Grist

The Journal for Writers

A Conversation of Selves: Canese Jarboe’s dark acre | Review by Emily Corwin

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dark acre

by Canese Jarboe 

Willow Springs Books 

ACME Poetry Series, 2018 

 

Neosporin Pussy Queen, Rodeo Queen, Rapunzel, figurine, showgirl, apex predator, a midnight bride with a 40-foot train: Canese Jarboe’s speaker is all of these and more, riveting us in their debut chapbook, dark acre (Willow Springs, 2018). I have been entranced, awe-struck with Canese ever since I met them (digitally) in 2016, and was floored to hear their chapbook had been selected for publication in the ACME Poetry Series from Willow Springs Books. I was honored to read and accept poems by them the following year for Indiana Review (which you can read here in IR 39.2), including one of the opening pieces, “Landscape with My Father & a Dead Man’s Harmonica.”  

After the sharp entrance to the book, “Using a Stolen Guide on Morse Code, I Send a Signal Out My Bedroom Window into the Cornfield” (a code which translates to: “I am still here”), the ghostliness of “Landscape…” follows with its hauntings and huntings, black ants, nail gun, a spirit in the rafters. Jarboe immediately provides us with the ethereal, the rural, the sensual corners of a self. Self as bride and bridle, self as bodied and already gone. 

Although dark acre is chapbook-length, it manages to engage wholly, to sew us into the side of this world, one of graves and blowjobs, wolf peaches, saddles, bull thistle and moths, taxidermy, magnolia, food coloring and gravel, a “nylon thong…bedazzled with river rocks” (25). The acreage of dark acre is concrete and touchable, constructed of tactile particulars we can almost ingest, almost absorb sponge-like. “I remember a horse in a parade with glittery, pink hooves. I remember when I had glittery, pink hooves” (15). Like the speaker, we enter into each image bodily, feeling it entire. 

For months now, I have been collecting poems which strike me, printing them out, and then taping them to my bedroom wall, like a vision board. Canese’s poem from this collection, “Rapunzel w/ Head Half-Shaved,” has been above my bed for half a year now. I am drawn to it for its startling moves, how it shifts from “There wasn’t any juice in the fridge” to “so, I drank the cow vaccine” without hesitation, from peonies to herons to calamine lotion to tetanus. 

Like in “Rapunzel…”, many of the pieces in dark acre play with white space, silences, the sense of images speaking back and forth across a distance. In the titular poem, for instance, the poem sprawls and echoes over several pages, often with text at the top and the bottom with a blank expanse at the center: 

 

Do you think I am under a curse?  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A banshee is just a rumor that a barn owl started (36). 

A conversation of selves, the speaker interrogating themselves in a vacant field, in a mini-fridge, in a nightgown. dark acre devours, it rushes forth with intimacy and pain, violence and survival, truly alive. Jarboe asks us to: “openthedooropenthedooropenthedoor” (33) and how could we resist? Bold and corporeal, dark acre is not to be missed, is meant to race upon us ferocious. 

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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the former Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Warrior Review, Gigantic Sequins, New South, Yemassee, THRUSH, and elsewhere. She has two chapbooks, My Tall Handsome (Brain Mill Press) and darkling (Platypus Press) which were published in 2016. Her first full-length collection, tenderling was just released from Stalking Horse Press. You can follow her online at @exitlessblue.

Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last | Review by Emily Corwin

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Justin Boening’s Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last is a book that gives pleasure, a visceral sensation that starts somewhere in the chest and ripples down to the feet. These poems are wild, lush, and dreamy. I even love the way this book feels in my hands—it is smooth, vibrant, something easy to carry. Boening’s poems are rich, populated by horses and rivers and hair, mirrors and children and paintings. It is a place that I like being inside of, a place to return to.

As the title suggests, Not on the Last Day, But on the Very Last, examines apocalypse, the afterlife, and the ways in which the self navigates these endings. “Is there another world? Is it this one?” the speaker asks. Boening considers this world before him, looking closely at the things of this world, the land and plant life, the gods and animals:

The noise of the bramble
never leaves me.

I bless the cedar. The months go by. I bless your saw.

When you need
me to hurt, I’ll dim

in the linden leaves, I’ll hide
in the fire-scarred hills,

and the great guards
of my gilded name

will circle around to protect me.
And you’ll be there,

and I’ll know your name
as a god knows your name

This landscape is often internalized by the speaker, such as in “Proxy Baptism” when he states: “I shake myself to wake a deer bent down inside of me.” Pervading the book is this desire to transform, to enter a more primal shape. “Everything seems like something you’d say to me in a small town to keep me breathing like a little beast,” the speaker says, wondering too what happens if he becomes “wild again and no longer respond[s] to [his] name.” Boening’s speaker shape-shifts throughout the collection, imagining himself as the man sitting next to him, as a god or animal, as an opera singer, as nobody. By approaching the speaker in these various forms and bodies, Boening shows a self in motion, a self that adapts and dreams of other lives, that ponder the kind of life he could have wanted. This is seen particularly in the poem, “Nobody”:

And as we pushed aside a tangle of leaves to enter

a stolen wood, we knew we’d be joined

by no one not dragging their fat bags behind them.

And the poplars began to shake, or we did.

And the leaves reflected light as they twisted

in the dumb wind—a school of fish

shot through by sun—and nobody was bothered

by a reality that had already come, and nobody

was longing for the one that hadn’t.

The reality that has come to us, this world that we are given is so very tender, dreamy, yearning—a world we should lean into, regardless of our bodies, human or not. In addition to the transformations of the speaker’s body, the female bodies in this collection were particularly striking—the speaker seems often surrounded by a community of women. Women as mothers, women who take his hair, who weep, who button and unbutton his shirt, who fall asleep, who walk back to the house cradling a toy horse. The women feel far-away and mythic, a mysterious, kindred presence on the speaker’s journey.

The scale of this whole collection works on the level of mythology, with these images that can feel both archetypal as well as specific. It is as though we look at the globe from a distance and see its details with a microscope. This effect can be seen in the opening of “The Door”:

In the wilderness, a door

stands upright. Its paint

peeling, its knob

a little loose. I place a palm

of dead bees beside it

to remind the trees

of what it is

to be young.

Boening’s poems are ancient, mystic, sometimes wry, and always ardent. I will be returning to this book often, to spend time in the places these poems have built, to spend time with this speaker at the ends of the earth.

NOT ON THE LAST DAY, BUT ON THE VERY LAST
By Justin Boening
Milkweed Editions, 2016
Paperback, 61 pp. $16

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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, glitterMOB, Hobart, smoking glue gun, and Word Riot. Her chapbook, My Tall Handsome, was recently published through Brain Mill Press. You can follow her at @exitlessblue.

Emily O’Neill’s Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles | Review by Emily Corwin

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Emily_Front_CoverWhat I love and admire about O’Neill’s poems is where they take me. Often, she starts with an image—such as the image of the “world’s smallest woman” in the opening poem—and this image quickly twists and leaps and transforms, bringing me to places I would never have guessed. The world’s smallest woman transmutes into images of tangerines, stockings, mirrors. It is O’Neill’s associative structure that creates these leaps, surprising turns, and an inimitable voice.

On a craft level, what allows for this wildness is movement within the poem itself through O’Neill’s use of repetition. Her anaphora at the start of phrases—repeating small fragments such as “when,” “if,” “your,” “can’t”— provides a framework on which the poem can hang, a place of return for the reader before traveling elsewhere. The sense of motion is really incredible, considering particularly the shapes of these poems. Often, as a writer and reader of poetry, I am attracted to poems that play with form more, that use the white space across the page. While O’Neill’s poems don’t wander from the left-hand margin, I don’t feel unsatisfied while reading. There is enough movement lyrically, in the language itself.

O’Neill builds other patterns to ground us through her landscapes, which shift constantly. The poems occupy everywhere from Florida to Wyoming to Texas, from cities to mountains to deserts. But there are constants built into O’Neill’s world, such as the “you and I” relationship across these poems. The speaker in Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles is feverish and sexy, in an endless push and pull with the “you.” The speaker wants and wants unabashedly – her phrases often begin with imperatives, such as in the concluding poem, “Not So Fast”:

Drive a spike into the ground. Wait for it to draw a spark.
Fill the bathtub with water. In case of unseasonable heat,

knot the curtains back. Take the doors off their hinges.
Drink cobweb gin where you can get it. Say it wasn’t easy

laying down in dirt…

Don’t answer me. I won’t stand still long enough.

The directives, both towards the you of the poem’s narrative and the reader, produce urgency, an insistence, as if we must respond and respond now.

I was wholly invested in this speaker, particularly during “Need to Know,” the long poem at the center of the book. A poem in five parts, “Need to Know” pushes forward through a series of “confessions” about sex, young love, and the power dynamics of a relationship. It moves in somewhat of a fixed form, like a broken villanelle, the final line of each section used as the first line in the next. Each refrain speaks to the complex desires explored here, refrains like: “I’m really the sugar in how you say my name,” “without wanting elsewhere. Without losing you,” and “I won’t breathe a word until you’re done with me.” The return to these images has an effect of circling, obsession, containment. The first line, “I’ve burned the dress I never wear & taken back my summer,” is repeated as the final line, keeping the reader, like the speaker, trapped within the poem, as if on a continuous loop.

The act of return occurs throughout the entire collection, as O’Neill is drawn again and again to a set of images—of food, of clothing, of caves and of bodies in desire. As expansive and sprawling as the poems are, O’Neill coheres Make a Fist & Tongue the Knuckles through form, aesthetic, and a voice that craves painfully, sensually and says: “Give me a choice better than razor or grave. Better than singe. Leave marks or I won’t learn.”

MAKE A FIST & TONGUE THE KNUCKLES
By Emily O’Neill
Nostrovia Press, June 2016
Paperback, 30 pp. $5.00

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Emily Corwin is an MFA candidate in poetry at Indiana University-Bloomington and the Poetry Editor for Indiana Review. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Winter Tangerine, glitterMOB, Hobart, smoking glue gun, and Word Riot. Her chapbook, My Tall Handsome, was recently published through Brain Mill Press. You can follow her at @exitlessblue.