What Weaponry a novel in prose poems - Elizabeth J. Colen (Black Lawrence Press)

Today's book of poetry:
What Weaponry - a novel in prose poems.   
Elizabeth J. Colen.  Black Lawrence Press.  Pittsburgh, PA.  2016.

What Weaponry - a novel in prose poems saunters into the room like a tattooed lady in a perky summer dress with a pistol in her purse and a smear of lipstick still tasty on her lips.  Elizabeth J. Colen is not new to this game and her characters are all body and soul, just like a jazz song, tattered and somehow still hopeful on the battered field of love.

These beautiful assaults are instant karma and sad fate.  Colen has access to instantaneous emotional intensity with her wide open heart channeling all the dreams of her wounded heroes.

This poetry novel burns.

We Are Only Animals Furred

And Undone

In this land time stops, white bird hovering in the

pre-dawn. Unseen fawns high step the wet grass.

And we, feet and shin bathed in shallows seas of

scrub, marvel at the complete dark.  "There's

nothing," you whisper, and then say nothing more. I

know you mean the world has closed its doors.

We haven't slept but tired's come back to wild elation

the way all things circle back to meet their opposites.

The way I sometimes become you again. And

through bare toes feeling for the towpath, and that

stab of electric light moved on by our motion, we

find the neighbor's barn door. No light in neighbor's

kitchen, no horse sounds from the yard. Only the

crickets and your breathing, pale face posed, the

gun still in your hand.

...

Today's book of poetry was gobsmacked by What Weaponry and pleasantly so.  Every time I begin to waver another poet comes along to give us hope.  Today's hope is supplied by these electric jolts from Colen's stun gun.  Elizabeth J. Colen is a talent to celebrate.  

We have heard all these stories before, in one version or another, after all, how many stories are there?  But Colen has found the right traction to make her startlingly lived-in/innocent voice unique.

Today's book of poetry had some extra help this morning.  Before everyone else arrived I was sitting in the shade at the front of our building and rereading What Weaponry and enjoying the quiet street, the occasional cardinal whistle, the sun coming through the large trees down the road.  Our friend Pistol dropped by with his pal Thomas.  When they sat down I handed What Weaponry over to Pistol and asked him to take a peek.  Pistol started reading, he always opens a book of poetry at a random page and starts in there, and the first time he raised his head he was smiling and said "well, that was okay."  And of course he meant much more.  

He buried his head in What Weaponry again and when he came up for air he was a convert.  Pistol doesn't like all that much, I show him poetry whenever I can, but when he does like it I know I've hit on something special, splendid.

Wife Beater

There's a tattooed girl at the counter in the bread

shop and she's thin and she's tough and she's scarred

and you start talking about what her life must be

like. Tank top, wife beater, fresh bruise on her chin.

You wonder if she's somebody's wife. And the shirt

doesn't come all the way down to her pants, which

are low, which are black, which are ripped at the

knee. And the shirt is a little dirty around the

middle like she'd rubbed up against some dirty

truck. And I see your eyes turn down and you look

at her waist and you whisper something about

stretch marks. I tell you you have no business

speculating about the nature of those. Was she fat,

you said, but you decided it was babies. And how

many. You give her seven babies, but she's probably

only twenty-three and just looks forty-four. She

hasn't had time, I say and you say, she looks like the

world, this girl, she looks like the whole damn world

has been sitting right in her lap.

...

There's a dark engine revving hard and running the show in Colen's wheelhouse and the poems in What Weaponry are often bracing as a result.  But Colen is wall-papering her sad confines with jewels.  No matter how darkly set these gems glisten with revealing light.

Today's book of poetry found Colen's mastery of the prose poem invigorating.  Each of these poems ends up bigger than the sum of it's parts.  These are screenplays.  Colen seasons each page with an intoxicating mix of tender, tawdry (in the best possible way) and tired.

When Today's book of poetry says "tired" we are talking about that bone-funking weariness that too much experience welds onto your face like ritual scars.

Last Meal Of Gin

What it took: two days to get used to. The break-off,

lesion to touch, legion. And where were you when?

And then admitting that dream. What breaches.

What I would have made up, but didn't. From there,

dories everywhere, talk of unicorns, what horns,

whatever, the red birds that did not alight on my

arms: there was no going back. Everything right

now is about you. Standing in the dim kitchen,

knee-deep in me. Standing in the living room, the

lights clicking off. Timers. I can't see the face for the

face, can't see the place for the what if. We were a

mob of lost parts, a wreckage of history. Weekends

are tiny models of the world, what weeks want to be.

Sometimes what years. Might contain all electric, all

thought. Which way we went. A tug on the hair and

the clock shakes, pulling you forward by bangs,

waking up bruised. Waking with loss everywhere.

...

Elizabeth J. Colen's What Weaponry is exactly what Today's book of poetry wants to see when we open a book of poems.  We want to see sparks fly, stick around and find out what is buried in the ashes.

Colen made a fan out of our friend Pistol this morning and that's a difficult get.  Today's book of poetry was already convinced.

Elizabeth J. Colen

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Elizabeth J. Colen is the author of poetry collections Money for Sunsets (Steel Toe Books, 2010) and Waiting Up for the End of the World (Jaded Ibis Press, 2012), flash fiction collection Dear Mother Monster, Dear Daughter Mistake (Rose Metal Press, 2011), long poem / lyric essay hybrid The Green Condition (Ricochet Editions, 2014), and Your Sick (Jellyfish Highway, 2016), co-written with Carol Guess and Kelly Magee. She teaches at Western Washington University.

BLURBS

• Handsomely forged like the best scenes of the best art films, Elizabeth Colen’s What Weaponry moves between expansive seashores and claustrophobic interiors to illuminate or exorcise the emotional interstices we all inhabit. Such violence and tenderness rubbing up against each other! It’s impossible to look away. And if, as Colen insists, 'There is no mystery here,' it’s because she has exposed the beautiful ugly subcutaneous.
       —Debra Di Blasi
In What Weaponry, Elizabeth J. Colen has done something much more challenging, much more nimble than write a book of prose poems. She has created a wonder, a linear circularity – “We haven’t slept but tired’s come back to wild elation the way all things circle back to meet their opposites,” – she has embedded a book of poems inside a book of prose. “Say you didn’t say his name. Say you sang it.” So I won’t. I will. I just have to follow her. Let her make music with the stories she puts in my mouth. Let her wake me.
    —TC Tolbert

The vortex of bold words that whip through Elizabeth Colen's What Weaponry are messages fully articulating a new form of body. A new sense of love. Radiant and containing "all electric, all thought," the language found in Colen's latest book generously provide a jittery syntactical jolt. What is constant in these dazzling lyrical vignettes is the desire for intimacy in the throes of love's changing face. What Weaponry swerves, plumbs, sears and burns for that which eludes but is right before us. It's a remarkable book.
     —Oliver de la Paz

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