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God Wave by Carlos Lara

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  God Wave  is “a book-length prose poem with no end punctuation,” composed of 51+ pages of 31 lines justified to both margins, with no capitalization other than “I.” Reading it, I sought some instrumental analogue for reference. Repetitive, muscular, dissonant alto saxophone (such as Evan Parker’s  Conic Sections )? However, I found that music was not a useful analogue. Music has texture and rhythm, whereas Lara’s work is “no material.”   “No material” writing, in the context of  God Wave , aspires to divest language of referentiality in favor of what Lara terms in an  interview  “the purely creative aspect of the purely creative aspect of language.” Thus, whatever memories and judgments come up in the work are not the reason  for  the writing; instead, they are the material becoming no-material, vehicles for the words’ flight towards a pure point of generativity:   I now address the subtitular epitome of divine relenting the restless l...
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Fecund by Katie Ebbitt

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Fecund is composed of two sections/long poems: “Hysterical Pregnancy,” which originally appeared in chapbook form, and “Fecund,” a long poem with forty sections set off by bold faced, upper case Roman numerals. There’s one line in the book with 8 words, but otherwise the lines are exceedingly spare (1-5 words), leaving a sea of breathing white space on each page.   These short lines and spacious pages bespeak a tendency in current left margin-justified, broken line poetry of reformulating the line as a stanza made of several short lines:   to walk public ground   see a middle name   cut in stone mothering cementation   Ebbitt’s lines are cosmetically minimal, as though “cut in stone,” cemented. In actuality, though, the lines have a roving quality that, in my reading, ushers you on to the next piece quickly. Rather than feeling overly-crafted and tight, these short lines instead feel unfinished (uncemented) and open, liable for mo...
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Failures of the Poets by Anthony Robinson

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  “Foreign Object Damage,” a poem about an eighth of the way through  Failures of the Poets , begins: “We are not driven to belief by sadness, / but to sadness by belief.” Rather than belief offering consolation for sadness (redemption), the sadness comes simply because you believe. While these lines may be read religiously, the way I heard them was worldly in nature. If you didn’t believe in the world  being  something other than it is, you wouldn’t be sad.    The world Robinson describes in “Foreign Object Damage” is a world “of coffee cups, zip drives, // & too many fighter jets.” Lest that diagnosis be read as indication of a particular stance about consumption, technology, and war, the poem immediately changes course, with Robinson writing: “Or not enough fighter / jets,” at which point he confesses that    it’s become so hard   to tell: to tell anything anymore is a grave & heavy program.    Rather than sadness borne o...
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