The lengthy bio of featured poet Stephanie de Montalk’s every thought, publication history, and philosophies on office poetry made me feel like I was flipping between an A&E special and a poetry infomercial. I imagined the poet putting black paper into something resembling a food processor and hitting loud function buttons. The end result was a puree of poems that quickly hardened into a thick perfect bound anthology. I was confused in the article “Getting to Know a poem” because I wasn’t sure if it was instructions for reading this journal in particular or every poem I encounter here after. (“the process of getting to know a poem is rather like getting to know a person.”) Well I don’t treat poems like people or vice versa so I wasn’t buying that drivel for a minute. Lots of stuff going on in Gerard Parry’s piece “Fishing the Wash” (“Fens, a sticky tar, plugs toes/The dinghy slaps mud/Slides into Great Ouse/Land and sea, here, meet/Gradually, without fuss/Marsh dipping into Atlantic/A farm’s soil floating/ Into the sea.” He gets into simpler imagery with “Hierapolis” (“The headless woman addresses the empty amphitheatre. Lizards bask on Greek tombs, fields, hills hum and steady themselves in the heat.”) Other smash hits include Timothy Brehany’s “Life (as a long form of suicide)” (“we come together/ like a jigsaw puzzle/ on a day that begins/ with so much blue sky/ the ground slowly takes shape/ beneath us”) but the winner for me was Jenna Heller’s list poem with its anti-domestic humour (“drink water/return home/eat 6 pieces of white toast with far-too-much butter/drink water/shower/shave underarm hair and bathing suite line/twice/just to make sure/pour a glass of coke and pretend it is lunch time/drink quickly/belch”) these little protests to our everyday lives made me laugh out loud. I imagine grocery shopping with Heller at 3am in faux-fur coats with tissue boxes on our feet laughing at all the food. (NGM)
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