A THREE ARMED OCTOPUS: Broadax, Serenade, and Testify (Octopus Books, 2017)
by Maureen Alsop
Broadax, Amy Lawless (Octopus Books)
With a limitless energy, Amy Lawless is brazen in her observations of interpersonal realms. Broadax, in megaphone, amplifies the confessional. This magnification cannot be contained. The poems are meteors as if captured in a multitude of lifetimes. Lawless enters the book with an epigraph, from which the title of the collection is welded. This epigraph acts a mantra rather than a statement or suggestive nudge to the reader: “You must go at your life with a broadax” (Ann Dillard)… and so Lawless does. She mightily attacks, with a razor sharp blade, one idiosyncratic moment after another. No experience is off limits. Her expressions are blunt, disarming, ready.
Among the first of a series of untitled prose poems at the entry of the book, she writes: “ I don’t like it when men show anger. So I should tell you: the Incredible Hulk has terrified me for as long as I can remember.”
The quality of this directness offers an interplay as a fearlessness of fear as she emotionally blends an innocence and humor with a warning.
Contemporary and pungent, these passionate switches decapitate the reader with a tenderness in a mystical sweep to expose an underbelly of vulnerability. These pivotal moments are frequented by a streetwise voice. These turnings create a stirring surprise:
“How many times have I smiled, barking, lugging my suitcase through Penn Station:
‘No I don’t need help. I got it!’ …
I might even be dragging these suitcases as I wander the Earth’s circumference
a planet across which I move ever-so-slightly for I am small
I can’t see the curve of the Earth
I have no perspective sometimes “
Within a short space the narrator presses against the world only to shift into a sense of scale at her own smallness within it. These swift intervals are rampant throughout the collection and allow the reader to experience the human capacity for a full range of emotion.
In the poem “A Love No Theory May Possess,” Lawless writes:
“I pressed my body
against a heavy door
of a store
just to feel something
just to avoid
feeling something.”
The power of searching for stimulation and simultaneously vacating one’s desire is swiftly enacted.
The collection ends with a quote from Kafka: “ A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is my belief.” Again, Lawless, broadax in hand, spares nothing upon this directive. “The devil can pass right through us if you use more than one door” she writes. Indeed. The devil passes over each threshold, as Lawless holds a spell upon the reader’s defences, consequently pressing us into the ice-bitten waters.
Serenade, Brook Ellsworth (Octopus Books)
A three section debut collection, Ellsworth’s Serenade swoons a voice of millennial spar:
“I ate my parents
and gave birth to nothing
The house where I lived is strange to me.”
The disembodiment is fierce: “Two burned masks, there are two of me.”… “I lifted my skirts in horror, lifted the mouth of my haunting into a realism”…Ellsworth navigates the craft of language to alight a reader with savage possibility.
These lines read like an ars poetica she writes:
“I write
for you
and I write
for the
knowledge
of anonymity
as we roll out
the century
in a
rented
ocean
texting
old
numbers…
sometimes
you gotta
keep
the
conversation
going”.
In a world of dispersals, where ownership is a form of fiction, Ellsworth claims poetry as a vehicle by which to remain grounded.
Technology also holds a footing in the poems to connect the reader to a mode of connected disconnect. Communication is reformulated into a new convention as body and technology merge: “Pilled out staring at your home screen”…“My level mind, my new hard-drive, my hypomanic bot/ riding the blue”… “you don’t know/ but I know when to remain online” “Tree entwined with the general Instagram appreciation for the balance of the frame”… “ you are a liar you text back.” Ellsworth does not let the reader forget where we are as she masters the intermediary of ether. Her language is sometimes quirky, and she is ingenious in her juxtapositions which are both bodily and cerebral.
Testify, Simone John (Octopus Books)
An exemplary debut collection which is memorialization, elegy, and documentary, Simone John wields with dignity and grace the clarity of assertions to which the whole of the United States not should, but MUST attend. In Testify John leads the reader into examinations of brutality with unwavering adjuration.
These testimonial poems command respect and are crafted with an assertive eloquence. From excerpts of Trayvon Martin’s testimony, to a litany of questions regarding the arrest (and subsequent death) of Sandra Bland, John’s poems are unwavering in their demand for a response.
In the poem “Elegy for Dead Black Woman #4, An Invocation for Black Transwomen Murdered in the United States” she writes:
“I will conjure your grace in poems. I will weave your names into prayer: Elisha Walker, Shade Schuler
Keyonna Blakeney
Veronica Banks Cano
Kenarie Johnson
India Monroe
Jazz Alford, Goddess Diamond
and Rae’Lynn Thomas
Ashton O Hara
Dee Whigha, Deeniquia Dodds
And Papi Edwards
Brandi Bledsoe, Bri
Golec, Kristina Gomez-
Reinwald, Maya Young
Londen Chanel, Sky
Mackabee, Keisha Blidge
And Jasmine Collins. “
The list is reminiscent of the faces of hundreds of missing women of Juarez featured on the front page of the LA times several years ago. Crimes continue unbidden. Haunted and lost, John refuses to allow these lives and crimes to be forgotten. In her act of prayer she creates a question of accountability from injustice. In the ceaseless litany of violence, where is the front page of the times with the faces of thousands of Africa American children, women, men who have been brutalized within US borders? One imagines the entire newspaper filled with photographs from the front page to the back.
John states the horror of the intolerable tainted by a spine-chilling prophesy of inevitably. In the poem “A Brief History of Murder,” She writes:
“The last black girl they killed wore beads in her hair
on picture day. Her name is swallowed instead of spoken.
Her hash tag—trending until they kill the next black boy.
The next black girl they kill is writing this poem.”
John brilliantly, with a reposed strength, awakens urgency through a meticulous examination of historic fact. Consciousness and identity entwine in stoic observations. The collection underscores the inflammatory, factual miscarriage within our social fabric.
Testify will make a reader hunger for more from a poet who is poised to relay the pertinence of spirit against the subversive violence in the United States landscape. How can our lives be lived under threat, under fear? John removes evasion, is victorious in her decanting of evidence as she documents the horror of history and the remaining tides of oppression.