Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10

Edric Mesmer reviews Katie L. Price’s BRCA: Birth of a Patient (2015) in Yellow Field #10. Much thanks! And of course, copies are still very much available.

Katie L. Price

BRCA: Birth of a Patient

above/ground press

2015

Of ways inadequate to approach Katie L. Price’s chapbook, with cover image of chest x-ray of female torso, there are many. All found text, these roman numeraled sections guide a reader through stages in the construction of this patient; thereby, the reader is somewhere near witness—at a distance not necessarily safe; and from here the most poignant of arguments for reading as sexed are met. As conceptual poem, this comes perhaps closer than any to representing that x-rayed ribcage—if not heart itself—all too human if far from embrace. The reader is not here to make anything better. In Anne Boyer’s defiantly exploratory essay “The Sororal Death” she maps the separate continents of the personal “I” and the term “cancer.” Price’s approach offers a different way to, occurring in third person, with redacted names of patient and doctors. As goes the analysis that Sappho’s poems may not be about her but “Sappho” in highly ritualized telling, the author is able to stand without. This may [be] the gift of the conceptual poem. Untoward that vacuum the reader comes dangerously close—close to the Reason for Visit, the Family History, the Consent for and Risks of Chemotherapy…How inhabit the reading of such a line as: “24 y.o. […] woman with newly diagnosed ER+/ PR+/Her 2neu 3+ breast cancer undergoing neoadjuvant DD AC +TH”? It leaves out what Sontag called (as quoted by Boyer) “one more story in the first person of how someone learned that she or he had cancer, wept, struggled, was comforted, suffered, took courage…” Now the poem goes there.

Edric Mesmer discusses (briefly) six recent above/ground press chapbooks;

Edric Mesmer was good enough to mention six recent above/ground press titles in the new issue of YELLOW FIELD (#nine; spring 2014): An Overture in the Key of F by Carrie Olivia Adams; The State of Which by Hailey Higdon; Sugar Beach by Camille Martin; from Hark: a journal by rob mclennan; Overheard While Hiding from the Sun: post-notebook poems by Kate Schapira; and Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas). Thanks, Edric! There are two previous reviews of Adams' title here and here, a previous review of Higdon's title here, two previous reviews of Martin's title here and here, two previous reviews of mclennan's title here and here, and a previous review of Thomas' title here, and copies of all are very much available! Also, you can pick up a copy of the new issue of YELLOW FIELD through: yellowedenwaldfield [at] yahoo [dot] com or by writing to 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. For those who haven’t been able to pick up an issue yet, I reprint such here:

6 more from above/ground press        2013-2014

I love a small press, what it can say through its poetics—in this case, chapbooks answering the call of a contemporary lea. Consider a cache of birds, a quintet of strings; but the trope may or mayn’t be limited to birdsong, string, or color-tone…Sometimes there’s a poem in which Buffalo poet emeritus Bill Sylvester writes: “pepper linen incense lobster / lutes viols and ambergris […] what a messy party that would be!” And so we messily hear a great party of Darwinian diversity: “The formalist of formant when our lips make the vowel, it I the act of giving somewhere shape” (An Overture in the Key of F by Carrie Olivia Adams); “I did some trying to voice the regional things –accents and whatnot / I even tried to find that series of hybridized creatures, part person / part place that exist in the park” (The State of Which by Hailey Higdon); “viewing creation / / from a precisely-gauged periphery, clock ticking” (Sugar Beach by Camille Martin); “A stone made out of stone. The dream of people you can’t know. Prince Adolphus, Duke of Cambridge, Bay. We know you, myth. What lifestyle will not allow” (from Hark: a journal by rob mclennan); “Anyone can submit / a video to the Free Me Library. Can find / purchase for brilliance, can be avenged sevenfold or / touched relevantly. All that can be shelved in me” (Overheard While Hiding from the Sun: post-notebook poems by Kate Schapira); “cadence address catch dreams / pays and agree, chlorate of poems, / empathic, the old epidemic / things themselves” (Albanian Suite by Hugh Thomas).

Edric Mesmer reviews Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013)

Edric Mesmer was good enough to review Lary Timewell’s tones employed as loss (2013) in the new issue of YELLOW FIELD (#nine; spring 2014). Thanks, Edric! This is the second review of Timewell’s chapbook, after Rebecca Anne Banks reviewed such over at Subterranean Blue Poetry. You can pick up a copy of the new issue through: yellowedenwaldfield [at] yahoo [dot] com or by writing to 1217 Delaware Avenue, Apt. 802, Buffalo, New York 14209. For those who haven’t been able to pick up an issue yet, I reprint such here:

tones employed as loss

Lary Timewell

above/ground

2013

Of poetry concerned with the nature of poetry, add to that list this title. Unthrough as we should be with Modernism, Timewell is well traveled in the space-time canonicity, “setting / The Way-Back Machine to conjure / / to conjure-up the serious business / of fiscal harps and apotheoses” ([19]). Canonical titles are satirized via pop culture slipups [i.e. Pound’s Cannelloni], and soon we breeze by geographical allusion via Stein and Tolkas’s address. If “the answer is here, but the message turns / out to be a grocery list” ([15]), how now the medium? We may be in a state of serial thought—defied if not also reified by an illusory fixity of the digital—nowhere better exemplified than by Timewell’s loudly mutable slices of poetry defined, from “an echo losing insistence” to “living in the lap of lechery” to “kinetic seed.”

Edric Mesmer reviews Armantrout, mclennan + hastain at Galatea Resurrects #19 (A Poetry Engagement)

Edric Mesmer was good enough to review three above/ground press titles in a recent group review over at Eileen Tabios' Galatea Resurrects #19 (A Poetry Engagement) [see the full review here]. Thanks, Edric!

Custom
Rae Armantrout
above/ground press
2012

Practices inhabited herein might include: the role of the maternal under patriarchy, the engendering of personal memories, the cloak of downward American mobility—commonalities and not—or, emo-hipsters and reality TV stars, “with that small fist pump // now used / to indicate / irony’s uselessness.” No stranger to techniques minimalistic or the over-read line made modernly familiar by Jean Rhys, Armantrout’s work continues—here in small scale, else writ large—to [decipher phatically] the obscurantist’s archaeology of speech made poetry: “let volumes speak volumes.” To quote from is nearly to quote in entirety these four poems! As always, Armantrout’s syllables are scant but not underwhelming, tensile in prehensility: “Water-strider, pond skater, / Jesus bug // skitters across the surface / tension // and // the ‘least-area surface’ / (flat, smooth) // has a surface tension / of zero.” Why strand that and, uncoupleted? Just as deity and insect reconnect and make anew construct, so surfaces work, rework, make riptide of ripple.

Sextet: six poems from Songs for little sleep,
rob mclennan
above/ground press
2012

As a feather, falling. So might go a line in mclennan’s latest, off his Ottawa-based press, above/ground. Modernity on the half-shell, emphasis plays folie à deux; as though Woolf were whispering to Robert Lax through a hearing[,] trumpet filled with water. These poems, each writ in dedicatory fashion and epigraphed, fall halved in binomial sets. They may be lean, stark, like “Laden, speech. A poor frail body. Swims. A mouth shapes words.” Other times they forget their own rules, at best, as in one for Pearl Pirie, titled “The learning curve that sometimes manages, itself”: “The gathering place of something, we. I can’t recall. It was I who called, who called, who.” And, in an uncommon third section, a coda, from the same—“Was contemplating an action. In, action. Inaction. We were, contemplating, we. Action. We were simply, in. This was, simply. This simply, was.” Minimalism is not wager against the sentence, nor: it is here a direct action in media res that may append its own apprehension. How, like a comma.

we / cum ::: come / in the yield fields / amongst statues with interior arms
j/j hastain
above/ground press
2012

“Tears are a way of staring.” Perhaps, wrote Kristeva, also a form of nonverbal articulation… There are so many such articulations—verbal, at least partly—that one has the feeling of watching Balla’s dog awalk with feminism’s theoretician. I am reminded of the sway Irigaray’s words have long had over me: that there may be no way to utter outside the patriarchal forms of language inherited, but we try anyway. Such utterances iterate in one of hastain’s latest, as where the reader encounters “non-articulable gender,” “how to be other-than,” “You wanted me to name you there,” “Oh female he,” “our interactive contour,” “To be gripping and gridding differential like this,” “Tactics and tacits. Creamy ratios,” “Like scaling a curve.” Prose sections find again and over definitions we knew of ourselves but had no way to say, as where asking: “a rainbow when there is no sun?” A lunar rainbow then, known to appear over Niagara Falls on nights of full moon, as Margaret Fuller went looking for (but didn’t see) in 1843. It’s that hastain’s images continue to find embodiment that make xir work—not so far beyond the concept, so much closer than theory—“A form full of noise.”