in other ways piercing. 

“What doesn’t / in time enter grief’s lexicon?” 

“We cannot love the earth / without getting blood on our hands.” 

Cardinal by Tyree Daye

This collection is full of roads, bones, ghosts, trees, and fields. Daye writes about his hometown in North Carolina, about his family’s travels in and out of the South, about the landscape of the places that made him. There are lots of birds, trees, and tobacco fields. There are highways and kitchens. He quotes The Green Book and The Warmth of Other Suns. Black movement, and the forces that seek to curtail it, are at the center of this collection. There is so much about geography and time, and so much about how the dead move (or don’t), and how ghosts also travel. 

I was so struck by the way Daye writes fields in this collection. Fields appear in nearly every poem. They are sites of violence—the legacies of plantation fields are ever-present, as are the cotton and tobacco fields throughout the South where so many Black families worked after slavery, in oppressive conditions and for meager pay. Fields carry ancestral ghosts, they grow trauma, there is often something sinister about the way Daye invokes them. And yet, they are also sites of freedom. In ‘Ode to Small Towns’ Daye writes: “This is where I danced / in the long moonlight of a field.” In a poem addressed to someone (a family member?) who leaves the South on a motorcycle, traveling, seeking freedom, there’s the line “breaking for a field’s freedom.” 

In ‘I Don’t Know What Happens to Fields’ Daye writes, “I’ve made whole days out of fields” evoking a kind of time-outside-of-time, as if fields, or at least this field in this speaker’s creation, operate and exist on different time. In the next poem, ‘From Which I Flew’ the first stanza reads: 

“Only together holding their hands in silence can I see what a field has done 

to my mother, aunts, and uncles.” 

Here, the field isn’t acting as a refuge but as a perpetrator of violence. Fields hold memoirs, grief, the possibility of freedom, knowledge, sustenance, sometimes literal bones. In one poem they are how the family measures the distance, counting the fields from one destination to the next. In another poem, Daye uses a field as a way to mark the passage of time, to mark change in a body. “I have a different body, a dented body, / fieldless and far gone.” 

‘Miles and Miles above My Head’ begins with these extraordinary lines: 

“my grandmother an unworkable field 

full of shooting stars 

in the soil of that field is everything my family needs 

to turn our traumas into river current” 

This passage is astonishing to me—a grandmother becoming an unworkable field—an act of refusal that turns the field from a site of violence into a “river current”. The transformation happens right there in the poem, this incredible movement of a field as a site of forced labor and racial violence to field as the embodiment of a beloved grandmother who refuses to labor, a field “full of shooting stars”, a field of endlessness, freedom. 

My favorite poem in the whole collection is ‘On Finding a Field’ — I gasped when I read it, felt it breaking and shimmering across my skin. In this poem, a field is a resting place, a longed for, looked for place, a place in which the speaker can finally, finally set down the weight they’ve been carrying. “I’ve been looking for you so long” it begins. And yet even in this beautiful poem about a field as a place of respite, it’s not so simple. There’s this stunning section in the middle in which the speaker asks the field a series of questions: 

“Can I plant my heart somewhere 

in your mud? May I lay down awhile 

under the magnolia in your middle? 

Can I dig you up?” 

It’s this last question that gets me. The speaker has found this field that they have been looking for so long, asks if they can plant their heart inside it and then says: but also, can I destroy you? All the ways Daye has been thinking and feeling about fields in the collection merge for me in this poem, where the field is both needed but perhaps feared, where the field offers some freedom, some sacredness, a rootedness—which is so interesting given how much movement and travel there is in the collection—but does so, partly, through its own imagined loss. There’s something here I can’t quite articulate yet that points to freedom as always in motion, as something none of the speakers of these poems ever arrive at, but that they build, create, continually, in pockets. There’s a contradiction in it that sings for me, where nothing is fixed. Fields are both violence and freedom, they are always in the process of becoming, they are not static. They are alive, and these poems tangle with them both physically and metaphorically. 

It makes me think a lot about Black Pastoral by Ariana Benson, in which fields are also a site of complex change, deep ancestral trauma, violence, witness, freedom. Benson writes poems in which fields become places-out-of-time where Black lovers create worlds white supremacy cannot touch. Maybe this, too, is part of why the fields in this book spoke to me so powerfully. They don’t so much reclaim fields from the history of violence that has been done in them in the name of white supremacy, as they completely redefine the boundaries of “field” and what happens there. 

How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir by Shayla Lawson

I loved this memoir/essay collection about Blackness, gender, travel, sex, desire, disability, aging, being creative and making art, teaching. Most of the sections are set in different places all over the world, and most center in on a certain event, whether that is traveling through Egypt with friends to discuss misogyny, or about being a Black professor in Amherst at UMass and dealing with the white liberals who are so focused on everything being correct and not interrogating their ideas, but also on how it was in that setting that Lawson came to love using they/them pronouns. There are sections on being Black in the Netherlands and working with refugees and the disconnect between Lawson’s understanding of race and that of the white people she worked with. 

Something I deeply appreciate is their insistence on both/and, basically always. They talk about learning how to see their body differently, learning how to move with their disabled body and love with their disabled body that the world does not see as worthy of desire. They write about not being a woman and how Blackness is inherently nonbinary, as it is always outside of the norm and the mainstream, and the freedom of embracing that. But they never limits themself. They are always allowing themself to continue learning, to get curious, to explore ideas of faith and death and love in new ways as they get older. 

There is also something wonderfully measured about they approaches the subject matter. It’s not just that Lawson is so smart and curious. There's something in their prose that is very calm and steady. Like They want you to really slow down and listen to what they are saying, to stick with the ideas and not feel like you have to rush on from them. I was totally riveted by the quality of their attention, the way they offer such deep analysis of history, of moving through the world as Black, woman, nonbinary, disabled, but also ground everything in these very specific anecdotes about their life.

Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women, and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

LOVE. 

I love the updated intro so much, the idea of gender as a shifting language, and also the idea that a book should be updated and also left alone. It made think so much about the culture Bornstein was writing from 25 years ago, a white U.S. culture of the 50s. They talk about how gender is so much more expansive today than it has been in the past, which is true and also not true. Cultures all over the world have had expansive understandings of gender for centuries; one of the aims of colonialism has been destroying this. I super appreciate the intro, Bornstein saying that we have so much more nuance around gender than when they were growing up in the 50s. I also like that it positions their own lack of knowledge, or at least what they’re not looking at. It makes the book feel like this living document, with Bornstein a part of that, imperfect, still learning and trying, knowing lots they didn’t know before but also holding on to things they learned. 

She writes so openly and freely about her gender, about how she plays with gender. She is so committed to play. This book is so funny, it makes sense, she’s an actor, the narration is very theatrical, I was constantly laughing, and it’s really clear to me that she is not interested in being legible to anyone, not to queers or straight folks or even other trans people. She wants to have fun, she wants to play and experiment and try things, she does not want to be boxed in, and she approaches this in so many ways. If this book has a thesis it is that gender is play. 

One thing I’m thinking about is earnestness and how humor is not really associated with earnestness, and I’m building this theory of earnestness in my head, queer earnestness, and I think this is part of it. Like, she makes tons of jokes, she’s irreverent, she makes light of things, it’s not earnest in the way Anne of Green Gables is. And yet she is so earnest, in the way she is committed to being her nonbinary self, to making her art and loving and living her life and naming herself as she chooses and talking about what she chooses and asking questions and throwing all the binary restrictions out the window. She doesn’t make any of it easier for anyone and I think that has to do with earnestness, too. This idea that being silly is powerful, that play is a form of queer liberation, that taking your life seriously can mean being loose and wild. I’m trying to think about how this relates to other kinds of earnestness, but I think part of earnestness is about being open to joy which means being open to great grief.

There is a lot of theorizing and great conversations about gender, loved the bits about theater, the parts about queer and trans communities needing to be expansive and not narrowing, but mostly this is a book about joyful queer and trans gender play, of making of your life a play and realizing that expression and delight and that can be the truest way to get free. 

A Last Supper of Queer Apostles by Pedro Lemebel

I loved this book so much and yet I hardly remember anything from it! I found it almost impossible to pay attention to the audio for some reason, maybe because of Lemebel’s rambling, meandering, fast, zigzagging style, his long sentences and exuberant anger. Eventually I gave up and let it wash over me, knowing I’d eventually reread it in print. 

It’s a collection of his Chronicas, essays he published in Chile throughout his career. Essays, stories, poems, nonfiction, fiction, I don’t know, one thing I loved so much is how deeply uninterested in genre he is. Many of them are about the lives of locas and travestis, many are about AIDS, about Pinochet and the dictatorship, about resistance, about life on the streets and in the travesti communities. Some of them tell the life story of a particular travesti, some are about his political anger. Some are about hookups, resistance actions, neoliberal bullshit, white gays and macho gays and homosexuals from places like the US ruining queerness. He talks a lot about how queerness and the lives of travestis and locas, the queens and fags and trans women and gender faeries, are totally undermined by assimilation, by mainstream homosexuality, by people refusing to play with gender. He talks about Indigenous ideas about queerness, about how he does not care about Stonewall and is sick of hearing Americans talk about gay liberation. I dug it.

Most of what came through is his language, which is so poetic and beautiful, but also sharp, campy, a mix of tenderness and bitchiness and anger and delight,. He makes tons of jokes, he doesn’t use “proper” language. It’s hard to describe this but it’s so alive, so vivid, so funny and irreverent and flaming and vivid and vital. So much of this comes through even in the translation. 

I loved the translator’s note, which was so thoughtful. She talks a lot about his use of language, his style, the way he refuses to categorize himself and the people he writes about into neat western notions of trans or gay identity, and how that played into her translation, how some of translating this book was just letting those rigid boundaries go, and translating his playfulness, his way with language, into various words in English that capture the same spirit. 

This is such an incredible look into such an amazing queer ancestor, a writer who loved his people and lived his life loudly and refused to look away from everything that was happening in his country during a dictatorship, who poured himself and the specific lives of locas and travestis, into words, with such loving care. I feel so grateful to have gotten this glimpse, and I can’t wait to revisit in print so I can slow down and really pay close attention.