Liz Willis' Meteoric Flowers

Just bought Liz Willis' new book, Meteoric Flowers, and it was as good, if not better, than my high expectations. Meteoric Flowers is part Baudelaire, part natural history, and part oracular verse. Reading these prose poems is like wandering through a forest when every sensation carries with it a vivid recollection of yet another forest. That said, the brevity of the book is deceptive—like Borges' Garden of Forking Paths, we can easily become lost. Each poem invites (or pehaps mesmerizes) us to look in new directions and, like the best poetry, allows us discover new correspondences in the world around us. One should, perhaps, read a few, and then make to take a long walk and let the poems work their magic.

Eugene Ostashevsky's Iterature

Here's an unabashed plug for a book I recently very much enjoyed:

Eugene Ostashevsky
Iterature
Ugly Duckling Press
$12


Right from the start, Ostashevsky’s Iterature declares itself: the cover shows, apropos, the headless horseman rearing up, the wind blasting behind him. And, indeed, we’re in for quite a chase through Romania, Coke ads, Spinoza, safaris, and rhyming, rhyming, rhyming!

Ostashevsky plays with language and narrative as if they were taffy:

Do-ra-me-fa-so-la-ti-do
We did what we had to do

We rhymed pillage with village
The responsibility rests with language.

We had nothing to do with it
We’re just a bunch of fictional characters

We don’t have any other characters
Except for out letters, that is our characters

Iterature is so rad: it moves a whopping pace and, believe me, it’s a pleasant sort of work keeping up with the layered references, entendres, and linguistic gymnastics. Honestly, and strangely enough, despite the suffused wit throughout, Iterature is very nearly mythic.

ideas of falling unfold methodically

Ideas of falling unfold methodically.

In the city, a system enacts itself, cleverly without language.
Crows gash the aggressive air, unrelenting fabric.

High flat sun. Their shadows create Venn diagrams of something
best left unspoken. When they falter, the world breaks in.

I keep my cursive longingly to my heart; my caesuras barren. We
distract ourselves, and play coy with slicing poor fingers as
markers of progress, insight.

Crows beat against the hordes of clouds. This elemental rejection
enlivens them, quickens their elegance.

Soon a copse of elms peels itself upward. Wearily you might sit,
desiccated rubble sharp beneath your heels. Narrow leaves
present an index of the city.

Searing sweet irruption, our city lights itself at night—neon sign tumescent.
Pulsing with. They twist their reflections, their images in televisions.

Subcelestial-Ecchymosis

Subcelestial—Ecchymosis

I have heard “mourir c’est facile.”
That, really, we’re about specificity, relevance.

But tonight, as usual, we’ve become
diffused: nothing held long & tender.

Quite honestly, I am not sure where
this will go, to what quiet wrecked end

or crowded edge it will find itself.
Technically, thoughts are subcutaneous,

so I’ve read. “Actually, even astronomical
systems suffer drag and tidal friction.”

Nobody feels this, so why say “suffer”?
Perhaps it’s a caress.

epistle three

Dear Trevor,

you may try but will
not at will banish
the fact of rain
nor discourage the sound
it makes - humming, buzz,
drone in my bones
that piggish truth of existence
what will not outlive the
duration of my senses?
consider the motion a mouth makes,
searching for its floundering counterpart
a flurry of motion like
some thing trying to die
a scream becomes the logical
extension of your voice, reducing things
to objects in a mirror
until only a spiny core remains
to speak of the human body and not
to speak of the human body
look skyward, poet,
imagine death and her rewards

-A

Becoming a thing of quiet

Drew,

Becoming a thing of quiet
is always a tender chance;
Our skin, tendons, bones, and teeth
hum loud with temerity.

True, I’ve lost my trust in songs.
Hakuin, quitting his life,
wrote only one character.
This was expeditious, sure.

So, thank you for the concession.
It slowly and quietly bruised.
Tonight, I’ll forbid talking,
And map out silent things.

Best,
Trevor

there are certain concessions

dear Trevor,

there are certain concessions
i am willing to make.  this music
could be a voice speaking to anyone.
this is what the words said.

"i do not have a story
to tell.  in fact i have less
and less to even say to
you every day.  if it can
be simultaneously said that
i love you, then we will.
not disregard for your predicament,
a glass eye peering into
a funhouse mirror - nor
my tendency to tumble
headlong into disaster.
what this is is more or
less a declaration of love.
though i am sure you will
misunderstand even that.
which i am trying to make clear.
at some point i thought
my heart might burst.  this
is so restricted.  it still just
might.  what this is all to say is,
i did once.  when you were tired
and lay in bed all day i loved
you then.  when you jaundiced
and constantly hacked
and coughed and spit.
when your eyes dried up
in your head.  but this i
cannot stand.  your ridiculous
prattle, the posthumous dance,
your business of coming
and going."

i am sorry about your lip.  when you
were singing i fell in love with the pink
in your mouth.  i wanted my skin to match
so badly that now i look like the devil.

now i only want to be quiet, to hear you
sing again.  to generally keep as still as possible.
to speak of the human body and not
to speak of the human body.
things people die and are made of.

A