Enclosure Architect by Douglas W. Milliken

Enclosure Architect by Douglas W. Milliken

Available from West Virginia University Press

Taking place in a future so near it might be happening already and you just don’t know it yet, Enclosure Architect traces the creation and dissolution of one woman’s chosen family amid the dissolution of larger social order, and, in doing so, also describes her halting and brave attempts to remember and create.

In the background of this intelligent, winning novel is an armed conflict, the origins and scope of which are never fully revealed. Mortars and bombs reduce sections of an unnamed city to rubble; emergency services are unreliable; business and money-making continues in select circles; and partisans blow up the university (accidentally? on purpose?) where our characters study art, and from which they receive “honorary (meaning meaningless) degrees”, thus turning them out into the wreckage of the city and young adulthood without even the benefits of having completed a formal education in art. (There’s a sly joke here, I think.)

Against all of this, our narrator nonlinearly describes their intertwining creative, emotional lives in squats, an exciting, voluntary poverty full of dumpster-diving and art-making and navigating what it means to create without the strictures (or architecture) of school, family, or society. They are beholden only to themselves and each other.

What do they do with such freedom? Take drugs and have sex? Naturally. Yet there’s also the sincere effort to construct meaning from experience, to create something stable against a turmoil that the reader doesn’t have to squint too hard at to see as being close to what we’re experiencing currently in the USA. What else could the materials of such construction be but individual moments, moments which Milliken renders with acute and sometimes heartbreaking detail. Flip to almost any page and be rewarded: “A beat-up table and instant coffee steam. The blue of a jawline shadow no one was meant to see. And me. Together we completed our composition. Then Marlene took my portrait, and I was gone.” Enclosure Architect finds heroism in such quiet, unheralded moments.

This reviewer is loath to reveal too much or provide any kind of heuristic; part of the pleasure of this deeply felt book is its unfolding, and the way it deals with the complicated nature of memory. At its core, Enclosure Architect could be understood as an argument against forgetting; that memory provides a basis for art and thus for humanity…our own, and a shared humanity, if we’re lucky.

Enclosure Architect is available from West Virginia University Press.

Organs Without Bodies by Stephen Guy Mallett

This work takes its title from an elliptical text of the same name by Žižek—itself a remix on the concept Deleuze and Guattari remix from Artaud—and it, this review, leaves Žižekian thought alone unanswered at the door in much the same way Kahlil Crawford’s hybrid chapbook Organ City states and forgoes justification of its own title and relations of referents therein and thereon.  

¶ It's all from the ground up, isn’t it, what we call art? How grammars visual and syntactic bubble to the surface like oil? Only the redactions are the result of dispensationalism. Poets take themselves seriously for the same good reason any craftsperson in a dying form takes their craft seriously: it’s dying. Not dead, but dying; will die. The mixed mediaification in Organ City isn’t as powerful as to stand for a panacea for poetry’s plight in threat of extinction: it’s not that serious. Neither a general social anhedonia nor a lack of a smart readership is to blame for the threat. It’s just that there’s too many of us; too many poets and not enough readers. Introducing a visual component (with more bite than say a Kaurian sketch of a succulent) might infuse a more robust sense of the poetic scale the poet has in mind, the meeting point of the Venn diagram’s little circles of grammars (1) poetic, (2), visual, (3) generative.      

¶ Depending on how the conversation has gone and is going, I will usually admit to Finnigans Wake as my favourite poem: it’s win-win—either my interlocutor is familiar enough with Finnigans Wake to correctly identify it as a novel, or, rarer, and even better for their sake, hasn’t heard of it, and I may introduce them to what it is and what it isn’t, my being as didactic as a pharisee. If color commentators uses poetic as an adjective when ejaculating over a counterattack, whatever poetic import is read is more alive than it was before, is expanding the etymological umbrella, and is, poetry is, as a noun, good for more than the stuff of forced end rhymes, and that which makes Finnigans Wake and an Allen Iverson-lead fast break and Organ City by Kahlil Crawford poetic is their respective urgencies; where the use of the poetic is less a choked umbrella and more a drink from a fire hydrant is where the canvas is filled. Bonsai-sized but with horror vacui décor. The encositive (FW, 27), the prescriptive grammarian fears misoccupied space, regulates the city squares, restricts, monitors acts of delinquency, makes sacred the categorical, is always asterisking, runs arrhythmic soulless executive commands; Organ City is a city that sleeps. The fever dreams of local history precipitating over the text color the present. A thesis with elements of poetic grammar and with elements of pedagogical grammar and with elements of visual grammar; as an Anders-streben, a comprehensive grammar is as much an object of catachresis or objection of catachresis as an organ city is—the self without an i (cf. the body without organs) (organ[i]city)—in living; motile, cellular, unbalanced, possible—Crawford suggests inevitable. A sense of self is confused-fused in the text (but not in an esoteric way, nor even a biotechnic way). The self seems to be its taste, which, of course, isn’t sufficiently a self, or I should say it is obvious taste isn’t organs’ sole function. Organ City approaches the dancefloor with the right attitude, just adept enough to neither embarrass their partner nor seem out of place, and maybe the traditionalists prefer the white space of their Saint-Armand paper, and the design fleshes out the vision, but the execution is less than the sum of its idealisation. Kahlil Crawford proposes and examines three rhythms in R1THYM (sic): meta, motion, and plastic. The moment reads like memoir in a sparse approximation of verse, where meta is “less about time / and more about movement” and is either generative for or by EDM genres the likes of which you can browse on rateyourmusic.com at your leisure. If you had to guess which films the motion-rhythm begins and ends with, you’d be correct. The influence of  Italian Futurism, cubism, and Afrofuturism is quite clear in the plates. It’s of as much significance to today’s blank verse as Bryan Johnson’s plasma transfusions: just something to talk about. The Paul Klee influence is also clear in the typographical arrows, and much like any good mixed-media manifesto, we’re met with more square brackets than question marks. And isn’t this how a conversation unfolds? Finitely? (And doesn’t the connotation for unfold differ so from unravel?) Threads are and end. Suggestive rather than comprehensive, all fires are ephemeral embers from a Hestian axiom, and the hybrid owes its origin as much to the wind as to a mind, left to be second-guessed days later in the shower.  

¶ The soul being the ghost notes of the body’s rhythms, Organ City’s is a light touch. Demotic; clastic; democratic in the sense that Crawford makes no distinction between the vital and non-vital organs, the self-life of the not-[i] is present perfect; what’s there has been preserved; what’s vital is what’s happened and what happens happens “sans emotionality in the midst of the digital monetization of conglomeration” (OC, 23). If the shift from organicity to digitopia is inevitable and will educe “transcendental languages, localities, and emotions” (ibid), the future-self is present perfect has been stitched from one alterity into another alterity into a user, but is “less about time / & more about movement →” (OC, 15), metarhythm having been substituted for the rm shell command to remove the directories of the unqualified as such; metarhythm having been programmed to “help salvage and redefine our humanity (OC, 11); this is the transcendent, not the transcendental. Note that Organ City neither confirms nor denies if arhythm is an ingredient of metarhythm. To ascribe transcendental bones is to use generative grammar, to vacate the site of the ontic and end the use of descriptive grammar, and to enter the imaginal, the poem. Futurity is less successfully preserved than Crawford’s perspectival historitcity: Crawford’s taste is futurity’s ischemia, Primary User. One can practically feel the heat radiating off of these lines in a parallel “Ghostly Bonding by Kinetic” by Will Alexander and his stethoscope one city over: “Since the living body persists / as strange accelerated crimson / what of its post-biology through ideas through ghostly bonding with itself as kinetic?” and, from the loupe of “Hypersensitive Emanation”: “Not broad or gregarious inaccuracy but refined exploratory drift evolved as proto-micro diagnosis. At this plane of sensitivity a dispatch of nerves explore themselves via vigorous angles that subsist as intermingled wave-lengths.” But, for all his gestural isms, doesn’t Will Alexander seem the paragon of corpuscular sagacity?  For the purposes of this review we need not bother him from his mountain perch any further, but see how a certain set of acuity is unbothered? Un-urgent? Non-rhythmic? The images act as adits but not quite intestines: trancitive (FW, 594) but not transitive-digestive, and in this azygous transitive-not-digestive trancitive loci is made a way-poitedness, as urgent as a subway-stop of meaning, foreground and background bleeding together in exigency. This effect is in the writing. The metarhythm is the anxiety to encyber the spatial. It’s by gut-feel. The reading is less fraught with ingestion—the Symplegates of transitive-digestive hid behind the literary curtain—and more memoir than ontic-technocratic scholarship, Organ City’s bathos is its modality.

¶ The manifesto as concept album as chapbook can occasionally work as a gestalt, but Organ City’s moments of actual poetry are tepid. The process which carbonates tepefies, or something like that. We neither take our coke warm nor our coffee bubbly. The poetic lilt comes out a bit tinny. When reading the work in total as poetry the work warps like attempting to portage a canoe before it’s set or settled into the home of its new wooden shape, the hybridity now as awkward as dancing with a wooden limb. How flat that meta-rhythm is greatest hits not deepest cuts: we’re whispered what we already knew. 

Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead

Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead
available from Publishing Genius Oct 31

With Fudge (Publishing Genius, 2023), Andrew Weatherhead serves up minimalist poetry that strives to efficiently sublimate the mundanity of life. Weatherhead is largely successful in this endeavor, almost sneakily so; this is a disarming collection that rewards careful rereading.

A note about the structure. Fudge is comprised of seven sections, or seven long poems, if you prefer, some of which are in turn comprised of shorter titled poems. The poems themselves are so short and swift that the entire book can easily be read in a sitting. Weatherhead opens the first section, titled “Hollow Points (Sept 11, 2016)”, with “Sessility”. It’s quoted here in full to give a sense of the aesthetics:

            Walking around the city

Hoping I don’t see

Anyone I know, old

Air conditioner water

Coming down on 14th Street

Overcast, high of 88, wires

Connected to a head

On Mott, a scab

The shape of Queens

Clear, casual, and an invitation for the reader to wonder what we’re doing here. You could read it as 21st century imagism or affectless city-dweller cool, or as a critique of that rather lazy pose as the title implies. After all, who wants to be stuck like a polyp?

The loaded date also suggests that there’s more happening than simple descriptions, putting one in mind of Williams’s (in)famous red wheelbarrow and the hidden things of life that may be at stake. Indeed, as “Hollow Points” progresses, the poems dig deeper, strike harder, and read more and more like long senryus, offering readers a sly, darkly amused look at a life scrabbling for substance.

And that, I think, comes to be the main thrust of Fudge: what it’s like to try to live a meaningful life in a world driven to senseless, consumerist distraction, often in the face of truly serious shit that warrants our full, sustained attention (e.g., terrorism, pandemics, being a compassionate adult). “Events just barely happen… / The insurrectionists took selfies and left” Weatherhead writes in “Last Poem”. “I hold my small, beautiful wife / Heavy metals congeal in the aether”. Violence exists alongside self-centered frivolousness, just as tenderness occurs in the toxic chemical soup we’ve made of the world.

Some poems are more arresting than others. “Dead Air (21 Short Poems)” are just too short for this reader; they skip cleanly off my brain like aphorisms failing to find emotional purchase or resonance. “Poem While on Hold with NBA League Pass Customer Support”, on the other hand, is a funny, near-brilliant meditation on growing up, getting older, and constructing a sense of purpose in your one finite life. “20 Pandemic Haiku” are likewise winning. Here’s one:

            “Fuck, I mean, shit,”

Our neighbor screams

Through the wall

The poem begins rather than ends with its cutting motion, but it’s otherwise an urban description worthy of Basho or Issa.

Sit with Fudge a while and observations like these come to haunt your side like a funny, slightly sad friend; and as the world continues to be a speedy, confounding place, I’m grateful for its company.

Fudge by Andrew Weatherhead will be available from Publishing Genius Oct 31.

So Beautiful and Elastic by Gary J. Shipley

So Beautiful and Elastic by Gary J. Shipley

available from Apocalypse Party

Gary J. Shipley’s latest offering, So Beautiful and Elastic (Apocalypse Party, 2023), is a challenging book and not for the faint of heart, but those who commit to it will be pleased to have done so.

On the most superficial level the plot concerns our narrator, Ann, leaving London and returning to the unnamed seaside town from which she escaped as a teenager, in order to bear witness to the death of her father. The journey is twofold and fraught. Ann is full of contempt for her father, her dead mother, her past, life in general, and herself. The reckoning the reader suspects Ann will have with her father will also necessarily be one she has with herself and whatever secrets her past contains and that she may or may not be keeping from herself.

There’s plenty to chew on there, to be sure, and the book’s brief chapters skip through time, giving us a kaleidoscopic view of a turbulent life, though Ann gives equal weight to the life of the mind by offering ekphrastic disquisitions on the visual arts, those being her chief obsession in life and the primary way in which she constructs her identity. In the place of what we might call “normal” human relationships, Ann has her intellectual relationships to philosophy and art; Magritte, Cioran, Schneider, Lynch, et al., provide the scaffolding which allows Ann to continue her own insubstantial existence.

For all the disorienting weight of the subject matter, So Beautiful and Elastic reads quickly and in an engaging manner due to Shipley’s fine prose. Here is Ann, early in the book, offering comment on one of the ways in which she created herself: “I suppose I’d made a point of not sounding like my parents. Not that their bare-bones syntax, stunted diction and coy expungement of expletives was the worst of it, and not that there weren’t cringier examples – those parents of friends, for instance, who’d made a point of not sounding like themselves, but whose impoverished disguises only ever managed to emphasize the lowliness they were attempting to conceal – but because the sound of them carried with it everything they were, the tawdriness of their thinking, the repulsive biological link that in the end no amount of articulacy could undo.”  

What’s noteworthy here, besides the elegant sentence construction and rather pointed observation, is the way in which Ann perceives language as a means to imprison, dissemble, and also construct. The book is obsessed with this kind of thing, how tenuous and flimsy the self is and how the essential “lowliness” of the human condition might be mitigated (whether Ann cops to that desire or not) through engagement with intellectual and creative endeavors. About midway through the book, Ann quotes Magritte as having said that “what is important is that in a hundred years’ time, someone finds what I found, but in a different way”, to which she adds, “I too have found what he found. I found it altered and perverse, lucid in its mystery from every available angle, and maybe awake to it, refusing to look away or squint or think it into something else.”

So Beautiful and Elastic does not squint or look away. It is full bore in its ugliness but never gratuitous, and in doing so it invites the reader to think about what makes a life, what exactly they love and why. What’s more rewarding than that?

So Beautiful and Elastic is available from Apocalypse Party.