Reviewed By Rob Talbert
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| ISBN 978-0-923389-91-8 |
Lewis’ chapbook, appropriately titled “State of the Union,” delves into the kaleidoscope of emotion and obstructions that arise in hyperactive urban landscapes. Juggling one’s
personal desires with public image in fast-paced daily life, compounded by the
constant discovery of new experience, forms the central conflict with which the
poems are concerned. “This is not a movie” Lewis opens her chapbook, “but now
& then it feels like one, & often has the same symptoms.” These “symptoms”
she references are addressed in the successive pages with busy and
overstimulating streams of prose poetry. Thickly constructed, the inundation
carried by Lewis’ lines serves to emulate the swath of urban influence that is “spontaneously
irrupted, inter- if not co-, exogenously layered like that sexy cake you sport
to shield you from the reign of expression.” Every poem is a strong current of
sounds and implanted thought, of shifting gears and approaches, but within that
current is a distinctive cry against the confusion. A cry for the unfiltered,
unarmored, connection. Reading through these poems is like walking through rush
hour pedestrian traffic, and in the barrage of advertisements, smells, sounds,
and ideas you suddenly lock eyes with someone passing you, someone gorgeous.
And then they’re gone. Swallowed up by the environment. “State of the Union” is
an overview and structural parody of our collective behavior in densely
populated areas, specifically, how we often let one another fall by the wayside
in the overwhelming world.
The full-length “How to Be Another”gives similar attention to these themes, yet carries a more personal, confessional, tone. The book turns away from the larger audience “State of the
Union” addresses and begins a private conversation, one-on-one with the reader.
“In the metropolis of my psyche, no
one is mayor. It’s a minefield in there, a bed of thorny roses. You may not be simpatico, but someone needs to dive in. Someone must swim
these waters. Everyone will drown.”
If “State of the Union” is from the
exterior looking in then “How to Be Another” is from the interior looking out.
It is a collection of poems constructing multiple passages toward empathy,
which is exactly what it means to “be another.”
A unique strength of the poems is
their refusal to specify the nature of personal relationships. Most poets eagerly
take us right into their bedrooms and relationships. They tell us specifically
who said what and the colors of the furniture in order to bridge their
experience with the reader, with the interior and exterior worlds. But Lewis
does this without the cast of characters and props. Only a “you” or other
personal pronoun is mentioned in her poems, rarely is it ever a sister or
husband or friend or garbage man. “How to Be Another” is an account of the we,
him, or her. This obscurity allows the reader to engage solely with the effects
of conflict rather than the people who cause them. The effect Lewis creates is
welcoming because to include these specifics would change how I read the poems.
I’ve been angry before but never at my brother, because I don’t have a brother.
Eliminating this “overload of
blurred identities” allows the poems to be entered with necessary neutrality.
We read of experience without the vessel who carries it, and this direct, pure
interaction produces a kind of clarity. As Lewis explains, “False consciousness
adorns our sparkling smiles, like spinach, like bling, like a koala clinging to
his fix, but that certainly is no excuse.”
Wordplay is another credit to
Lewis’ book. Each prose poem is woven with highly developed assonance that
brings both richness and new dynamics. As the poems address the repetitiveness
of daily life through subject, their construction simultaneously takes on
repetitiveness in sound. The cadence is an intended parallel to the habitual
patterns in our lives.
“On & on towards death &
its weak-kneed counterpart. But enough about us. […] Say again what I might
knead, seeded & sown, thrown like caution to the wind, wound like any toy
keyed up to meet its maker.”
The use of the ampersand in place
of the word “and” is consistent throughout the entire book, and I sense its
presence serves as a subtle reminder of our dependency on symbols. Symbols are
myriad in the overload of urban environments and missed intentions, and symbol,
by its very nature, demands inference. Like the McDonald’s arches or Nike
checkmark, the ampersand in Lewis’ poems is a structural illustration of
something larger. In this case, the danger of inferring what you think you
know.
Playful and unapologetic, “State of the Union” and “How to Be Another” are not just easy to step into, but easy to
inhabit. Each book rapidly addresses our fragmented concepts of anonymity,
narcissism, appreciation, sympathy, diplomacy, physics and other concepts we
brashly agree to understand. The voice is frank and forever in the flux of
shifting emotion and environment. The poems are brief and acute. They are
narratives, signposts, windows and fragments that stream heavy lines pulled
right off the sensory-packed urban streets. Within these lines lies the
struggle for each of us to connect and empathize with others. The struggles to
clarify what symbols, what sounds, mean and how they affect us. Rife with
misunderstanding and wordplay, the situations in the poems are all too
recognizable. They threaten with the noise and confusion of lost focus,
collectively emulating a crowd of people, all talking at once, while a crowd of
ideas floods their minds. “Pay attention,” Lewis warns, “or the clamor in your
head might very well prevail."
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