Poetry Pamphlet Round-Up, Spring 2022
A standout among Broken Sleep’s prolific slew of recent pamphlets, Lotte Mitchell Reford’s and we were so far from the sea of course the hermit crabs were dead is edgy ecopoetry that covers everything from the ecstasies of ‘Cheeto dust’ to wedding fantasies and the ‘necessary fictions’ of sexts. In this dense, hyperactive and occasionally surrealistic lyric—‘The sky is an embarrassed ear’—the queerly confessional is recalibrated for the anthropocene: where desire, dreams and language undergo crisis acceleration, felt in sprawling lines, prose-poetic tensions and an intimate, lively register. Cheeky, astute and frank, ‘I have never / thought about sex half as much as I have about a slice of toast’, Reford processes the detritus and detail of everyday life in fiery exhales. If ‘all poems have a body’, then this one is almost superhumanly attuned to other bodies and their troublesome instincts: ‘It isn’t about / what I want or don’t want, more about having to bite / so much!’
Eegant and pleasingly landscaped, Gloria Dawson’s hurricane / orison, from Birmingham’s And False Fire, is the much anticipated follow-up from 2018’s circlusion (Zarf Editions). Structured around the storm and the prayer, this sequence centres solidarity, nurture and resurgence through domestic, civic and atmospheric encounters—from tear gas to sex and nourishing food. Asking ‘what did we learn in this brief season’, tacit reference to the Covid-19 lockdown is situated within the ongoingness of other crises, where ‘wage is a panic attack’ and capitalism continues its great temporal theft. In these poems, the hurricane and orison are more than metaphors, and Dawson speaks resiliently from a lyrical hullabaloo, gathering flowers and ‘doing anarchist calisthenics’. Intimacy is an extended gesture of being-with, even at a distance: ‘I walk in time with you / and I talk in time for you’. Bodies are vulnerable, porous, stronger together; erotics is possibility; ‘care is a lie unless you take it home’. What is at stake in this work is language as a site of interruption and suspension, where ‘plans can be undone by singing’.
Beautifully assembled by —algia press, with illustrations from Greg Thomas and a portion of proceeds going to World Land Trust, Saskia McCracken’s Imperative Utopia composts materials from Marianne Moore to Isabel Galleymore and leaves us with the rich topsoil possibility of a ‘Microbiome party’. Like delicate fruiting bodies, these poems ‘Start with something small’ but connect to a broader understory of intricate metabolisms and object relations, the tactile, consonant language of ‘foraging’ and ‘sad green lasagne’. Processual, playfully instructive and fertile, McCracken’s work explores the more-than-human world in ways that restore to us the pleasure in being inquisitive. As lepidoptera lore smudges against lockdown domesticity, and paradise is just a brilliant room full of people, this pamphlet offers an ecological commune of use-value and joyous study.
—Maria Sledmere