In Vievee Francis' "The Shore," the speaker observes a couple at a hotel and reflects on her own affairs and others'. The language is vivid. I really need to read her book, Forest Primeval, which is upstairs either on my desk or on the poetry bookshelves.
Some of the other poems in this small batch touch on similar themes. In "Sex," Christine Gosnay writes, "... I can't help closing my eyes to imagines/ the boat that carries me to the middle/ of a lake as dark as the gaps between the clouds." Rachel Galvin's "Little Death" describes, in intense and sometimes violent detail the catching of a fish. (The poem's--subtitle? epigraph?--is "after Jonathas de Andrade"; in the notes, Galvin says she wrote the poem after watching the Brazilian artist's film O Peixe; I saw some of this work at Richmond's ICA and it is indeed striking and memorable.) Despite its tight descriptive focus, Galvin's poem packs a punch: "Remember: when a man captures a fish/ he will seduce it while he slaughters it".
I didn't care for "Birches Are the Gods' Favorite Tree" by Regan Good. Some visceral images emerge, particularly in the poem's latter half, but the dense language, classical allusions, and intellectual diction makes the balance feel off to me. In her contributor note, Good writes, "The randomness of suffering and grief is at the heart of the poem. ... It is not really bearable, but we bear it."
In a somewhat stream-of-consciousness style, Jorie Graham's "It Cannot Be" foregrounds the suffering of refugees, mixing and blending with the personal (the death of Graham's mother) and the impersonal (an implacable sea, the prospect of "extinction").
The most powerful poem in this section, for me, was Julian Gewirtz' longer, multi-part "To X (Written on This Device You Made)." The epigraph quotes a newspaper article about a "24-year-old migrant worker" who jumped out of the window of a Chinese factory dormitory run by iPhone manufacturer Foxconn. The poem begins with an iPhone: "Pick it up./ Black glass our mirror when it's/off but it is never/off." It continues:
I see you I think I
see you load your
poem onto it, into me, into now Did you, just like that, standing
fall asleep Did you fall farther than you meant Did you
mean me to be reading this I want
to touch the sky/ feel that blueness so light/
but I can't do
any of this/ so I'm
leaving this
world/ I was fine
when I came/ and fine when I
left In this blue touchlight
fine rain starts
scrolling down
The "you" throughout the poem is tricky--usually, it seems, the dead worker, but sometimes the phone itself (Siri makes an appearance) and sometimes the end user, the author or perhaps the reader. A section describing consent forms (optional, but not really) is followed by sections on the inhumane conditions of factory work, facts woven in with musings. And at the end, poet and reader are horrifically complicit: "I pick it up // forgive me // I pick it up".
After reading the poem, I wasn't surprised to find in the notes that Gewirtz is a historian. He writes, "This poem responds to the extraordinary collection Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Worker Poetry, edited by Qin Xiaoyu and translated by Eleanor Goodman. ... The experience workers--and the intimate connection to their exploitation of every person who wears 'Made in China' clothing or texts on an iPhone--is almost wholly absent from mainstream conversations in the United States, even though those workers' labor has reshaped our world."
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