Borderlines

Unpeopled Eden, by Rigoberto González.

Four Way Books. $15.95.

At its most basic, poetry is always written from the edges of social interactions — from the place where the self speaks to itself, and maybe speaks loud enough that it will let someone, a reader, overhear. But it’s always telling secrets, always saying what won’t fit into words. This is one of the problems of poetry that seeks to be “political”: How can a poet speak for a public, about a public problem, in the kind of private language that poetry requires? It must investigate the nature of language itself, and that investigation is necessarily an esoteric one — the parsing of the personal and public meanings of words.

Here are three new or newish books speaking, at some level, on behalf of marginalized communities. They use an array of different techniques — collage, quotation, mythology, science, and many others. These poems work best when they approach the personal sides of these very public problems in rich and complex language, making clear that many of the most heavily guarded borders are linguistic ones.

Rigoberto González’s fourth collection treats, by various means, the myths and struggles of (mostly) men who’ve crossed the border between Mexico and America. It’s a concept book, a suite, but it reads best when the poems are considered as individual lyrics; it becomes a bit claustrophobic and repetitive when taken as a whole.

Of course, the stories González has to tell are claustrophobic and wrenchingly repetitive ones, about people who leave Mexico in search of a new life and new resources — with the hope of bringing their families to prosperity after them — only to find, as many of these poems narrate, poor opportunities and no way to reach their families again. Subject matter is back in vogue, by which I mean that poetry readers, and other poets, are no longer so impressed by books of poems written to illustrate the ways language can’t convey meaning. González is one of the finer practitioners of what one might call the new old-fashioned poem, full of images, vivid sensory detail, and lush, figurative language in the service of identifiable people, places, and things.

González is a maker of striking, powerful metaphors, something he should be better-known for. In the best poem in this book, “In the Village of Missing Fathers,” which spins a fable about the imaginary town where border-crossing men leave their wives and children to wait, there are pages and pages of stunning and precise metaphors, moments of sleight of hand when the poem gets its work done on you before you have a chance to realize what’s happened. “When it rains,” González writes, “the women never say / it’s coming down, they point to the ground / and say it came”: this is a posthumous place where grief must be presupposed, where description of the present is in past tense.

Over its eight pages, González speaks with luxurious longing for other situations, other possibilities, other futures, other pasts. These women “roll their torsos / in the final trace of musk that must have / overwhelmed them once.” A fine stanza about sex shows what he’s truly capable of:

            Oh delicious weight of passion,
oh terrible tickle, oh precious probe.
The women are becoming brittle without it.
The boys are growing anxious with it.
The walls of every house are threatening
to collapse from the negligence of it.

González interweaves unfulfilled adult longing with the unfulfillable longing of puberty, setting the whole scene in a place just outside of time, where “the sad architecture of abandonment / will always stand.”

It’s the myth of a place where nothing changes, where nothing happens because it’s happening elsewhere, at the end of the men’s “journey North to waste / their days as kitchen slaves.” It’s rare to see so newsworthy a topic, a topic so much in the news, elevated to the realm of poetry without suffering cliche.

Of course there are a handful of overused tropes in this and other poems — too much “shadow” and a kind of inevitable gravity in the poems that becomes predictable, as in the opening lyric, in which each line ends with the world “soldier” (which is how González would like us to think of  border crossers) and the poem concludes, a bit Gertrude Stein-ishly, with “the rattle that beckons the soldier / to death to soldier to death to soldier.” I want another end, a conclusion rather than wordplay — but perhaps that’s because I wish for other endings for the characters.

González’s crowning achievement in this book is a stanza and a half in “In the Village of Missing Sons,” the counterpart to the poem quoted above (in fact, these two poems, coming near the beginning and end of the book, are so arresting and emotionally large, they overwhelm the others, making them seem a bit like filler):

In the village of missing sons there are sadder
scenes than that: the mayor scolding the mice

for eating sugar and refusing to brush
their teeth; the schoolteacher reading a fable
to a row of coffee cups to usher them to sleep;
the doctor’s wife pinching her nipple numb
over the orchid when it’s time to feed.
In every yard tricycles rise like gravestones.

If only more poets of witness would let their imaginations run this dark and wild. These lines, which seem to come from nowhere and everywhere in time, harken back to W.S. Merwin at his best in the late sixties and early seventies. It’s the old — the timeless, really — 
made new and pressing again.

 

Solecism, by Rosebud Ben-Oni.

Virtual Artists Collective. $15.00.

Ben-Oni is a kind of polite, accessible avant-gardist, meaning her experimentation takes place not so much in her style or mode of address, but in her stance toward the reader. We are meant to feel like we are being given the secrets of a club which did not exist, let alone have its own secrets, until she made it up on the line before.

Her style is caught — to surprisingly magnetic effect — somewhere between page and stage, meaning that at first many of these lines seem designed more for easy, one-time verbal transmission than thoughtful re-reading, except that, upon re-reading, many lines do indeed yield more. Ben-Oni seems beholden to neither the long literary tradition nor the club-like customs of the performance poetry scene, though she lets herself borrow freely from both.

Ben-Oni, half-Mexican and half-Jewish, conceives of herself as speaking, again, from in-between spaces as well as for them. Her bio attests that she is also a playwright, at work on a novel, and in the midst of composing her next book of poems. This is either an older model of how to be a writer — think of D.H. Lawrence — or a new one, in which the almost religious allegiance to one’s genre in the MFA world is foresworn. Ben-Oni is a young person of letters, and if she has a lot to prove and live up to, she is trying on many fronts.

She claims and speaks from aspects of  both of  her heritages, recalling scenes in Hebrew school and Mexican border towns. Much of this poetry is also set in the too-crowded streets and subways of New York City, where the author attended college and currently resides, and the speaker prides herself on a certain amount of know-how in navigating it all. If the poems are not always, line-by-line, so ambitious, their mission of making themselves widely understood is.

The opening poem, “At Ten I Held the Look of Locust,” narrates a coming-of-age in a place where “the Americans came and built a factory for the women / to work with solvents and a playground for their children”:

I held the look of locust, black-sunken eyes and long, thin limbs
               so mothers of melting plastic and plywood

scrambled for sawdust from the mouths of razor-wild men.
               Bloody nails wrote the mornings after in pencil lead.

I was unborn again, casting the look of locust, leather-rebellious nymph,
               swarming in constant omission, twitching in sin.

Twenty years later, the factory is condemned, but the playground stands
               with a sign in English: WARNING: Toxic waste, no playing.

She often goes for a seemingly off-the-cuff feel, improvisatory, filled with in-jokes, snippets of Spanish, subtle winks to groups to which the reader may not belong:

I’m a lychee peel in peril
Plates tipping off the table
By catnipped paw.
I’m those ecstatic missing thumbs.
I’m ghosting the trains until home.
I’m a wash-and-wear sunburnt mess of curls.
I’m 7 Train Love Local,
No names Express.
 — From Song of Waxing Gibbous

She is capable of startling and powerful turns, as when she describes “what it’s like to survive / a bombing” in the voice of such a survivor from Jerusalem. The experience is finally subjective, 
un-sharable, “like bad music / I can’t get out of my head.” After cataloging a parade of horrors — 

                                     The newborn
flailing in the exiled mother’s arms
I meet the anger in the eyes 

of his son, later captured
on a Human Rights website.
 — From Proof of Absence

— she concludes, “But even these are not facts,” a testament to trauma 
filtered through the prism-glasses of the Internet. This is urgent, 
authoritative writing — news reported artfully.

 

Mad Honey Symposium, by Sally Wen Mao.

Alice James Books. $15.95.

The most exciting book in this trio, just in terms of the textures of the poetry, is Sally Wen Mao’s debut, Mad Honey Symposium. Her poems, many of them set in rhythmic couplets or tercets, or in numbered sequences, strongly bear the marks of  having read, and thought deeply about, Sylvia Plath, Lucie Brock-Broido, Mary Jo Bang, and D.A. Powell, the latter’s lines serving as an epigraph for one of her own poems. She learned Plath’s tension: the stakes are always high — perhaps sometimes one gets a little sweaty from all the heat in these lines — and when there’s humor, it is of a dark kind. Like Brock-Broido, or even Dylan Thomas, she is willing to trade a little sense in exchange for great music. This book is packed with science terminology — a biology, and word, fetishist’s playground:

It is said that when bees can’t migrate,
they hibernate in a dragnet of  bodies
             around the queen, rotating outward

for warmth so no one dies. But somewhere
in the outskirts, a worker bee might fall
            into a coma.
 — From On the Sorrow of Apiary Thieves

Mao works with a very focused body of imagery: bugs, especially bees; plants and their biological processes; and human beings, often engaging in sex acts. She’s also got a subtly incredible ear, and these poems are packed with delicious lines and phrases:

          Some girls pray to be Queen

They think: wouldn’t it be terrific, to be
wanted like that. Wouldn’t it be terrific

to be stroked and adored, to lose your virginity
in the glorious aftermath of royal jelly.
 — From Apiology, with Stigma

And she’s catchy in other ways: there are plenty of portable lines here, esoteric truisms that would make excellent T-shirts, tattoos, or trucker hats. I’m tempted to tattoo “Even the thickest skin is still a membrane” on my chest.

Like these other writers, Mao speaks as an outsider, though it is not so much race as the distinct and voluptuous inner lives that make the speakers of these poems feel set apart. Everywhere these speakers look, they see a scrim of imagery, science, and sex woven together and into everything. When she does go more directly at the issue of race, her other obsessions — sound, nature, material textures — still carry most of the weight:

                                     With the smugness of a man who has
just caught a trout, you say, I love those Asian women.
I will fuck you up with the spastic ember of a Puccini opera.

I know what you crave. It is larger than me. It is the pretty
face on the library book — the fallow field, the woman
with a comb in her hair, a grin about her like so many
hives. It is squalid peonies, murderous silk. It is febrile butterflies

and it is slave.
 — From Yellow Fever

Spread throughout the book is a series of poems about a couple who eat poisonous “mad honey” to enhance their sex lives, but nearly 
kill themselves. They serve as a metaphor for people who identify outside of the normal currents of   life, or want to be.

My wife spread-eagles in a quiet room.
One teaspoon each morning of red
honey, incarnadine gamble.

A bid to bury our compulsions — 
for our bed to open up and swallow us, hard
into its gullet. Each night one head

stampedes the other, twin eagles shot
in this province. The missives,
misgivings, spill our sheets afoul.

Is this pulse worth saving
in 2008? Friends cautioned
against the honey. Histories chimed in:

entire armies murdered. Remember Pompey?
Remember Xenophon? How the warnings purr
gently on that bed.
 — From Mad Honey Soliloquies

They’re desperate for a kind of poetic life experience, life heightened to the pitch of poetry, life made ideal, meaning, as this poet knows all too well, made unreal — and unsafe — except, of course, in poems.