by Emily Dickinson,
edited by Marta Werner and Jen Bervin with a preface by Susan Howe,
New Directions /Christine Burgin, 2013,
hardcover, 272 pages, $39.95,
ISBN: 978-0-8112-2175-7
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The Gorgeous Nothings volume finally collects the poems that Emily Dickinson wrote on the backs of envelopes.  This effectively presented text holds myriad clues for present day readers, poets, and scholars, as these odd, almost unclassifiable scraps of paper provide an amazing window into the way Dickinson worked.

Building on poet Susan Howe’s insight in The Birth –Mark, that the manuscripts “should be understood as visual productions,” this volume presents a whole new side to Dickinson’s work that has implications for the treatment of other writers’ work as well.  Co-editors Jen Bervin and Marta Werner make a key decision to set transcripts of Dickinson’s poems on left-hand pages, opposite facsimiles of the envelopes on which Dickinson first penned them, on the right-hand pages.  The volume also includes a scholarly apparatus consisting of a preface by poet Susan Howe, an introduction and visual index by visual designer Jen Bervin and, at the back of the book, an essay, formal listing and bibliographical description of the envelope manuscripts by scholar Marta Werner.  If you are a fan of Dickinson’s poems, or a poet, I suggest begin with the presentations of the poems themselves, and only then delve into the scholarly sections to enhance your reading of the poems.

Even if you’ve not read a lot of Dickinson before opening this book, the poems presented in graphic form will convey how Emily Dickinson created her world one poem at a time.  For example, the first poem, about an inner shipwreck, unfolds in two dimensions, in text and on paper:

On the text level, the reader can follow Dickinson laying down lines word by word, like a bricklayer, until she comes to a decision point and stack her words on top of each other: The poem sets up a number of oppositions: “havoc” and “damage,” “tale” and “witness,” “mighty freight” and “dread occasion,” “sea” and

“land.”  Taken together, they convey states of the human mind as items lost at sea or freight destroyed on land; they express the foundering and despair of the human mind.

On the paper level, you can watch how Dickinson, like a builder, uses the space, folds, and boundaries of the envelope.  Wide spaces between lines allow her to stack her word choices, and the envelope’s shape conveys the sense of a closed tomb “that told no tale and let no witness in.”

Even though Dickinson would never have suspected that her envelopes would be read by her readers in this way, The Gorgeous Nothings presents her work with such simplicity and intimacy that the reader feels almost as if Dickinson were there at the same small table, allowing the reader to look over her shoulder as she drafts.  I’ve only found a handful of books that let you have this kind of close contact with a poet actually in the act of drafting. Curtis Bradford’s Yeats At Work is one, and The Gorgeous Nothings is another.  The co-authors Marta Werner and Jen Bervin deserve enormous credit, as does poet Susan Howe for her thoughtful introduction.  New Directions editor Christine Burgin, in association with Granary Books, has produced a thoroughly agreeable volume that yields new surprises every time the reader opens the covers.

Once the reader has made these discoveries in the poems themselves, there is time to turn attention to and admire the generations of scholars whose work lies behind this volume, the Amherstites vs. the Harvardians, and how eventually good sense prevailed to share with the world the folder that the first scholar had labeled Dickinson’s “scraps.”  The backstory shows how easily these poems could have been lost.

In bringing these poems to light, with well-conceived layout, design, and scholarly context, Bervin and Werner allow the reader a sense of Dickinson’s process in finding “the certain slant” and choice of words that make each poem arrive at and convey its present moment.  As the Danish poet and scholar Niels Kjær has written, this presentness is the hallmark of Dickinson’s

work, and The Gorgeous Nothings lets us experience it up close. Such intimacy makes this work not only a scholarly tour de force, but the freshest presentation of Dickinson’s poems to have come to us in a very long time.

— Mark Schorr 

by Kevin Prufer,
Four Way Books, 2014,
paper, 96 pages, $15.95,
ISBN: 978-1-935536-43-7
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Many of the poems in Churches, by Kevin Prufer, are full of fire, smoke, and broken glass.  Their speakers often find themselves in a world figured as a womb of violence, forced to face — without the solace of religious abstraction, and often under the harshest of conditions — human mortality.  Out of these wombs is born, for the reader, a necessity to contemplate the role of faith in our attempts to survive and understand the harm done to us by circumstances, or by others, but also to consider that the harms we suffer are often of our own doing.  These poems frequently illustrate the failure of the coping mechanisms that we have come to rely upon in a post-Nietzschean world where religious faith is either absent, or, even worse, destructive.

The opening poem in Churches, titled “Potential Energy is Stored Energy,” highlights this question of faith.  A porter lying in the snow, a victim of the explosion of a bomb planted on board a train, thinks of the infant son he and his wife had lost to fever. Neither the porter, now approaching death, nor his wife, in his memory of their son’s passing, voices the supplications a reader might expect.  Rather, it is the anthropomorphized bomb that utters its prayers, ominously, to heaven, just before its stored energy is destructively released: “I give this to you, Lord, /in a wisp of smoke, in splinters /scattered in the wind and love.” These final words of the bomb are set beside the porter’s last moments in which present and past have become one, and his wife’s words to their fevered infant are now applicable also to himself: “Oh breathe, breathe, his wife was saying, /while the great unmelting snows concealed his eyes, /and up to the waiting heavens /this black plume rose.”  The God of the poem is the God of bombs (and bombers) and while his heaven may be waiting, it is a heaven that admits only the smoke of wreckage.

If religious faith can no longer be of any consolation, then where do we seek solace against a harsh world?  One replacement for faith, portrayed as largely ineffective and even harmful, is the numbing power of medication.  The little white paper pill cup is ubiquitous throughout the book, a grail in which the speakers of the poems often seek solutions.  That white cup looks bright against a backdrop of black smoke, but it is a brightness, the poems seem to argue, that obscures rather than reveals — its promise of cure seems as unreal, as unattainable as heaven.  The poem titled “Paper Cup” offers the constant refrain “Here are your pills” until, in its final line, we are told: “Here are the last of your pills, little white zeros in a cup.”  In a world that rains down the pain-killer Lortab like manna, there still aren’t enough pills to cure what ails us.

Churches approaches the existential problem of the death of God primarily in order to illustrate both the insufficiency of our answers and the effects of this failure.  Consider the elderly speaker of “Sunday Afternoon in the Park” who, rather than being situated in the scene of the title is, instead, a mere observer, trapped within the linoleum floored world of a retirement home where the orderly’s cry of “Pills, pills, pills”  leads the speaker to identify her as “the crazy woman /down the hall.”  Such an institutionalized existence pales in comparison to even the quotidian world of people waiting for buses that exists outside the speaker’s window.  After making some perceptive observations of the scene, the speaker wistfully, and tragically, declares,

How I love a cool Sunday morning

high above the park

after a rain.

If I could, I would jump

right through this window.

These lines are tragic largely because they illustrate real human potential, struggling, however unsuccessfully, against terms of confinement that, unlike mortality, are not necessary.  We don’t have to keep the elderly drugged and shut up in homes, and the poem reminds us that this problem, among others, is man-made. It requires a God neither to blame for it, nor to solve it.

— Christopher Hornbacker

by Jeffrey McDaniel,
University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013,
paper, 88 pages, $15.95,
ISBN: 978-0-8229-6260-1
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After reading his fifth book of poems, I propose Jeffrey McDaniel as the Louis CK of poetry: He’s sincere and unsanitized, flinging humorously dark insights from a position of middle-aged white-male self-awareness.  Like the comedian, McDaniel’s voice makes the recognizable male desires and insecurities seem fresh and relatable, exploring the engaging middle ground between vulnerability and masculinity.

The first section, “Little Soldier of Love,” sets up the themes of lust and infidelity that permeate the text.  The book’s introductory poem, “Hello,” deposits the first of many references to Adam and Eve and human failing:

but please, forgive me, because complaining is like sex for old people.

Have you ever cringed with your whole body?  Been so filled with shame

you wanted to wriggle out of your flesh, like a serpent in a forest,

like the snake that betrayed Eve?

McDaniel’s humor keeps even loaded passages like the above from turning sluggish or dour.  Later, in a persona piece from Eliot Spitzer’s point of view, McDaniel asks, “Lord, /swaddle me in a blanket dipped in smallpox,” and expresses a desire to “open my mouth and bite /into the snake’s Adam’s apple.”  Again, playful language buoys the dark content.

Sexual desire, from both the male and female perspective, as a means both of alienation and validation, is a primary concern here.  In “Track of Now,” a virile voice experiences “what it feels like to have sex with the universe,” as he imagines that “each woman in Tompkins Square Park /eats her ice cream just for me.”  The self-assured male voice reemerges in the later poem

“A Brief History of Immorality,” which features a twenty-two year-old man strutting through Manhattan after a sexual conquest.

McDaniel explores female desire as well, in poems like “Happy Marriage,” which describes a woman’s urge to break free from the monotony of married life:

You’re sitting on the sofa.  Your husband

is upstairs, your child sleeping.  There are dishes

in the sink with your name on them.  A dark sedan

pulls up to the curb of your mind.

This feminine yearning sets the stage for the book’s second part, “Reflections of a Cuckold and Other Blasphemies,” wherein a number of male voices react to the infidelity of their wives.  While sometimes heartbreaking, these poems crackle thanks to McDaniel’s imaginative and precise language:

so years later, when your wife stumbles home

with that glazed, seen-god look in her eyes, the sweat

of his trigger-happy fingers still greasing the white

napkin of her thighs, you can settle into that moment,

ask her how it was, if you can witness next time.

The last line here reflects the acceptance that many of these male voices arrive at as the cuckold poems continue.  They are defeated in the way that the men in “Track of Now” and “A Brief History of Immortality” are victorious.  McDaniel does some of his best work in describing the emasculated male.

In “The Cuckold in Autumn,” an older male voice watches a young couple trying to start their truck:

He shuffles towards me, mumbles

something about a jump.  My loins

ignite like a furnace. Welcome

     to my world, I think, attaching cables

under the sprung hood, revving the juice.

This mindset reaches a crescendo in the poem entitled “Middle Age.”  In it, the speaker explains how his “testosterone feels like watered-down lemonade,” and how he couldn’t even “impregnate an awkward pause.”  All of this is in stark contrast to the younger male self, the one who walked next to a pregnant wife feeling so masculine that he imagines “being a crop duster / filled with semen and pollinating all the women /passing in springtime dungarees.”

All of this sounds rather pessimistic, these poems about the fading power of the aging man, unable to maintain either an erection or a relationship.  But McDaniel’s cumulative effort reveals the modern male as master of the universe, neutered cuckold, and caring father all at once.  He ends the collection

with its uplifting titular poem.  In “Chapel of Inadvertent Joy,” the speaker urges us to savor the good moments, whether that’s

“a white horse in a sunlit pasture at the end of summer” or when a “garden hose slips out of your hand /and sprays you in the face,” or simply watching your “wife and daughter lollygag in the grass.”  McDaniel’s voice, capable of portraying all this with wit, empathy, and metaphorical pyrotechnics, is one we would be wise to savor as well.

— Michael Christian