The Fix — Lisa Wells (University of Iowa Press)

Today's book of poetry:
The Fix.  Lisa Wells.  University of Iowa Press.  Iowa City, Iowa.  2018

Winner of the IOWA POETRY PRIZE

The Fix is in.

Lisa Wells has climbed right into the poetry heart of Today's book of poetry.  Wells burns like her hands were made of matches.

Today's book of poetry did not recognize the language Lisa Wells was employing at first, some renegotiation was necessary, and it was my fault.  But Today's book of poetry did know from the very first poem in this insanely entertaining debut that it was going to require a seat-belt and helmet.

The Fix has a sureness to it, an accomplished voice, Wells gets to the heart with zest and immediately consumes the reader with her abandon fervor.  Today's book of poetry had to think about it for a minute and then it hit us.  We have only recently become aware of the superpoetry of the nurse/poet Belle Waring (Belle Waring died of cancer in 2015).  There's a zany, I don't give two shits - except that I care deeply, mantra.  A completely abandoned building sort of shouting that goes on in the poetry of Waring and Wells seems cut from the same fine cloth.

What Today's book of poetry was clumsily trying to say is that we are BIG admirers of Belle Waring and were surprised to find Lisa Wells raising the same hairs on our poetry neck.  Today's book of poetry will be looking at Belle Waring's Refuge (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1990) and Dark Blonde (Sarabande Books, 1997) at some point in the near future.  The Belle Waring books arrived in our offices courtesy of our Southern Correspondent, The Twangster, reigning St. Louis Champ.  He sends regular literary "care packages."

Today's book of poetry is so happy to introduce you to the poetry of Lisa Wells we can hardly sit still in our seats.

Theory of Knowledge

Alive on the highway shoulder.

The ruddy trucker passed

tossed a can from his cab

and I scrambled to retrieve it.

Cut like a twig and titless

the boys said

bbs on a breadboard.

Crossed my arms over my chest

in the frigid stock room of the mini-mart

while a classmate donned a nylon bib

and counted my cache into his hamper.

So I whipped a boy at school with my windbreaker

and where my zipper caught his shin, he split.

Blood slipped through the fold

mercury slow.

For that, a teacher faced me toward a wall

to think about my wrongs.

I don't need a wall to know.

...

When Today's book of poetry tells you the Lisa Wells poems are not concerned with point of entry, they attack you like an unseen gas, impervious to detection and thoroughly effective;  you're not going to believe what will happen to you — even as it is happening.

That last sentence/paragraph will have Max, our Sr. Ed., bleeding out his eyeballs; but Today's book of poetry has learned that we have to poke the beast once in a while just to make sure he is still breathing.

Back to point of entry.  Lisa Wells is the perfect poetry assassin because these poems come at you with such humour and wit that we often don't see the big "pop-up" mallet she keeps in other hand.  The Fix is devoid of trickery, These poems come at the reader straight down the middle of the page, Lisa Wells may be the Larry Csonka* of American poetry.

*Larry Csonka played for the Miami Dolphins and is universally respected for his inside game.  Fearless and unstoppable.  "The Sundance Kid" won a couple of Superbowls and was the star running back on the only professional football team to have a full undefeated season.

Memoir

I stitched my mask of hide- snout- sinew- talon- and rode

the vast savanna to war

in my former life. I was the hybrid. I sewed my brutal double-helix

     into a child

and packed her boots with greasy wool that felted as she walked in bright

stratified color. Carpathian bronze couldn't buy her off

when she leapt at the throat of my lover.

Him I called The Lion for his yawn and yellow ringlets.

I placed a Deglet date upon his tongue, I pressed

the golden scarab into amber, straddled all his lap, kissed

my cresset to the yurts of my superiors

and in this life, I think I'd like to do more damage.

...

Today's book of poetry thinks that Lisa Wells has a considerable reserve of grit, she knows that most injustices go unpunished and that many go unnoticed.  Wells is a reporter, and an excellent one at that, but she can't stay neutral.

Our morning read was robust to say the least with an excellent cast of characters here for the event.  Jeff popped by to measure my desk for another bookcase, at present I count something like fourteen bookcases, one-hundred and twelve shelves, in my office, but I need a couple more.  Jeff has the knowledge.  He also has a great voice and rattled off a couple of Wells poems.  Thomas was on this morning, he brought in his friends Pistol and Barb.  All three of them contributed.  The office was a busy place this morning.  

We laughed and laughed.  All complaints get sent to the fifth floor.

With Lisa Wells, no complaints at all.

"Poetry Man"

      after Phoebe Snow

To recall the cull of this life.

That one must harvest by selective annulment

the body they will wed

                     and the body they will hustle

from dress to tongue on the sly

                                           for days

I lay as a flank in my lover's maw

                      swathed in wine while warm

winds frisked the wisteria.

It was innocent.

He lashed my wrist to the mast.

He tied my blind because I wanted

to be battered in the swell

            and blossoms purple still

any place he pressed his mouth

any place

I asked for it.

By now I know, I begged:

relieve your mouth its bland aperture

Talk to me some more

~

Home's that place       somewhere      you go each day

in absence of his finger I have conveyed to my teeth

a relentless procession of corn chips, zoned out

on the bedroom wall.

Little my tongue does for the hole it circumnavigates.

It was a clear day, sun jigging figures from the leaves

on the alien green of College Park

              I was ocular in his arms

an enormous pupil, blown open.

     We knew the hour had come

by the way the light collected

raptured to several heavens

there's no need to choose.

~

If choice is obviated  "Le Paradis n'est pas artificiel"

his letter begins, anxiety of what is

in back of each long note.

He compares me to a garden.  "Why weed what winter will kill?"

Fidelity is perennial, survives the cold     cloaked as a peony.

He wishes me a grand carouse at the local dive, a dry

bottom bun for my rubber burger

and another man's sex         bashful boy.

~

do not touch the stove you will

fuse to its element    slaver over

the burn.             You don't have to go.

You're hiding something sweet

from this swollen thumb

and from these glossy welts derives

the suspicion that I am truly sick.

Monstrously wooed by these

reports of injury, he admits

         "its invocation of parts. You have a thumb. Eyes."

Instruments of agency.   Logic divides

pleasure from having

               give it to me

All Medea's remonstrations ended on a blade.

downed in the poisoned mug, draped in the tainted gown

but she never howled

when love departed

she muscled out to meet him.

...

Any of you regular readers of Today's book of poetry will know that we are always a sucker for poets who find hope.  Lisa Wells gives us renewed hope, and why not?  

This energy, zip and intelligence make for that rarest of books, can't miss poetry.  It will "muscle out to meet" you.

Burn, Lisa, Burn.

Lisa Wells

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Lisa Wells is a poet and nonfiction writer who lives in Tucson, Arizona. Her work has appeared in Best New Poets, the Believer, Denver Quarterly, Rumpus, Third Coast, and the Iowa Review.

BLURBS

“Full and luscious as a grape before wine-making or a moon before love-making, the poems in The Fix live in a roadside space that’s earthy, sensual, erotic, and wild. Lisa Wells writes by feel, shaping, kneading, and bending the line the way a potter builds a ceramic vessel from the bottom up, coiling around a central idea until it’s solid, visible, and ready to be marveled at.”

     —D. A. Powell

“The Fix is ruthless, sleepless, vigilant, obsessive: a profound work of mystery and matter, of power and pleasure, in which any singular truth is always just a step ahead, a bit beyond reach, below sight line. This new voice is so strange it sounds familiar, like family unforgivable or a lover who’s never over, or like a kind of food only grown on alien soil but that tastes disturbingly like your childhood. Here, every line is a surprise, a curve, a path this visionary poet cut just this moment for you to travel deep and emerge altered by this, her stark dark knowing. You’ll read this brilliant book again and again looking for the way back from it.”

     —Brenda Shaughnessy, judge, Iowa Poetry Prize

“The Fix is perfectly executed. It’s always poetry, yet it never strains to be poetry. It’s flush with nervous and yet confidently directed energy. Its most striking moments are never haphazard, but are surprising and indelible. It doesn’t read like a first book, it reads like a book for life.”

     —Shane McCrae, author, In the Language of My Captor

“Lisa Wells knows all too well that a fix is just a habitual stay against the moment’s decay, and in these corporeal poems equal parts binge and purge, one can only wonder what rough bitch slouches down low to be reborn in a Paradise as dirty and comfy as a trucker’s blown rig.”

     —Timothy Liu

Lisa Wells

reads "The End"

Video:  BitchMedia

www.uipress.uiowa.edu

694

DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration

Take This Stallion - Anais Duplan (Brooklyn Arts Press)

Today's book of poetry:
Take This Stallion. Anais Duplan.  Brooklyn Arts Press.  Brooklyn, New York.  2016.

Anais Duplan has a big voice and Take This Stallion is loud.  Duplan is marvellously excessive in her exasperations, take this title:  "An Account Of A Child Born Alive Without A Brain And The Observables In It Upon Dissection."  

Duplan would also have us believe that her dog is God.  Today's book of poetry followed along with rapt and somewhat nervous attention.

A Fledgling Is A Young Bird

That Has Its Feathers

And Is Learning To Fly

[1]

S-H-E-D-E-V-I-L,

I, on the other hand,

make sure to wash my mouth

whenever I say something slippery. I am washing

right now, ma cherie, with a pen

in my left hand and my page on the rim of the sink

and my right hand is reaching toward you,

you in the mirror, to pull your hair out.

[2]

The terror of having to realize the unrealizable: I am a baby

on the kitchen counter, one of many. My mother continues

to unload us from a crate. The counter is littered with knives.

No one is hurt except all of us are hurt and yearning

to sleep. It is cold. Keep this in mind, it is cold.

My mother, the woman, she is wearing a chain

of children's molars. A man wearing the same chain

appears in the doorway and begins to eat us one by one.

[3]

My mother in a blue apron. It is springtime inside

and outside the kitchen. I hear the dog screech from the yard,

his "body" is caught under the lawnmower

my father is driving. I tell my mother to get off

the machine, to let this one live, but he doesn't listen,

he takes off his apron and steps outside,

sees the dog screeching and by now, it is still springtime.

[4]

You are in control. The day is yellow

in the sense that the grasses are dying. There are animals

dying every minute, waiting, even after their deaths,

to be adopted. Pick up the phone. Pick up the baby

and set it in a meadow. Wait for a bird to settle

on its head and take a photo. Mail the photo to your mother.

Write to her, write, Just this once, just this once,

would you please come to my recital. I promise I will do better

than Jenny. Take the baby back into your hands

and promise me.

[5]

What makes us go all the way to the bottom. The brother had severed

one of his fingers attempting to slice a fig. The mother took him

to the emergency room but only the brother returned. Since then,

I have had to be the woman of the house. I am proud to say

that the brother's fingers have grown six inches since I took over and the father

is very well near portly. I promise to fill them up. I say this every time

I pass the emergency room on the way to bed.

[6]

At least we have our authenticity. This is the last time

I'll ever lend my skin to a man who tells me he'll give it

right back. Keep this in mind: it is cold and my eyes

are too bloated for my head. I have had to squeeze them dry

at day's end. I do this in the bathroom, where a lady is safe

to take her apron off and her eyes out.

[7]

I say to Michael, I say, Michael,

why don't you go out and find yourself a woman. I say,

Michael, any lady would be lucky to let you have her. I say, Take

this cake and take it into your arms and find a woman.

[8]

You are in control. Take this stallion and ride it

to your demise. (Read: the sunset, behind the stars,

the green green garden.) Compare my flesh to yours. Look at my hair:

my neck hair and my toe hair. (Read: I am a woman and a woman

is a woman.) My unconscious is under siege,

Papa Bear. Take up your arms

and throw them around me. Bring a bouquet,

bring your big cowboy hat. Show me how to kill a horse.

...

It's clear Anais Duplan is comfortable going all back-beat to the regular rhythms of things but this doesn't stop her from finding a big, deep groove.  Take This Stallion isn't an easy get - the reader has to take a minute to find firm footing because this is surprisingly new ground.  Anais Duplan is teaching us her new vernacular and it is splendid.

Why Would You Ever Go

To A Pool Party Anway

I.

Anais, you needn't cry

like a baby seal. You needn't wear

your hair long, just to divert

the passing sailors--

                O what flag waves outside the windows

of all fledgling girls

when they detect

what lives

between their legs.

                                   John Paul once said to me,

O Anais, o Anais, what lives between your legs,

and I opened up to him, put his hand inside me

and said, This is the fiery throat of God -- be careful.

You may find you are no longer every-

thing you had been

before you arrived.

II.

He said, she said, we wrote of a great awakening.

Instead of death we only moaned

every time the sun did wane and how

it waned every morning. Today could be

the day that does not end

in your death-

ly embrace.

...

A lot of fun at this morning's read.  Take This Stallion lent itself to a dramatic show.

Not sure how Anais Duplan has done it but Take This Stallion feels like a strange familiar.  I know I have never been here before and some of the language is foreign but these poems ring the ears off of my inner reader.  I'm happy/sated, deja-vued and curious for more.

I Felt Like A Traffic Light

As Soon As I Got Inside You

I.

This is how to be honest:

I learned it on the subway: look

me in the eyes and tell me

I'm not beautiful. Sometimes

it's best just to drop out tune down

let go so ever so deep. So deep

was her throat and how the gods

did sing, how the dog doth sing,

Happy birthday, darling. And thank you, too.

II.

I met a girl named Martha

with eyes as big as Arizona,

relative to other states.

Martha, I promise to change

your bandages forever 'n'ever,

and if the doctors should ever say,

O Anais, Martha will not survive

without your limbs, I would

tear them off one-by-one.

III.

Lift me up --

I am looking at the neighbor's wife,

I am looking at the neighbor's wife

and wond'ring where she buys her things.

Lower me down, just below your eye-

level and tell me about the time

your mother made you wear clothes you didn't want to wear.

IV.

Never forget to greet the doctor in the room,

I know it was your birthday but I never got

the prescription you wrote me.

Dancing is not permitted in certain towns and that's ok

for some. Don't stop get it get it get it get it get it get it

before it gets you.

As soon as you walked into the room

all the flowers said O hell yes.

V.

My life is a ballad, it goes: O

ooooo! I can't breathe

when you hold me so

cold. Get paid get paid

tomorrow. Wake up get

paid tomorrow. You deserve

everything you get.

You don't know nothing and you never did, silly bill.

I don't have a gun but maybe one day I will.

...

It can't just be me.  There are a strokes worth of vicarious thrills both carnal and poetic in this rambunctious first book of poems.  Today's book of poetry will happily champion Take This Stallion until Anais Duplan gives us some more sugar.

Anais Duplan

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Anaïs Duplan was born in Jacmel, Haiti. She is the director of a performance collective called The Spacesuits and of The Center for Afrofuturist Studies, an artist residency program in Iowa City. Her poems and essays have appeared in Birdfeast, Hyperallergic, The Journal, [PANK], and other publications. She is an MFA candidate at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

BLURBS

“I have never before read a book like Anaïs Duplan’s Take This Stallion. Her major talent is recognizing the self in the other, making for poems that flow forward in a tone of oneness—is oneness a tone?—poems that make evident an ever-expanding world by opening themselves up into that world. This debut does what poets in their fifth or sixth collections are still trying to figure: it balances the intellect, image, music, and emotion in ways so unfamiliar that a blurb couldn’t possible characterize the work.”

     - Jericho Brown

“For all the ways we pad our language with qualifier, with apology, with hedge, Anaïs Duplan is antidote. Her poems are talkative, inappropriate, obsessive, and sexy. They put everything on the table and if there’s no table, she erects one: of the mechanic’s lobby, of men selling peanuts at her door, of the George Washington Bridge underpass, of the ocean. Sometimes the poems hang the air with obsession like tangential rope. like snake. Sometimes they pick up their skirts and dust the ground. Duplan’s work is at once this methodical, and this unhinged. She confirms a fear that drones and Kim Kardashian have more to do with our therapy sessions than we wish. And then at times, she puts all that away, and the poems wash out their mouths. This first collection is, after all, of this world. And though it might be haunted by a voice that says “Don’t be too cocky,” on nearly every page it talks back. Heroic, inspired, and smart: these poems are on their own two feet, saying “I’m always cocky.””
     - francine j. harris

“Take This Stallion is the sound of a generation finding its voice; it is a sound of a generation that has more rapidly than any since the generation that came of age in the 1960’s turned the world on its head, both exposing the faithlessness of the generations before it, and reifying the promises those generations made. Listen: “When she was lost to them/ they took to striking/ each other over the head with empty fists,/ striking until blood ran freely in the city/ ditches. All of this sounding like horses thundering/ into each other, peeling themselves/ off of each other, and thundering/ again. The whole city, this sound.”In Take This Stallion, the whole city is made new, and the maker who re-makes it is new, and the songs they sing as they work are the new songs.”

     - Shane McCrae

Anais Duplan at SPECTRA

Video:  Therese Guise

brooklynartspress.com 

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DISCLAIMERS

Poems cited here are assumed to be under copyright by the poet and/or publisher.  They are shown here for publicity and review purposes.  For any other kind of re-use of these poems, please contact the listed publishers for permission.

We here at TBOP are technically deficient and rely on our bashful Milo to fix everything.  We received notice from Google that we were using "cookies"

and that for our readers in Europe there had to be notification of the use of those "cookies.  Please be aware that TBOP may employ the use of some "cookies" (whatever they are) and you should take that into consideration.