Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want by Ruha Benjamin

        Nonfiction sometimes serves to inform, sometimes to persuade—but rarely does it serve to excite. In the opening pages of Ruha Benjamin’s Viral Justice: How We Grow the World We Want, you can feel the energy and the push to take action. The doom and gloom despair of statistical realities have their place, but Benjamin’s focus is on creating a vision for what might be otherwise, which seems to be confirmed in the excellent supplementary interview between her and Ibrahim X. Kendi that is added as an appendix to the book.

        Viral Justice is the kind of book we need: a book that looks backward to explain, but looks forward to empower. The book is about social justice advocacy, particularly as it pertains to race, in the wake of the Covid pandemic. In the introduction to the text, Benjamin offers an excellent outline of the project. She begins with the following reflection: “Racism, inequality, and indifference are a juvenile rebellion against the reality of this interconnection, microscopically, and sociopolitically.” Citing from James Baldwin’s address at the National Press Club on December 10th, 1986, she writes, “I want to grow up and so should you.” She then sees the Covid-19 pandemic as “perhaps [...] forcing us all to grow up, exposing that vulnerability and interdependence are our lot, whether we like it or not.” As an aside, there’s an excellent Propagandhi song that expresses a similar sentiment: “There is no me / there is no you / there is all. / There is no you. / There is no me. / And that is all. / A profound acceptance of an enormous pageantry. / A haunting certainty that the unifying principle of / the Universe is love” (“Duplicate Keys Icaro (An Interim Report)”).

Anyway, Benjamin suggests that “Covid-19 is a social disease” and draws from the work of sociologist Eric Klinenberg, to note that “solidarity is an essential tool for combatting infectious disease and other collective threats. Solidarity motivates us to promote public health, not just our own personal security.” She then notes that he cautious: “It’s an open question whether Americans have enough social solidarity to stave off the worst possibilities of the coronavirus pandemic.” If I retain one essential element of Viral Justice, it is that the myth of independence is seriously overblown and politically precarious. At every turn, collective action and solidarity are required. Even “vaccines” (both literally and metaphorically) “are no magical fix for the kind of pathological self-interest that masquerades as independence.” Benjamin explains, “When we look worldwide, access to a Covid-19 vaccine has widened the gap between those whose lives matter and those deemed disposable” and then notes that “we don’t have to resign ourselves to this infantile individualism-cum-vaccine-nationalism.”

The questions that guide the text are as follows: “What if instead we reimagined virality as something we might learn from? What if the virus is not something simply to be feared and eliminated, but a microscopic model of what it could look like to spread justice and joy in small but perceptible ways? Little by little, day-by-day, starting in our own backyards? Let’s identify our plots, get to the root cause of what’s ailing us, accept our interconnectedness, and finally grow the fuck up.” This passage gives an example of Benjamin’s inviting and direct tone. I appreciate the humour and emotion in her strategic use of expletives as we embark on her vision of a “microvision of social change.”

Essentially, Benjamin brands the text as a selection of lessons we can learn by modelling action after the virality of Covid and crafts the text with a blend of autobiography, statistics, anecdotes, and academic studies. That said, she very specifically notes in the closing interview that looking at problems academically is a privilege of those who do not need to live the realities; academia diagnoses but does not reimagine. The framework for social change presented as an alternative is drawn from the work of Dean Spade; Benjamin notes that there are three types of movement work:

1. Dismantling harmful systems
2. Providing for people’s immediate needs
3. Creating alternative structures that can meet those needs based on values of care, democratic participation, and solidarity.

One of the highlights of Benjamin’s work, for me, is the way she makes discussions more nuanced and truly progressive rather than replicating models that do not serve us. The point is made clear when discussing the carceral systems in an early chapter of the book. A few quick reminders: the prison system is harmful for inmates, but also for the families of inmates—of which there are many in the United States. The impact of that system is far-reaching, including the innocent families of incarcerated people. Benjamin notes that when we see people doing wrong, our knee-jerk reaction is often to want to see them punished or imprisoned. Benjamin notes, though, that this model is fallacious, since it replicates ideas of carceral justice rather than reforming it to better serve us.

As a point of contrast, take the example of Ecuador. Benjamin explains how in 2007, they “began a bold experiment that didn’t cost a lot of money.” She notes that “rather than continuing to criminalize street gangs, the country legalized them, and as sociologist David Brotherton documents, gangs were able to remake themselves as cultural associations that could register with the government, which in turn allowed them to qualify for grants and benefit from social programming, just like everybody else. Some members went to school, started businesses like catering and graphic design companies, or took advantage of grants for job training or setting up community centres. As a result, homicide rates dropped dramatically and gangs began operating more like social movements, even collaborating with their rivals on cultural events.” The approach is simply a reworking of policy in the same way that legalizing drugs is simply a shift in policy that changes policing practices and allows people to seek help and addiction resources. The notion is that over years, “trust and long term relationships had a chance to build up. It wasn’t the policy alone, but how people used the legalization of gangs as an opportunity to transform how they related to one another.”         From the opening chapters, Benjamin then transitions into a discussion of inequities in education. I value those conversations, of course, given my profession. There’s some excellent discussion of hiring practices, the impact of suspensions, the idea of segregated schools (either directly or indirectly), and some of the grassroots initiatives that were supportive of true social change (cf. Cultivating Genius by Gholdy E. Muhammad). In a tangentially connected passage, Benjamin discusses how job descriptions can be rewritten in order to be more inclusive and facilitate more diverse applicants. This, I think, is especially needed for a school system that is significantly, homogeneously White.         I can hear the objections of people who will say “but jobs should go to the most qualified applicants!” I’ll counter that with a fantastic passage from Viral Justice. Benjamin recounts being at a conference and presenting in a majestic place and when they are being praised for their distinction, her fellow panellist interrupts: “Yes, you are worthy—but you are also very lucky.” The conversation Benjamin offers about luck is incredibly poignant. I believe this is a blend of her fellow panellist’s commentary and her own: “Lucky. Not a word one hears often enough in elite spaces. Being lucky doesn’t mean you are not qualified, it just means many others could have been in your shoes, but they were not chosen, and there are many more besides who might have qualified if given the same opportunities.” Summed up in one glorious sentence, Benjamin offers this line: “Luckiness does not negate worthiness, it negates entitlement” and continues that “Luck is the kryptonite of elitist delusions of specialness. And even then, the language of luck doesn’t do justice to the sheer organisation of selectivity, a key dimension of elite spaces, as a process [...] These processes are more often than not obscured.” These kinds of insights allow us to reconceptualize our relationship to power and privilege. Being aware in this way is necessary to take action for change.         Alas, I feel like I’m always waiting for a book that offers a list of ten ways to make the world perfect. That never happens here or anywhere—I guess you could count something like 12 Rules for Life if you want something by an opportunistic hack and political lunatic, but I don’t and I don’t. Viral Justice gives a guideline for making small changes to create opportunities for others, provide for peoples’ needs, and develop new systems. It makes the idea of change manageable and thus offers an optimistic outlook for the world. In short, it embodies that phrase: “Think globally, act locally.” It’s the small actions that matter.         I admit that between finishing Viral Justice and writing this review, I’ve started reading The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander and some of the core concepts are getting jumbled in my head. That in itself is illustrative of Benjamin’s point: we are all connected. These texts are connected. No one is in isolation, for better and for worse.         In this case, I’d really like to think that it’s for the better.               Happy reading!

The Kingdom of Surfaces by Sally Wen Mao

  If you pick The Kingdom of Surfaces off the shelf, I imagine you’ll be struck by the beauty of the cover image and that you would expect the poems housed within to be similarly ornate. Imagine my surprise, then, when I began to read Sally Wen Mao’s book and found that every poem serves as a reflection of Walter Benjamin’s quote that “There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” The Kingdom of Surfaces offers poems both long and short that call into question the West’s engagement with China throughout history well into the present day.

In fact, an early work in the collection, “Batshit,” addresses the way China was and is portrayed in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. Having been born in Wuhan, Mao confronts head-on the racist tropes that emerged following the outbreak. She references the fact that “some love foreign / dogs more than foreign people” (9) and that “they call eating dog barbaric, / but not police brutality” (9). The poem immediately following, “Wet Market,” further explores the shifting meaning of barbarism with reference to cultural practice.

Throughout the collection, Mao includes concrete poems (poems in the shape of things), which seems to have fallen out of vogue with “serious” poets. Here, though, it’s a refreshing take on the genre. Rather than having a poem about cats in the shape of a cat (how cutesy!), Mao replicates the shape of Ming vases to address a history of conflict, of exploitation, and of appropriation. It’s rare to see a concrete poem that addresses such meaningful issues, elevating the form to unabashedly honour the traditions from which the poet has emerged.

This work is important precisely because Western culture aims to decontextualize artistry from its origin. The titular piece of The Kingdom of Surfaces is a sustained, surrealistic piece that draws from Alice in Wonderland and the MET Gallery. The poems in that section, spanning twenty pages, each use an epigraph pulled from the exhibit at the MET China Through the Looking Glass: Fashion, Film, Art. The quotations often make claims about the work being disconnected from its context in a kind of postmodern revelation. Specifically, part of the exhibit reads as follows, provided as the epigraph for Mao’s poem “Humpty Dumpty”:

The China that unfolds before  our eyes is a China “through the looking glass,” one that is culturally and historically decontextualized. Freed from settings, past and present, the objects in this catalogue and in the exhibition galleries begin to speak for and between themselves. A narrative space opens up that is constantly being reorganized by free association. Meanings are endlessly negotiated and renegotiated.

Each poem in the section “The Kingdom of Surfaces” offers a challenge to the MET’s perspective that art can be removed from its context. The poems offer a metacommentary on museums’ accumulation processes and the appropriation inherent in exhibit art from Chinese dynasties. The culture-jamming and satirical bent of offering these quotations as a guidepost for a poem that cleverly appropriates from Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland (a nice little inversion of Orientalism) is a great statement on the state of curation today.

What makes the collection really powerful, though, is that this is not simply a tirade against the forces of Western culture engaged in yet another colonial exploitation. The foundations of Mao’s culture are also troubled. Take the poem “On Silk,” for example. It’s an eight page poem about the history of the silk trade, and a number of poems in the collection reference the cultivation process of silk and boiling living creatures alive in order to harvest the culturally-coded material. “Romance of the Castle Toppler” similarly tries to grapple with the treatment of women in Chinese culture, another interrogation of a heritage which has ultimately produced beauty, as well.

The poem “Paris Syndrome” really helps to reinforce that challenging disconnect. Paris Syndrome is itself an experience of failed expectations, a medical affliction recognized among Japanese and Chinese tourists to Paris, whose experience of culture shock is so intense that it creates a sense of dis-ease, sweating, anxiety, and panic. The final stanza of the poem addresses the idea of home and what expectations the speaker’s mother had for a house. The final lines of the poem read as follows: “Before we arrived in the beautiful / country, I imagined a house / with walls made of silk. // I imagined a stranger could come up to our door / and whisper a secret through its seams” (35). It’s an evocative image, both familiar and strange. The idea of the house being made of silk is not entirely comfortable, particularly when it is troubled by the other cultural and “barbaric” layers of the silk trade. The idea of a stranger whispering a secret through the seams of the house presents as intimate a scene as it is coded with danger, an alluring danger perhaps, but a danger nonetheless.

The poem immediately after is “On Silk,” which is structured around a series of vignettes that provide glimpses of history in the silk trade and its current incarnations. Mao offers some rich imagery where the speaker narrates, “When I found the water, I debated / drinking its mirage. In the desert, / everything grew wild. I expected / an expanse of death, but everything / sprouted before me, more alive / than I could ever hope to be” (43). It’s a rich and lush kind of image that is immediately undercut by the section of the poem which follows. She notes that “Every evening in the Bund, orange light / bathed the municipal buildings as I strolled. / The cameras captured every transgression— / jaywalking or loitering. On this side of the river, / memories of blood spilled. A luxury watch brand / sells time to the rivers of people walking down / East Nanjing Road” (43). There’s a coldness to the scene. The orange light takes on an ominous quality where “every transgression” is documented. In the passage that follows, there is a dystopic depiction of the skyline “sequined / with fishscale lights, projections on buildings — / cherry blossoms, ads for skin cream, and the / words I love my home in Chinese and English” (43). The passage ends with the line “Even the sky / was a bolt of silk torn in half by God” (43). The short quatrain that concludes the poem discusses “the splendour and squalor” of their collective past. It’s an appropriate phrase for characterizing the depiction of aesthetics in across the collection: splendour and squalor interlinked, and “A worm spitting / and spinning itself into a new luxury, a sensation, / finally, yes, a thing of value” (43).

While the poems often take on a political bent, they are thoroughly infused with the personal and some of those poems really standout. There’s a viscerality to the pieces, notably in the excellent piece “American Loneliness,” where personal memories are recounted and placed within the broader framework of American and Chinese culture. There are some narratives that weave in, out, and around each other for a finely crafted experience.

As you may have noticed, Mao has a knack for striking images and some poetic phrasing. The first piece in the collection is a highlight that offered a beautiful closing line; in fact, it is what compelled me to read the rest of the collection. In describing “Loquats” (after which the poem is named), the poem concludes on a compelling paradox: “A tree so pretty and snakelike / it renders you breathless, then worthless, all at once” (4). Grappling with contradictions like awe and worthlessness before the beauty of the world is compelling, but Mao twists the knife just a little bit more. The small word “then” is in conflict with “all at once.” The experience is both sequential and simultaneous, which gives that irresolvability voice and helps to nourish the pieces which follow.

The Kingdom of Surfaces is an engaging collection. If you’re interested in history, colonialism, aesthetics, and the monuments to barbarism regularly erected in the West and beyond, it has a wealth of narratives to engage with. It’s an informative collection as much as an imagistic one, and there is enough of a personal touch to breathe life into the poems (without simply being a history textbook with line breaks). It was a surprising read, far more confrontational than I would have expected, but also sincere and appreciatory and conflicted. Sally Wen Mao offers a rich collection here worthy of deep consideration.

Happy reading!

Empire's End by Peter F. Crowley

  Before I jump into a review of Empire’s End by Peter F. Crowley, I should explain how it came into my hands. Recently, I took a trip to Boston and when I go on vacation, I try to buy a poetry collection by a local poet as a souvenir, of sorts. I was lucky to discover that Boston has a book store that focuses exclusively on poetry: The Grolier Poetry Book Shop, which is coming up on a century of existence. I loved seeing thousands and thousands of poetry books on floor-to-ceiling shelves in a cramped room (in my estimate, max occupancy is approximately 5). Amid those shelves was one labelled “Local Authors”, so I went about my perusal and the design of Crowley’s book stood out. And so it came home with me.

Crowley’s collection tackles contemporary issues, including the January 6th insurrection, the rise of AI technologies, and the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic. There’s a clear political impulse here to critique, among other things, capitalist exploitation and toxic work cultures, but it Crowley maintains a poetic impulse that is sometimes lost on more overtly political works. Crowley borders the line of being bombastic, but more often than not veers into the surreal, offering strange connections or unusual imagery to help evoke a response.

As a result, readers are left with two choices for Empire’s End: to root oneself in the images and do the tough work of parsing them, or to let the poems fly by and try to claw your way to a touchstone. I admit that I was mostly in the latter camp, focusing on the big ideas and repeated motifs (Crowley loves eyelids, for instance), with an occasional poem forcing me to linger.

Let’s examine, for a moment, the poem “Dreamless.” It begins with two words on two lines: “plateau-eyed / wasteland.” There’s a kind of deadness to open the scene. Then, in a new stanza, a new start seems to emerge: “shades utter minced light / eyes crawl from bed / the bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh, / asking it to sing. / The flesh has been gorged, / leaving entrails / in the night’s imploding eclipse // And the mirror / is a wasteland” (37). The agency of the scene is largely ascribed to the environment, but the thing being acted upon is often unclear. Shades let the light in, almost conspiratorially. Then “eyes crawl” from the bed and the “bathroom’s barren walls / reach into flesh”—but whose flesh? The idea of an “imploding eclipse” is also a challenge, an inversion inverted. Ultimately, perhaps it’s the mirror that is being acted upon, taking everything into view. The consequences of the scene are less clear. The scene is evocative, but it doesn’t really demand that I sit with it because I’m not clear on the significance of the scene to a speaker or human entity.

There is another poem that potentially illuminates this one. In “Coming to”, a prose-poem that ends with a stanza that reads as follows:

Sometimes, as he gains self-consciousness and an understanding of surroundings, I have a déjà-vu of traveling the same path, stumbling, tripping and not knowing but, with maple syrup slowness, gaining a sense of things before losing it all again, on days when the sky does not share” (47).

The passage sets up an episteme that seems place-centered. “Self-consciousness,” taken literally as awareness of oneself, emerges alongside an “understanding of surroundings.” Further, there’s a sense of memory attached to place—the speaker is “traveling the same path,” but even when the path is the same, it is fraught with error—”stumbling, tripping and not knowing.” In a sense, Empire’s End offers such landscapes that are at once familiar, though they remain difficult to traverse. The landscape-poems demand “maple syrup slowness” and, once parsed, it appears that the speaker gains “a sense of things before losing it all again,” just like the reader. Each poem is a new challenge that emerges. In reference to the previous poem, though, where there does not appear to be a human cognition of significance, here Crowley refers to “days when the sky does not share,” establishing the primacy of the environment over the speaker. Perhaps that is the key to “Dreamless,” offered as a touchstone in “Coming to.”

I admit that I have some suspicions of what Crowley is up to, but much of his work remains oblique to me, so I rely on such touchstone poems. I’ll refer to a poem late in the collection simply titled “The good poem.” It’s possible that the title is intended ironically, but for the sake of argument let’s assume that Crowley is sincere. The first stanza seems to illustrate Crowley’s writing ambitions and dramatize them in a short eight lines. The first stanza offers the wild juxtapositions, imagery, and political impulses that propel his work: “An angelic blossom consuming the night / A lark performing trapeze acts / A servant killing their master / A fruit devolved into seed” (75). The second stanza takes a different turn: “Knowing that the woodrat’s ripped out throat could’ve been you! / To know birth is an accident and life absurd. / To live with this buried in neural pockets of ghost-formed words. / To transfer to paper the universal thousand-pound cinderblock weight” (75). The final line about transferring a thousand-pound cinderblock weight to paper implies to me a deep pain that needs to be dealt with. The “ghost-formed words” seem to suggest a meaninglessness to language, but the contrast of the pain being placed into words on the page is an effective elevation, however tenuous, of the poetic project. It implies that the violence and unfairness of the previous lines can be dealt with through the poems.

The dark cynicism the pieces comes through elsewhere, sometimes in the form of questions. In the poem “Older corrosion,” the central premise is clear: “When we get older, we corrode” (59). The rest of the poem discusses our decay and the impulse to preserve ourselves. If there were a way to pass ourselves on or extend ourselves without corrosion, it seems tempting. The Utopic sort of ideal quickly takes a dark turn, pointedly offered through two juxtaposed questions: “What of the pigs, whose heads were severed, / though kept alive for hours post-mortem? // But should our dead selves be forever curated / On our daughters and grandsons’ backs?” (60). These questions point towards the darkness in our impulse for longevity, especially with reference to the pigs, presumably subject to the will of human beings. If we are in the same position of captivity and imprisonment, what value is there in prolonging our existence? And, even if we were successful, is it right to force the subsequent generations to curate our lives? Even in the metaphorical sense, is it right for the past to be shouldered by the next generations? It’s a provocative set of questions that seem to imply their own answer, however darkly.

To conclude, let’s examine for a moment the collection’s namesake as a final sample of Crowley’s work. Here is the first stanza of “Empire’s End”:

It is the end of empire.
I walk in circles around
my block like an amnesiac,
avoiding people like the plague.
Our hospitals held in
ransom to tomahawk missiles
and silent-blooded drones,
at last, get a trickle.

We can see the political consciousness that impels the poems on full display here: reference to empire, avoiding people “like the plague” during covid-times, the reference to hospitals and tomahawk missiles (like in Palestine, perhaps?), and so on. The second stanza repeats the idea of empire coming to an end, noting that “Truth died long ago — / if indeed it ever lived” and “today we believe anything: / That an apple ate the sky / That a pear has eyes” (15). In the third stanza, Crowley reference the end of war alongside the end of empire, the sense of privation that comes along with aggression: a return to paradise. Immediately after suggesting a paradise, though, Crowley suggests that it was a “huckster” that “unmasked the entire charade.” In this references to post-truth life and the charade of a paradise we didn’t really have, I can’t help but feel a connection to a certain president with an antediluvian slogan. It results in, in Crowley’s words, an “unmasking.” The end of empire still retains its darkness. Even without empire, there is darkness. In the final stanza, Crowley notes of the unmasking: 

But first there is a steep fall,
like a drunk collapsing
on shards of glass.
No longer is the horror over there.
And when awakening from corona
with power inebriation dissipated:
things are far different


it is the end of empire. (16)

I suppose there is much to discuss in terms of the final lines: “things are far different // it is the end of empire” (16). I can’t help but sense a certain irony here. All of the supposedly generative capacities of empires have faded away, and what is left? More of the same—perhaps as though empire is never about its generative capacity. Despite all of the “awakening from corona” that took place, I can’t help but feel that things both are and aren’t different. As though we’ve reverted to a previous reality, as though whether empire exists or not is immaterial.

Despite the bleak revelations sometimes offered in the poems, I can’t help but think that there’s an optimism at the core of the poetic project. I feel like if we were truly defeated we would not write poems about our concerns. We write only when there is something to be done, that the poems can mean something—can take action. So, with that in mind, I’d encourage you to give Crowley’s poems a chance and then take to the streets to liberate yourself and others from the tyranny of empires.

Stay strong and imagine the possibilities. Happy reading!

Milkweed Smithereens by Bernadette Mayer

    I couldn’t leave New York without a poetry collection (well, I guess two poetry collections, given that I had already bought Victoria Chang’s The Trees Witness Everything). I’d had it in mind to visit Berl’s Brooklyn Poetry Shop in the Dumbo area of Brooklyn, but it was closed the day I was there. Luckily, Brooklyn is a highly literary place and I found another book store within a block or two and, within a few minutes of being there, Harneet handed me Bernadette Mayer’s Milkweed Smithereens. When I opened the book to a random page, it just so happened that Mayer referenced another one of my favourite authors:

“vladimir nabokov said:

i confess i do not believe in time 

in BEING AND TIME, poor heidegger
didn’t finish the time part in time
to publish it with the being part
so everything-now must be not-being” (14).

References to Nabokov and time was enough to persuade my pocket to shell its money out, and so I acquired Milkweed Smithereens.

    When I started the collection proper, I found Mayer’s work a bit alienating. The first poem uses precise and technical diction for describing flowers, which makes it challenging to imagine what she’s referring to when you’re a layman on the topic. The second poem, “The Joys of Dahlias,” descends into sound-association, a form that doesn’t really resonate with me much: “blah blah blah it’s blue satin bliss / the bishop of York wants some blackberry ice / the blue bayou is bluetiful, bonnie Esperance / is blue purple-urple or more like bridezilla?” (6). The predominance of “b”s is clear, but the meaning is not. It seems that sound, rather than logic, dictates the progression of the poem, which makes it hard for me to get anything out of it.

    Over time, though, the freeform style of Mayer’s poems grew on me and the poems themselves offer some justification for their haphazard associations. In one poem, Mayer makes a passing comment on taking on an expressive style—if I recall correctly, she notes the transition to an expressive mode with some trepidation. In another poem, Mayer offers a more explicit stance against the overly curated, overly manicured nature of poems:

“the idea that writing is easy comes from the frank o’hara method. but it is in fact easy, especially if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking, for instance you might be trying to say what somebody else is thinking, like barthes or lacan. slowly does the middle tree turn yellow, always having been the most interesting fall tree, it is somewhat damaged with dead parts you can see from the field, it’s the tree whose branch snapped off & hung there threatening our (covid) social life till when it fell. Now threatening is cold weather, can’t sit outdoors, our plan is to borrow a tent from grace, & in it use our mr. heater buddy, little buddy, maybe it will work” (52).

There’s a free and easy quality to the writing that mimics the “frank o’hara method.” I find Mayer’s comment compelling that writing is easy “if you don’t try to say more than you are thinking, to say other than what you’re thinking.” In such a simple phrase, Mayer deconstructs basically all of modern poetry, or at least modern criticism, wherein we read with suspicion: imagery is not imagery, but the interior world of the speaker; the speaker’s stated views are either ironic or satirical, never sincere. In this collection, Mayer’s style offers a more natural approach to poetry, perhaps getting to the core of a poetic ‘moment’ rather than a poetic ‘vision.’ Less of a construct, the stream-of-consciousness approach offers a range of possibilities often closed off to other poets.

    This aesthetic approach presents itself most clearly and effectively in “from The Covid Diary,” a long prose poem that is interspersed throughout the others. While artwork about the pandemic already feels dated, there’s enough in Mayer’s work to offer a case for its presence. You’ll notice that in the lengthy passage I quoted above, Mayer starts with literary referents—Frank O’Hara, Roland Barthes, Jacques Lacan—before jumping to a lush image of a dying tree. There’s a parenthetical reference to Covid, unobtrusively but noticeably embedded in simple moments, a background interruption. Then, Mayer moves to a personal note about borrowing a tent from Grace. It’s like a collage of ‘high’ culture philosophers with the ‘low’ form of a note-to-self and all the things in between.

    The Covid diary takes up a significant portion of Milkweed Smithereens and often includes short references to passing thoughts—to repeat—in a free and easy style. In the first, Mayer reflects, “can you feel sorry for a field? i feel sorry for myself though i’m smarter than the field maybe, but not as smart as nabokov, as we both go around criticizing everything, but poor nabokov didn’t understand about whales’ memories of the future, how come?” (8). The more that time passes, the more I value the record of deeply personal, possibly foolish, philosophical reflections. The idea of feeling sorry for a field feels both extraordinarily particular and deeply universal. It doesn’t hurt that the next sentence is profoundly relatable: feeling sorry for yourself because you’re not as smart as Nabokov—been there; I’d say “done that”, but I feel like it’ll be forever ongoing.

    The poems in the collection fall into one of several categories, though the boundaries between them are not necessarily defined. Some of the poems are reflections on flowers; others are reflections on time and memory; others deal with the realities of isolation in times of Covid; others identify all-too-relatable concerns with a (then new) Trump presidency and its implications; others are about friends and family; others express a kind of aesthetics of poetry.

    One of the stand-out poems in this regard is “I IMAGINE A POEM by bernadette mayer (Based on the poem by ALAN CASLINE)”. I like the cheekiness of identifying herself as the poet in the title of the poem. It’s a subtly subversive spin that places the oft-effacing poet figure front and center. The poem expresses the same ethic of attention and focus that appears in other poems: “even now the vacuum cleaner sounds like / it’s rehearsing a poem” (67). Partway through, the speaker offers a challenge to the poet: “i dare you to make this a real poem, half / as wide & with all the sounds of the angelic choirs / of poetry, or, of the homelessness of poetry, or the wild / thyme-ish-ness of poetry” (67). It’s an unusual move to see the poem itself or at least its speaker challenge its writer so directly and, while in some other contexts this might feel like a cheap move, here it feels entirely appropriate to the vision of the book. In a paradoxical stance, the artificial distance between poem and poet here serves to highlight the personality and unique voice of the poet.

    When I mentioned the core motifs of the poems, I neglected to mention stinkbugs, ticks, and thoughts of death. There’s a resignation towards death—not that Mayer goes gentle into that goodnight—that seems prescient; Milkweed Smithereens was released and Mayer passed away in the same year. The poems do have an elegiac quality, especially in the journalistic style of her Covid diary. You can feel the world getting slower, the great winding down.

    The final poem in the collection is called “Conclusion.” It’s quite short, and I feel justified in citing it in its entirety:

“The Method of Repeated Reproduction of
remembered material with increasing lapse
of time, until it has reached a stereotyped
form through transformations in which influences
play, excites an attitude of uncertainty, which
has nothing to do with objective inaccuracy,
towards the introduction of what is new” (85).

Given the repeated motifs in the collection, referencing the “Method of Repeated Reproduction” is a nice summation of the project. (Incidentally, it reminds me of Avni Doshi’s Burnt Sugar, in which the main character draws someone from memory and then every day produces a portrait based on the previous one). Mayer having these flashes of memory despite increasing lapses of time seems to imbue these moments with additional significance. The final lines offer an outline of Mayer’s process: “influences play” (consider the references to Nabokov, Heidegger, or Barthes), “an attitude of uncertainty” underlies the poems by being ambiguous and not easily pinned down into one meaning, and there is no concern for “objective” accuracy—the personal experiences override the constructed and fixed nature of poems. I think it’s wonderful that the final line of the poem posits a project that moves “towards the introduction of what is new.” In many ways, I feel like that is a wonderful ‘last line’ for a poet to write before they pass away. What a wonderful encapsulation of possibility and an assertion of the hopes for a lifetime of poetry.

    I hope that each of us can bring that spirit to our lives: may we all introduce something new in our own ways. We’ll all be more enriched for it.

    Happy reading!