H of H Playbook by Anne Carson

  There will come a day, or series of days, when I finally stop confusing Anne Michaels and Anne Carson, but that day hasn’t yet arrived. The last time I read Anne Carson was when I picked up The Autobiography of Red, and when my partner and I saw the format of H of H Playbook in the poetry section of a book store, she picked it up immediately, knowing nothing about it.

The reason for that is because H of H Playbook is an oddly shaped rectangle that opens up to part play-script part scrapbook part art collection. That’s one of the highlights of Carson’s book: there’s a haphazardness to it, as though these fragments are compiled from an ancient manuscript for a play about Herakles lost to time. In fact, one of the opening pages denotes the book as a translation of Euripides’ play first performed in 416 BC—a statement that quickly becomes ludicrous when reading the rest of the text.

Carson’s “translation” is replete with modern colloquialisms and allusions to events that happened centuries after Euripides’ death. In particular, there are references to Jane Austen and the Bolshevik revolution, and so on. This approach gives the book a whimsical freshness that helps to enliven the classic tale, which is, in my view, in need of it.

I’m not a classicist. I know very little about the ancients and discussion of Greek gods often slips through my ears. Reading the back of the book was critical for me to really process the book. Herakles is a hero who goes off on labours to defeat enemies and kill monsters and whatnot. The book makes reference to about two of them explicitly and then glosses over the other ten as boring retrod ground. Apparently, Herakles also went beserk and killed his whole family before considering suicide. In Anne Carson’s version, it’s somewhat implied that he has PTSD and that he has a psychotic episode in the same way a Vietnam veteran might. At the same time, it’s as though he’s controlled by malicious Gods. Again, Carson blends the ancient explanations for more contemporary ones.

A number of aspects of the book remain obscure to me. It’s one of those unfortunate things about revising the classics: the commentary and elaboration of the classics is often more impressive to me than the classics themselves, but I also don’t know the source material well enough to make the discussion truly meaningful. So, when the redwinged man shows up or when Theseus shows up to guide Herakles away, the significance is sort of lost on me.

The artwork is what really helps to clarify the spirit of the book. First, the text is presented in small fragments, sometimes isolating a single phrase on a page to elevate its emotive power. The artwork throughout the book embodies a kind of loose style, occasionally depicting sketched human forms and often splashes of colour. Red for violence and blood. Yellow and blue strips when the mood changes. All of them adding to a sense of disorder mimicking Herakles’ disordered misadventures, perhaps.

I’ll have to admit: the story of Herakles is not close enough to my heart for this book to really rock my world. It’s a nice, short book, but one I’m not likely to return to or have linger with me. I appreciate its inventiveness as an experiment and multigenre text and the way it makes time fold over itself. I’m sure there’s a genius at work here; I’m just not smart enough to really let this book thrive.

Happy reading!

Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

        There is an illicit pleasure in reading Jenny Hval’s Girls Against God. The main character is charged with hate and sees hate as a true creative force; the titillating cynicism and adolescent rage of the book couldn’t help but bring smiles to my face.

The main character of Hval’s novel is a young girl in conservative Norway that is looking for any kind of alternative to the quotidian existence she sees around her. To that end, she has an obsession with black metal and witchcraft and what she refers to as the “cosmic internet.” The novel follows these fascinations as it jumps around in time; we see her early roots as a member of a black metal band that (maybe) never actually plays concerts—instead she engages in performances so subterranean as to be undetectable and not even music related. The lines between music, visual art, witchcraft, and language collapse. So too does the idea of an independent producer become incomprehensible as subversive art becomes by necessity a collective, collaborative work. The other component of the book follows the main character’s filmic ambitions, including a full account of her film in the back third of the film. If you’re looking for a conventional story, Girls Against God is largely lacking, but if you’re looking for some vibes and philosophical reflection, Hval’s work is an absolute treat.

If you’re a true devotee of my reviews, you might remember my commentary on The Hearing Test by Eliza Barry Callahan. I find that premise extraordinarily unlikely. One of my critiques of The Hearing Test is its referentiality to other art works and it really relies heavily on readers’ knowledge. Girls Against God does something similar, but Hval is much more generous in elaborating on its touchstones. There are extended summaries and analyses of the works, often replete with imagery. In that way, the text is more accessible even in its offputtingness. Or, maybe it’s just that the touchstones are more part of my cultural lexicon.

Hval expounds in particular on the aesthetic of early black metal—an interesting angle, given the author’s own musical style. She describes music videos found as extra features on early black metal CDs and the way she describes its grittiness and content and wild cuts and sweeping shots of high-contrast nature is just perfect. In the aesthetic, she sees a primitivism that restores sincerity to art. When planning for her film, she notes, “I don’t know what the film is going to be about yet, but I like the early black metal aesthetic, so near to my own childhood. Strangely, it gives me hope, hope that it’s possible to make art primitively, in a way that isn’t steeped in professionalism and compromise. Art that still hates. I remember how much hope there is in hatred” (8). That manifesto sets the direction for all of the main character’s efforts. I adore this notion that hatred is hope—indeed, there has to be hope for there to be hatred, or else we would simply have indifference and apathy.

Throughout the book, she seeks connection with others through various means. One way that manifests is in the Satanism associated with black metal: “I can establish a connection or a pact, demonstrated through the connect-the-dots drawing between myself and the world of the gods, the underworld, or between myself in the past tense and myself in the present. Or all of it simultaneously. Maybe I could even draw up a map between me and you” (26). She’s trying to be part of something bigger than just herself. The connect-the-dots metaphor works in that way; she’s looking to be the lines between points. To that end, when she plans her film, she thinks, “Maybe this film has created a place to meet” (26). She makes a direct address to the audience—which is in itself odd, given that there is not a frame narrative that establishes she’s writing for others. Nonetheless, she presents the audience with a series of questions: “Do you also recognize the desire for secret and impossible connections? Do you recognise the loneliness, could we share in it? Could we get closer to each other? Could you and I and the film be the start of a we? A we which takes the form of an expanding community of girls who hate?” (26).

Hval’s narrator’s gesture is twofold. On the one hand, she’s aiming to escape the prison of subjectivity and on the other she’s trying to build a subterranean network of connection. Reflecting about her relationship with religion, she notes, “Sin is still inside me; everything is my fault and my responsibility, because I’m doomed to be alone, locked inside this subjectivity” (37). There is an exhaustion to the process of creating oneself: “I am so tired of chasing after it, this subjectivity, looking for something that’s all mine, that doesn’t have any context, surroundings or background. It’s so lonely. It’s so limited. It’s so heavy” (37). I appreciate this angle to exploring the posthumanist principle that we are not individuals but rather we exist in a context that has formulated us. She continues, “The subject is reflected negatively, the subject is so alone, so threatened, so scared, so dying, so guilty” (37). She considers how she wants to swap some of these negatives for “something else, something shared” (37). The passage ends with a delightful crescendo and what some might deem an anticlimax but which nonetheless has a ring of truth for those in the know. She concludes the passage, “I want to take part in a chaos of collective energy. I want to be in a band” (37). The fact that a band is what embodies that collective energy and chaos is just so humorous but also it imbues me with a sense of nostalgia and the optimism of such a project. The other side of Hval’s project is the desire for community, specifically through her witchy communities: “In blasphemy, there’s a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn’t rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit” (43). She elaborates on how the subversiveness allows for these connections:

Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It’s an unknown communal place, an impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic. (43)

I love that spirit of togetherness and spontaneity. I feel like it elevates the idea of being in a band to a metaphysical tour de force.

I’ll return to that in a moment, but I also want to bring up the idea of time. Bands shape sound in time, so there’s a bit of a connection already. There’s also a stunning series of pages—too long to quote here—where the narrator describes her experiences with the early days of the internet. She describes its cosmic power, its ability to connect people across time. It brought me back in time, completely. The way that she describes the experience of finding communities, largely anonymously, and sharing files, connecting over subterranean media—it’s a perfect blast from the past. Then, towards the end of the book, the narrator gives an account of a photograph. Just before the photograph, she blasphemes and she delights in the moment where it is impossible to tell her apart from her well-behaved classmates. She notes that it is “impossible for an unknowing eye to spot the difference in our smiles, but at the moment this picture was taken, I’ve just said fucking hell, in the middle of the photo shoot” (214). The moment is imbued with a power because, even though it’s such a mundane kind of rebellion, it is elevated as symbolic of the collapse between herself and others—yet one that is distilled in time. In aspic? She continues on to say that “Half the class are about to stop smiling; they are about to look around for the sinner as they cautiously cross themselves and touch their hands to their hearts” (214). It’s a moment where the offense has not yet been detected and “a moment later, everything will be defined, crossed, damned, forgiven and blessed” (214). The moment that lacks definition has its subversive power: “right now, in this image, there is chaos; the students aren’t sure what happened yet, who said the word” (214). She continues, “Sound is faster than comprehension, faster than what they call heart and soul and sin. Right now my voice could have come from any of my Christian classmates, a slip of the tongue, a Tourette’s tic; that’s why they react and why they are about to cross themselves” (214). Hval seems to present the idea that a sin has its power when it has not yet been defined or remedied; sin exists as potential and “everyone in the class is a potential sinner” (214). The narrator notes, “the uncertainty is shapeless, even in the middle of this conformity; they themselves aren’t exempt; the guilt includes everyone in the room and leaks from one thing to another. No one remains dry, everyone is defined” (214). It’s a great parallel to the idea of everyone existing in connection with one another. Everyone gets joined by sin and guilt into one mass and “just as the most evangelical of them feel defiled when we’re taught by the lesbian teacher; they fear that she’ll lure them over to her side, that they will say what she says, that they’ll become, or realise that they already are, like her” (214). The notion of the subversiveness awakening something in its audience gives it a compelling power—and there’s a kind of optimism in that.

Towards the end of the book, there is dedicated focus to the symbolism of aspic. Aspic is a kind of jelly in which other things float. It’s a great symbol for the lack of distinction between individual entities. A passage that identifies the sense of connection in aspic reads as follows:

Aspic is made from the collagen in the bone marrow of pigs, and I dream it’s also made from our own bones and our own marrow, because marrow is the very best we have to give of ourselves. In the marrow is found the collagen, the creative power, the coherence. The same sounds ring in marrow as in margin. In my language it’s even the same word. In the margins are the experiments, the bonus material, the unwritten scenes, the unused leftovers, a suggestion for a new world, a suggestion for impossible connections. In the margins are the comments, the hope and hate, suspended in the thick, translucent marrow broth. (229).

For all its sprawling nature, Girls Against God has a knack for recreating this kind of connective aspic. There are a number of strange false starts to the book that float around. The focus on the margins and experiments is critical to what Girls Against God is up to. It is itself “bonus material”---auxilliary content about other works. It is the unused leftovers; consider, for example, we get the fragment of her film as an additional chapter that takes up a reasonable portion of the book. 

Girls Against God asks a question that I find perpetually troubling whether it’s phrased as “can the subaltern speak?” as it is in the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, or as it appears in Mark Fisher’s question about capitalism: “is there no alternative?”, or indeed, as it is asked by Terese in Girls Against God, “Why does resistance always end up just polishing the traditions?” (69). Hval is exploring the idea of how we might preserve a space of genuine resistance to tradition, a genuine alternative that does not get subsumed into the aspic like everything else. She notes this paradoxical position—wanting to have connection as a form of subversion and yet preserving a special space for the truly radical. Hval offers an extended meditation on the topic: “Think about that word, EXCLUDED. To exclude something, to explain something. THe nature of the subversive isn’t actually to be directly visible but to roam the shadows, to give texture to the seemingly shiny and clean, to scrawl public walls with inexplicable nonsigns that refuse to materialize into language” (96). She’s looking for that shadow space: “the subversive desires to be seen and not seen simultaneously, it desires both to be excluded and to be explained” (96). I think that’s a critical observation for the counterculture; we are riding the line between legibility and rewriting. The trouble, as Hval notes, is that “it’s so easily muted, left behind, forgotten, excluded without being explained. Or it gets picked up and transformed into a language we all understand, that is, explained, but for some reason that always seems to mean commercialised” (96). This succinct passage puts to words the trouble I feel with my own subversive subcultures—how much are we preaching to the choir? When we are preaching to the masses, how does the meaning get hidden behind dollar signs?

I really appreciated the way Hval characterized the grotesque resistance in black metal music videos. I’m not sure I recorded the quotation, but there’s a part where she describes the sound of the music like flies and worms wiggling out of the tape. As she navigates the “cosmic internet” she finds additional videos and details to supplement her research into primitivism in art. She finds a clip of “a black metal gig that looks as if it took place in an assembly hall in an early nineties secondary school” (8). In her note, “wholesome Norwegian youths talk amongst themselves and walk in and out of the room while the band plays on, completely unaffected. Black metal crawls unnoticed through adolescence, mine too” (8). There’s a real love of the genre and the music scene that shines in Hval’s work. There’s a sincerity and authenticity to the depiction of shows like this—I can vividly picture videos of grainy punk shows in a rented church. She thinks about how “it doesn’t burrow down completely. But for as long as it’s there it lives and crawls” (8). She reflects on how one one of the youths in the video could have been her “if [she]’d been a few years older, or if the clip had been from 1997 and not 1991. If [she] hadn’t been a girl and excluded from the black screen” (8). She concludes, “It could have been me: we could have hated, all of us, together. Instead I had to hate alone. Provincial hatred” (8). In the description of black metal music videos, the graininess of the image, the rapid cuts, the high contrast colour palettes, and so on, brought me back to a special moment where the internet made all kinds of possibilities real. Essentially, it was a modern day dada movement. I think in particular of the revolution it caused in my brain when I saw the video for Some Girls’ “...Warm Milk” or the freneticism of The Locusts’ album Plague Soundscapes. Sure, it’s not quite the genre Hval described, but it’s adjacent enough to feel the same.

Hval’s book is, in many ways, about representation and connection. She philosophizes that “to describe is also to construct form and perspective; it’s the reflex of mortal dread” (206). She wonders, “could language be used for something else? Aren’t there other reasons to write? If we let go of the descriptions, will we discover that we’re no longer moving at all, since we already exist within everything in here?” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to renegotiate with language and art: “we’re given up shapes, our own shells and components and we’re back in a flow, that gelatinous substance that ruled the earth before the harder minerals, rock types, skeletons and shells came into existence. This could be the beginning, the white egg, the original place, the original life” (206). Girls Against God is a quest to find that area of potential, the origins, the not-yet before everything gets established and codified. 

Hval meanders in all the right directions. It felt to me to be a deeply intimate and resonant novel that was also accompanied by humour and thoughtfulness. Hval’s other novel, Paradise Rot, had a bit more in terms of story, but she clearly has a gift for introspection and ambitious projects to revolutionize both literature and the world.

Hope we can appreciate the margins without taking out their teeth. Happy hating!

Museum Visits by Éric Chevillard

  When you walk around a gallery, pause for a few moments at a piece, process, and move on to another piece, you have Éric Chevillard’s Museum Visits. The book is a collection, essentially, of flash fiction stories or prose poems presented back-to-back with no continuous throughline.

With that in mind, the book hinges primarily on Chevillard style. He presents his scenes with humour and surprise. For instance, the second piece in the collection is about his constant need to ejaculate. For page after page, he writes about when and where and how much he ejaculates and it gradually becomes clear that he’s talking about writing. There are a number of these linguistic spins that emerge throughout the collection, too.

In addition to the linguistic playfulness, there’s a playfulness in the construction of the vignettes. In a two page story called “The Gift,” for example, a “stern-faced old wife” presents her husband with a gift for the first time in twenty years. The cold woman has a rare moment of kindness in which she gives him a fountain pen and that brings the husband back in time—back to a time where he had writerly ambitions. Like everything else, his ambitions have worn away. Within a few short pages, there’s the whole story of a marriage and its deterioration, culminating in a moment where the husband appreciates his fountain pen gift by leaning forward and stabbing himself in the neck with it.

The collection mixes a few different types of flash fiction pieces. There are a few character portraits, a few sections about particular artifacts or artworks, and a few more general philosophical reflections on spaces. In terms of referential pieces, I think one of my favourites was “Hegel’s Cap,” about going to see the philosopher’s hat. When he sees the hat for the first time, he reflects on how more philosophers should take on the eccentric style in the modern day. It then becomes a reflection on seeing an artifact for a second time and all the magic has faded from it. Another of my favourite referential pieces is a character portrait in which a grown man repeatedly discusses being a child and throwing moles over Samuel Beckett’s fence. The fact that he brags about this repeatedly brings up reflections on how Samuel Beckett’s life and writing could have been so different if he hadn’t had to deal with moles over the fence all the time.

In terms of the more spatio-philosophical chapters, there are several resonant passages about being in museums. On top of that, there’s a chapter about doors. It begins with the question: “Is there anything more idiotic than a door?” (71). Drawing maybe on a Bachelard influence, Chevillard continues, “The very idea could have come from a mind that was itself open too wide, if not downright unhinged” (71)—note again the playfulness in the wording. Chevillard extends the meditation as follows:

“For either the door provides passage at a point in space where there was formerly nothing to impede free circulation, thus standing guard over it completely uselessly, or it forbids access to this or that place by closing it off, but in that case it’s not enough, because as soon as it’s installed you have to put high walls around it, which means arranging a tiresome cartage of stones and beams, an entire industry of the most exhausting sort, followed by a superhuman labor that hurls the masons up to vertiginous heights on their makeshift scaffolding while the mind-numbing music of the spheres, captured on their transistor radios, resonates all around.” (71).

I love the sprawling nature of the passage, especially because the passage is about the blockages doors impose. Instead, it’s a long sentence, unimpeded by periods. It’s the kind of stylistic elevation to the content that makes Chevillard’s writing more powerful.

I’m going to decontextualize a passage by way of ending the review. In “An Overwhelming Success,” the entry ends with “some inner peace: a peace without images, without shapes or colours, the blessed primordial emptiness of those uncreated worlds where everything remains to be done” (50). I love that moment of raw potential—”where everything remains to be done.” It’s a shame to bring things to a conclusion, to have things so set that they foreclose growth. 

So, with that in mind, I hope that Museum Visits inspires you to seek out something new, something unfinished, something that you haven’t returned to that, like Hegel’s hat, has lost its lustre.

Happy reading!

Two Bowls of Milk by Stephanie Bolster

  I invite you to share in a memory of mine from my younger years. I’m in Verona at an art gallery, carrying a notebook in which I write fragments of poems and miscellany thoughts. After milling about for a few hours, I find my way into the modern art section, and come across a striking painting of a man with what I remember as a bloodied eye, looking anguished. The painting arrests me. When I look at the title, it is Waiting for Godot—a play with a similarly arresting power. I sit down on the floor of the gallery, examining the painting from a safe distance and writing in my notebook while Italian security guards snicker at this strange, floored, Canadian. There’s me: writing a poem in response to a painting in response to a play.

I mention the anecdote because poetry-ifying visual arts was one of my main tactics as a budding writer and in Stephanie Bolster’s Two Bowls of Milk, we see the practice playing out by a similar, albeit more capable hand. Two Bowls of Milk is a collection of poetry that, like many collections, comes in multiple parts. The first section of the collection is more rooted in experience, particularly rural experiences, while the back half of the collection is in direct response to artworks, which are cited under the titles of poems. 

Bolster maintains a lush descriptiveness that feels philosophically resonant, exploring the idea of perspective. She starts early with untitled the poem opening the section “Come to the Edge”, in which she invites the reader: “Come to the edge of the barn the property really begins there, / you see things defining themselves, the hoofprints left by sheep, / the slope of the roof, each feather against each feather on each goose. / You see the stake with the flap of orange plastic that marks // the beginning of real” (3). I appreciate this early invitation from the haze into something more defined, and the positioning of realness as the precise details. Important to note is that the things define “themselves,” giving agency to the inanimate. The poem continues with a rationale for the reality”: “I’m showing you this because / I’m suck of the way you clutch the darkness with your hands, / seek invisible fenceposts for guidance, accost spectres” (3). The poem has a grounding effect in the material rather than the abstract, while still providing that hint of a sort of “great beyond” of inspiration. It makes me think of an engraving I once saw of someone, bent over, looking “beyond the veil,” which to me looked like someone awaiting the sting of the guillotine. This trip into the real is not without its need for caution, as the poem’s speaker notes: “I’m coming with you because I fear you’ll trip // over the string that marks the beginning, you’ll lie across the border / and with that view — fields of intricate grain and chiselled mountains, / cold winds already lifting the hairs of your arm—you’ll forget your feet, / numb in straw and indefinite dung, and be unable to rise, to walk farther” (3). There guide has a gentleness that I quite appreciate, noting the danger but offering the guidance to avoid it. The poem weaves together the philosophical project: bringing the abstract into realness while also maintaining the allusiveness to something more significant and resonant. The poem ends with the following stanzas:

My fingers weave so close between yours because I’ve been there
before, I know the relief of everything, how it eases the mind to learn
shapes it hasn’t made, how it eases the feet to know the ground
will persist. See those two bowls of milk, just there,

on the other side of the property line, they’re for the cats
that sometimes cross over and are seized by a thirst, they’re
to wash your hands in. Lick each finger afterwards. That will be
your first taste, and my finger tracing your lips will be the second. (3)

There’s a suggestiveness in the final lines, pairing this idea of revealing the real with a charged intimacy. What I like best, though, is the line about “how it eases the mind to learn / shapes it hasn’t made” (3). I feel as though that’s critical to Bolster’s project here. There’s an attentiveness to the details, a commitment to learning things that did not originate with us. I once wrote an essay about the ethics of attention posited in the short works of Samuel Beckett—funny how that motif returns to me again.

With this kind of care and attention, Bolster offers some short reflections on “Assorted Flora” and about the “Iris,” she writes,

Your spine is a secret grief.

Rooted in inconstant mud,
you managed to stand, proud

though purple marks the perfect
white of your throat.

But cut, left
alone in a vase, you will lean

away from light, shrink
into your crippled shadow. (8)

The imagistic nature of the work draws on the specific details of the flower and elevates it, though I’m not sure elevates is the right word—humanizes might be more a propos. The personification of the iris with “the perfect / white of [its] throat” and the idea of shrinking away into a shadow, away from the light, gives the flower a human quality. It’s a charming observational moment of identification.

The imagistic nature of the poems reminds me of William Carlos Williams, particularly in this section of “Poems For the Flood,” a poem that is comprised of several vignettes:

Watering the garden, I call the earth thirsty
and then cringe at what I’ve said. The way things are

is simpler and more difficult to understand. My throat
and the columbines open for the same water differently.

Closed rose petals, a sky not scrawled with cloud,
the small of the back, these are lesser. Beauty is the red

rectangle of a barn surrounded by flood.
The white chicken on the rooftop testing its wings. (17)

Maybe it’s the white chickens and the redness of the barn. I appreciate what Bolster adds to the imagery by having the connections between humans and plants: “My throat / and the columbines open for the same water differently.” 

The back half of the collection is focused on responding to artworks. One poem that stands out to me in that regard is “Still Life With Braid,” which is given the subtitle for the artwork “Female Dissected Body, Seen From the Back, Gerard de Lairess, 1685. Engraving with etching.” The poem has a more narrative-driven impulse, introducing a kind of relationship between two characters: “I loved her when we washed our hands / in matching sinks at school” (55). The specificity of the moment stands out to me and then it continues with an excellent set of lines: “She feared the cubicles / where a raincoat with a man in it might stand / on a toilet’s rim awaiting us, pocket knife // tight in his fist” (55). The ominousness of the moment is finely delivered. I think what I like best is the way the line “She feared the cubicles” is given a line break that creates meaning on its own but then is doubled up with the lines which follow. The poem continues with the disappearance of the girl with the teacher reassuring the speaker that she’s just camping. Finally, the central character’s “letter slot released / a drawing of an iris, pencilled throat open, bulb / engorged beneath” (55). She continues, “Veins so intricately etched / they stung the purple in my wrists. No hand but hers // had done it” (55). The narrator flashes forward where “Time passed / until [she] visited a gallery and ticking stopped / before her adult portrait: wrists resplendent, raw / in bracelets of taut rope” (55). The narrator sees her childhood friend’s gestures replicated in the image where her posture “peeled to reveal her braided spine” (55). The final description is such a haunting one that reminds me of a philosophy book I read about the female form last year:

skin draped

her waist, was pinned aside like coy sleeves fitted
to her upper arms. The alphabet named her

crucial points but not that curl she’d tucked
behind her ear at eight. Her face averted, ashamed
at believing its body worth this spectacle of death.
Why did I not tell her she was more than this? I am

no more myself: bones pitched inside a tent of skin;
fear; one bound hand and the other binding. (55-56)

The description is so rich and evocative of their bond and seems to tell a story in just a few short, rich sentences. There’s a notion of what is invisible to others re-emerging, or at least being perceived, seemingly by nobody else. It’s a fantastic conclusion to an entire story, told within two pages.

Of course, the challenge of a collection like this is that, sometimes, without the reference images, the poems don’t really land in the same way. The challenge of responding to art with another art form is that you’re both adding and subtracting at once. You’re adding a layer of interpretation, but potentially subtracting from your own work by relying on your references. It’s a fine line to walk that has the potential to make your work shine but also to limit your audience. At the very least it places some demands on the reader to conduct additional research.

Overall, I quite liked Two Bowls of Milk. It had a lot of great poetry in it, which sounds like an odd thing to say, although I do think it encapsulates the spirit of perception that gives poetry its ethical and aesthetic force.

Happy reading!