Subtexts
by Dan Brady
Publishing Genius Press, 2022
Brady makes a case for less-is-more. These poems, whose origins can be found in the layered paintings of the artist Eugene Leroy, recast the experience of reading a poem into an act of recasting: each poem in the book moves through a series of reimaginings via a type of erasure; we are propelled through different iterations of the same text much as if walking through a gallery and viewing a silk screened image that employs a different color palette (or adds/subtracts colors) with each iteration; the image remains recognizable, but the eye shifts knowing. The difference in the same. Here the full, original text serves as a casting mold for the grainy excess, the overspill of language, of meaning, of reseeing. The score for a song in which the instrumentation gradually builds, crescendos, then slowly fades back out. That I am so taken with merely attempting to describe the methodology of these poems belies the fact that out of these erasure/layerings Brady twangs the discordant notes of our disparate, evolving human experience, the subtexts of how we compute being alive at any given moment. Melancholic or slavishly funny, these poems work most powerfully in their stripped-down moments. “A Disagreement” devolves the classic he-said / she-said argument into a nuttering nonsense barely able to escape the throat in its embarrassment. In their best iterations these poems recast the reader in the multiplicity of their various selves. And leave us in our fully unformed state, asking: Which version echoes most true? How thoroughly does a body, a self, a text rebirth itself with each brief breath?
Where Was I Again
by Olivia Muenz
Essay Press, 2022
Sentences that can’t seem. To finish. Themselves. Ample use of the emphatic. Tic of excessive. Punctuation. Yet here that popular periodic punch serves as a fulcrum to hold us back, to throw us wildly forward. The period becomes the literal point of disorientation, deranging the typical value markers of conversation into a violent pulsation. How does one talk. To this speaker who. Erraticates. The throbbing music of these prose bursts unfurl over the two poems that comprise Muenz’s chapbook, “I’m here” and “But not,” which take the form of similar opposites, two sides of the same coin, the punctured, exploded coin, the coin with the hole in the middle that when peered through constricts the visible, slices the real into shards of nonexperience. Throughout the text a shattering discontinuity of image and sense presents a world all out of order, a world struck through with depression and loss. “Here is my brain on drugs,” Muenz writes in the preface. “The doctor ones.” In the drugscope of Muenz’s vision we are alone in the language of debased potential, trying to tell apart the twins: one a shimmering self, the other a spectral negative of self, dissociated, damagingly present. Just bodies. Trying to find. A way. To.