the correct fury of your why is a mountain by kevin andrew heslop

    Please read this in the most positive tone possible: it took me a long time to read this short book. I first started it—twice—right as I was going to bed. The opening poem in kevin andrew heslop’s collection gives a gentle, playful opening and the second is a demanding, extended, beautifully wrought and inventive piece. I knew, I just knew, this was not a before-bed kind of read. This was a book that commanded slow, thoughtful consideration. With that in mind, I restarted my reading. Again.

    the correct fury of your why is a mountain is replete with double and triple readings that are as playful as they are insightful. I’ve already alluded to the opening poem of the collection, presented as a forward, which reads: “a thought, barefoot //// slips ///// along a / painter’s /  tendon, // pools /// at the risk. //// Wrist” (ix). In addition to that auditory echo, heslop’s cheeky love of language is elevated, too, by the placement of the words on the page. It’s hard to replicate the organized chaos of the arrangement, but it takes me back to a special time in life where I was experimenting with form—largely to no purpose—and it’s nice to see heslop capitalizing on the visual side of poetry, particularly when it feels like so few poets (myself included) are making use of the page, truly, like a canvas.

    The second poem, “i cavalloni”, dives into language by exploring the Italian word for high waves; the opening line says it doubles as the word for horses. The rest of the poem builds an incredibly imagistic scene of waves coming in like horses. The use of the word “doubles” in the poem is particularly potent because so many of the lines can be read in secondary ways. Because of the spacing of the words and their lack of punctuation, the emphasis falls in places sometimes unexpectedly. The style forces a second read and the secondary interpretations of lines prove fruitful. I often think great poets teach people how to read them, and “i cavalloni” serves as a perfect primer for the collection; you learn to get used to the spacing and the cadences and the lack of punctuation and the layering that comes through in each piece.

For instance, here’s a sample from “the prettiest the most tangential now”:

makes more             sense                       than the former

               blur of         endeavour as                     the con

--temporary surplus autopilot clusterfuck              edits                                                               a mere         boy (5)

The brokenness of the lines gives a gentle ambiguity that allows for possibility. We could make more sense than the former blur, or we could make more blur of sense. The brokenness of con— and —temporary is also engaging for several reasons. Of course, we recognize “con” as a kind of deception, and to me the line suggests that the contemporary is a con. What makes it more compelling to me is that, usually, hyphens are placed at the end of a line to help signal to the reader that the word continues on the subsequent line. By placing it at the start of a line, heslop accomplishes something I find very interesting; he gives a sense of finality in the line that continues. We expect to end on “the con.” With the hyphen at the start of the line, our reading starts in media res, as it were, with a new thought, a “temporary surplus.” The approach requires a good deal of mental juggling that allows multiple truths to co-exist. Another example is in “actually listening ducks is preferable to the predicated pinprick religion”, “the river   its referred   countenance horizontal gravity ducks  seem to prefer / sidelong pinnacle gymnastics of light on water turning like recall i was won // -dering about the manifested of it  meanwhile this radical white indivi– / dual inclined smallpox folk the western world must have longed for escape” (6). The line “i was won” suggests a completion—a kind of entrancement, a giving over of oneself. The moment is then immediately undermined when the word is revised to wondering. No longer is the speaker of the poem given over to the ducks, but instead the ducks are turned into an object of an interrogation, a mode which is, by necessity, incomplete. Notice also that indivi— / dual gets split up differently. Instead of the hyphen appearing at the start, we are given a sense of continuation. And where do the words continue? As a ‘dual,’ a doubling.

    Look at how much I’ve already written about this book. Now take a moment to appreciate the fact that I’m working through the book chronologically and I’ve made it to page 6.

    heslop’s inventiveness with line breaks and page arrangement is only one element of his work, though I do think it contributes to his creative and political project as a whole. There is a resistance to some concerning trends of modern life, including the extremes that arise when people fail to take time to think slowly and carefully.

    One poem, “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever” (9), heslop addresses “the masked static of our time” and considers “the question of the edge is of precise diptych / of whether remote chaos without     order    is    possible” (9). The poem continues entrancingly, where “the discrete infinities of language bubbles” are “suspending in sanitizing gel.” Subsequently, “we are / disordered and  ordered  the   crystalline     kin        we    are   just    now as one // community without impulse to you  me my your us  them viral binaries thin— / king English distinction requires  as a syntax of sunlight in italics on the river” (9). heslop works on multiple levels simultaneously, but we also see in this poem a resistance to “viral binaries” — I read the word “viral” in its sickly sense here — and the addition of the word “thin” there shows just how little binaries can be taken seriously. The erosion of distinctions between you, me, my, your, us, them seems to be an impulse here, and what better way to generate political change than with some gorgeous imagery like “a syntax of sunlight in italics” (9). Just fantastic. Actually, in “all the wrong ghosts live here” there’s another beautiful image the draws on text feature imagery: “Bumper cars like ampersands guided by chance / and circumstance in a threadbare ballet” (41). Holy moly what an image. Sliding back over to “oh that’s the universe in absolutely radically caps lock accordance with forever,” the whole poem is great, but I worry that if I cite too much I’ll just overwhelm everyone. I’ll take that risk: “disorienting  grammar      like      love    consciously    trans / —piring the masked   infinities   we    are   can         will      go on forever here” (9). I love the way the poem weaves together issues of identity and language in a non-didactic way, illuminating the issues with wonderful turns of phrase: “you can’t take the edge off a sphere” (9). 

    The poems I’ve cited until now are among the more strange and challenging pieces. That said, heslop shows some great range. Several of the poems are more direct in their formatting, whilst still being compelling. There’s a wonderful, short, piece called “in lieu” that has a lovely sentimentality that balances the more political / socially conscious bent of some of the other poems:

A truth is we hold memories too meaningful

to punish with the anecdotal telling of translation

Into brittle words, as equally there are some memories

too scared for review: the ilk of faces they contain,

held wrapped in neural silk, suspend above the storm

of harms the world can be, like a perfect eyelash

on a sleeping baby’s cheek, untouchable

because of that concern that sleep would not return

after a wakening—so sleep, a little, memory: sleep. (24)

The gentleness of the poem is a refreshing ‘reset’ in partway through the collection. While it still references some issues of language and translation, some of the tender imagery really elevates the piece. The idea of being “wrapped in neural silk” is lovely and the apostrophe addressing sleep in the final lines is a delight.

    In addition to the political and sentimental, there are some aphoristic pieces, some poems in inspired by other poets and some more personal-sounding pieces. In “about the twice-bent blast of that good night”, heslop presents a poem in two parts that is a blend of texting between two characters and a meditation on language and the way heslop mixes the parts together gives the poem a wonderful sequence. The closest analog I can identify is with John Ashbery, whose poems similarly hold a mix of different elements woven together like an intricate handmade basket. I couldn’t possibly do the poem its justice except by rewriting it all here, as I’ve done for my private notebook, but there’s a lovely call-and-response between the first and second part of the poem. In the first part, “That night, / abacus was from the Hebrew word for dust; // calculus, a pebble, from the Latin” (21). There’s then a throwaway mundanity question, the second part starts, and there’s a gut punch: “Grief is a time zone without a calendar. / ‘But define dust’” (22). I love the parallels and mirroring between the two parts and within them. I also like the line “Acrylic / runs from every dog’s mouth on every side / —walk in every city in the world and hear, / brother, in every endless tongue, in every style // of union or revilement, the text of the world: / Fuck” (22). Notice again the breakdown of side-walk. It ends the dog image and then starts an imperative to act, to walk in every city. The poem operates as a kind of spiral and it’s a pretty incredible ode to English speakers’ favourite profanity.

    Really, I can’t rave enough about the imagery of the collection. The poem “back in town” paints such a vivid picture that, again, I could only do justice to by quoting the poem in its entirety. It’s a beautiful ride on the bus. heslop paints the scene beautifully and then gives it that perfect personal touch, that tiny hint of narrative: “With that sentence, / I hoped to tell you how I felt—of particular relevance / is the first line break. Also the distances” (30). After 13 lines of poetry, the personal address is jarring. There’s something about the poem that reads like a prolonged sonnet. A lot of the lines are a syllable too long, and the whole poem is about three lines too long. Both elements combined feel like a lingering longing, a prolonged desire. It’s a poem I’d love to delve into with some of my students—I think they’d really be able to provide some excellent insight. Similarly, “Astoria” offers a personal touch that feels so vulnerable and authentic to be irresistible.

    The creativity of the collection doesn’t even end with the poems. I’ve never seen an acknowledgements section like heslop’s. heslop provides a poem that stretches over several pages in bursts of one or two lines. The poem’s lines are provided with footnotes. In the footnotes heslop thanks a number of his loved ones and influences. I loved that inventive approach to elevate a humdrum “thank you”s section to a creative act in its own right. Incidentally, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an acknowledgements section that thanks so many people that are personally known to me and so many places I’ve been. I hope my experiential overlap with heslop will allow us to one day come into closer contact and talk poetry.

    On that note, there’s a poem in the collection called “observing how you went a few steps at a time to parchment” that has an epigrammatic inscription: “a found poem in four acts for the disabled poem-making entity known as Roxanna Bennett which bears this very went-to-school smart person subtitle you are reading now” (17). As an aside, I absolutely adore Roxanna Bennett’s work, as well, so this meeting of the minds seems, to me, fortuitous and for them outright inspiring. In that poem, there’s a line that reads as follows: “to decide whether ot not / the organization of hope / is poetry” (17) and I quite like that formulation. The idea that poetry gives shape to a particular kind of experience is a worthwhile exploration. I like, too, that “organization” could be used as a noun here in multiple ways. It could read as either Institutional or, as I prefer, the conscious, craft-like act of putting things in place.

    If poetry is the organization of hope, I see a tremendous hopefulness roaming through the correct fury of your why is a mountain. The collection is so wonderfully constructed and embodies a particular kind of ethos, a slow thoughtfulness that serves as both a personal and political imperative. The medium, as the adage goes, is the message here. Everything heslop does seems purposeful while not being limited to a particular interpretation, and I really value that.

    As I mentioned, it took me a long time to read this book, despite it being relatively short. Luckily, it took me a while to read for all of the right reasons and it was a blessing to feel time expand before me while I mulled over the turns of phrase, images, and implications of these poems. This is one of the best, most interesting poetry collections I’ve read in a long while. While it may be hard to adjust to heslop’s style, once you’re immersed you are bound to linger in these lines and it’s worth every minute of it.

    Happy reading!

She'll Find The Sky by Christy Ann Martine

    Sometimes when I read poetry collections, I open to the back section to read the thank yous and acknowledgements. I don’t know why I have that affectation, but when I did this for Christy Ann Martine’s She’ll Find the Sky, I found statements not like “Christy Ann Martine is the publisher of three previous collections and has her work in Fiddlehead, CB2, and The Malahat Review” but instead a passage that read “celebrities around the world have shared her poetry on their social media accounts, including Julian Lennon, Misha Collins, The Jacksons, Mena Suvari, Good Bones star Mina Starsiak Hawk, actress Amyra Sastur, and TV personality Matt Johnson” (25). I have never seen anything like that before, except, perhaps, when Arrested Development’s Tobias Fünke’s acting reel included a section called “Famous People I Know.” Both cases have a dubious notion of celebrity and both make me feel awkward to experience. Perversely, though, the tactic worked—it did make me want to know just how low this book could go.

    And it really is bottom of the barrel.

    Hopefully Christy Ann Martine never reads my review; I would feel knowing terrible knowing she put her heart and soul into self-publishing this book and then being panned by some nobody know-it-all.

    The reality is, there is a market for this book, but I am not that market. I won’t bother rehashing my problems with instagram poetry in any level of depth, but in short I am very critical of any poetry that, rather than creating an experience for the reader, simply employs stock greeting-card phrases to allow readers to self-insert any actual content. The poems do not create an experience of love; they rely on readers to know what love is like already and then read a poem and say, “girl, same!” Again, this is me speaking from some sort of ivory tower-adjacent structure when I discuss the unpracticed hand that has big feelings but doesn’t have the craft to shape them into an experience.

    These problems manifest in the recycled similes and metaphors throughout the collection. Everything is rain, everything is fire, everything is stars, everything is flowers, everything is butterflies. Reading the poems individually may not yield the same effect, but when you read them all in succession (it took the length of 1 dog walk + dinner making to read the 254 pages of this book), you start to get the sense that all these published poems are drafts for a poem that never gets written. I present here a few ad hoc selections, but plenty more abound: “Love is a soft rain, / gently falling / on my heart, / nourishing my soul / so it can grow” (42), “She’s in the clouds, / heavy and dark, / waiting to fall like rain” (164), “I want to live / in a world / where love falls / from the sky like rain, / washing the pain / of the past away” (168), “My mind is dark / and filled with pain, / like the dark sky / before the rain, / I need to let go” (175). When so many things are like rain, rain stops being like anything; it’s a placeholder for meaning, an idea devoid of content.

    If you feel that I’m cherrypicking lines from poems to help lampoon Martine’s book, an important detail to note is that each of the quotations above is an entire poem. One thing to be said for the collection is that it is a page turner: I’m already turning the page as I start each poem since the poems are nary more than four lines. That may be why many of them feel like false starts. For example, in “Dreams of a Full Moon”, Martine writes, “The roar of the ocean / holds secrets of / moonlight lovers. / Love rises with the tide, / it lives within the waves” (51). There’s a reasonable premise of intrigue there: the idea of roars that overshadow secrets and the hush of foam rendering moonlight lovers hazy could be developed into something engaging, but there just isn’t enough to latch onto.

    A significant portion of the poems can be classed as what I would refer to as ‘advice musings’ (and what Christy Ann Martine refers to as “Little Life Sayings” in Chapter Ten) rather than experiences. It’s the telltale use of the imperative that should serve as a warning to any non-Instagram poetry aficionado: “Keep searching for the colors / when everything turns gray. / Even in your darkest moments / a brighter day awaits” (“A Brighter Day Awaits” 202), “Dance with the waves, / move with the sea. / Let the rhythm of the water / set your soul free” (14). This book is at its most, as the kids might say, certified cringe, is when it leans into the advice poems. In the last section of the book, suddenly the titles of the poems are missing and instead the audience is given a post-poem title in the style of Rupi Kaur. I suspect there may be a historical / cultural precedent for consistently putting the titles of poems after their namesakes instead of before, but here it just seems to be a kind of weird derivative technique. What makes it truly embarrassing, though, is that the titles are simply the advice the poems are providing. Let me give you an example. Here is a poem: “When life becomes so loud / that I can no longer / hear my own thoughts, / I need to turn down the volume / and tune into my soul, / so I can remember who I am / and where I am going.” Its title follows in italics: “your inner voice is always speaking to you, but you need to listen.” What, exactly, is the difference in the tonal register, word choice, or even the length of the poem and its title? It appears that the only difference is that what is presented as a poem has line breaks while the title follows a conventional left-to-right margin approach. Another example: “You can’t receive the gifts / the present moment is offering / if you are living in the past” (243). The title of the poem? “You don’t have to hold on to the pain forever, let go.” I am left perplexed by these titles and this approach. Is it the case that the titles are meant to clarify the “Little Life Saying” provided by the poem, as if it were not immediately obvious? It would be one thing to title “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” “It would be wise not to dwell too much on the past, lest ye become an old man looking for consolation in a universe in which you’ve had no impact”, but here it just makes me blush to see a life lesson parading as a poem followed by a banner that says “hey! Here’s exactly what the poem just said!”. Martine’s approach presents itself as a draft leeching off a different draft.

    While I was reading the book, my eyes were rolling hard, but as I write this review I actually feel a pain in my chest at how harsh I feel myself being. Please note that the book is, in all likelihood, sincere, and I want to value Martine’s personal experiences as an author. She is a survivor of neglect and abuse, and I in no way want to diminish the severity of those experiences. As an aesthetic object, though, I feel this book misses the mark. In the section “The Dark Years,” Martine offers a trigger warning for abuse, neglect, and depression. I commend her for showing compassion to her audience, though I don’t personally see these as being particularly triggering; because the poems are quite vague (allowing audiences to self-insert), I feel that whatever triggers arise are triggers you yourself have placed into the poems, rather than the poems themselves being triggering. For instance, the poem “Your Words Couldn’t Break Me” reads: “You tried so hard / to shatter my spirit, / but a soul full of love / can never be broken” (149). It skims along the surface; it intimates an idea (though is it a lover? a parent? a destructive teacher? a mean internet reviewer?) but it doesn’t create, in me, a visceral reaction through its incisiveness or descriptive qualities.

    I am well aware I’m not the target audience for this book. I’d like to be at least a little generous and say that there is a demographic that will love these poems, likely more casual readers or people beginning to get into poetry. If this book helps them get their feet wet, I am in full support. [I should confess here that my entrypoint to poetry was Charles Bukowski and, honestly, I’m not sure most of his stuff would be any better and it would certainly be more problematic.] The cynic in me, though, thinks that the vagueness is a marketing ploy to capitalize on a pre-critical audience (cf. Bo Burnham’s song “Repeat Stuff”). Poems like “Everyday Hero” speak to this concern: “You don’t have to be brave, / you just have to keep trying. / You don’t have to be strong, / you just have to keep going. / Maybe your superpower / is refusing to give up, / even on your weakest days / when you feel you’re not enough” (204). Granted, I prefer to read things that make me hate myself for being such a useless garbage bag of regret, but the compulsion towards self-aggrandizing feel-goodery doesn’t, to me, feel authentic or sincere. Maybe someday I’ll get to a place of unqualified self-love but when I do, I don’t think it’s going to come from a poem like this one. The most redundant platitude peddler is “Extraordinary Moments”: “I haven’t had / an ordinary day / since we met. / Each moment / spent with you / has been / nothing less / than extraordinary” (59). Don’t let the line breaks fool you; the poem is saying that the speaker hasn’t had an ordinary day because the days have been extraordinary. That’s it. It’s poems like that that make it feel like a cash grab of false fire and staged swoons (also if poetry is a cash grab now I really need to rethink what I’ve done with my life). 

    I’m coming to the end of possibly the meanest streak I’ve ever had in a review, and I want to end on a poem that I found interesting, though I am confident it’s interesting to me unintentionally. The poem is called “The Secrets of the Forest” and it reads as follows:

When the soft winds blow

I can hear the trees whispering.

Their leaves rustling

as they share their thoughts

with the universe.

They talk about the sun, the sky,

the people that roam the earth.

They say we are all one. (20).

Now here’s the thing. At the heart of this poem is a paradox. Let’s accept that “we are all one.” I appreciate that sentiment and largely believe it to be true. But, if everything is one, the premise of the conversation falls apart. Why would trees talk to one another to say “we are all one”; the need to assert the ultimate unity of all things necessarily entails a division. If everything is truly unified, there would be no need nor any way for formerly individualized trees to speak to one another; they would already be sharing the same experience. Likewise, there would be no distinction between the sun, the sky, the people—there would not be different appellations for different entities with which to refer to one another, much less so in the absence of a human ear [the very distance of which subverts the premise—if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around to hear it, does the person not also fall?]. I’m likely overthinking the metaphysics of this piece, but that was the poem that actually made me stop to think.

    I used to have a professor whom I very much admired and he would often use a phrase that was something like, “If a job is no experience necessary, there is no experience gained.” Essentially, it was about how if the barrier for entry (in this case to a text) is nothing, then it won’t provide much when you leave it. Essentially, that’s how I feel about “She’ll Find the Sky.” 

    I’ll bring this review to its natural conclusion here. I’ve exhausted myself with complaints, and I feel quite guilty for offering such a negative review to a book that may very well do good in the world. I hope it finds its audience and that my naysaying does not diminish the joy other people find in this book.

    Happy reading, with apologies to Christy Ann Martine.