By Sarah D’Stair
The Book Eaters, by Carolina Hotchandani. Perugia Press, 98 pp., $18.
The Disordered Alphabet, by Cintia Santana. Four Way Books, 94 pp., $17.95.
I Love Information, by Courtney Bush. Milkweed Editions, 83 pp., $16.
Impersonal Rainbow & The Bisexual Purge, by Paul Killebrew. Canarium Books, 149 pp., $17.
We rely on artists to pull at the threads of our collective anxieties, to unravel what it is, exactly, we fear. Poets are particularly well suited to the task, for their work is to liberate words and phrases from the stricter confines of prose. Indeed, the best poets recognize that language, like a single atom, must be ruptured in order to unbridle all the energies buried deep inside. They show us what we fear – isolation, grief, obsolescence, disregard, mortality – in splintered lines that lay bare all the abstract and unknown silences at the core of our trepidations. They place a word just so on the page to unearth its individual power and to help us trace that power directly into our own unconscious. It’s an intense labor that requires absolute trust in one’s medium of expression. But what happens, one must wonder, when poets begin to fear the very system they rely on for revelation? What happens when poets begin to distrust language itself?
Contemporary poets work in an era in which culture at large continually degrades the authenticity of human language. With the explosion, in a relatively short time, of social media, artificial intelligence, and an increasing reliance on visual rather than written information, our ability to concentrate on the nuances of language are waning at best, and being completely destroyed at worst. Too many of the words we encounter in daily life are put before our eyes to mislead, conceal, subvert, lie, or sell us something we don’t need or want. Much of it does not originate from the human brain at all. How, then, can we trust any of it? Each collection under consideration in this review in some way addresses our collective anxieties about this very question. How does this distrust of our most basic form of communication impact culture, art, friendship, family, romance, and even civilization as a whole?
In Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry, Jane Hirshfield describes poetry’s power of coherence and permanence. She writes, “Shaped language is strangely immortal, living in a meadowy freshness outside of time.” The “immortal” nature of poetry becomes a source of both confident reflection and deep anxiety for contemporary poets. In both intimate and systemic ways, language is a central means by which we commit to both truth and untruth, to depth and to superficiality, to kindness and to cruelty, to understanding and to indifference. Language is “shaped” by poets, but only in order to express the inconsistent logic of unshaped relationships, sensations, and experiences. The four poets in this review each attempt to bring language under their “shaping” control, yet in doing so, fundamentally reveal ways in which words cannot be trusted. Each collection, in overt and nuanced ways, challenges readers to consider language not as a unitary force that pulls experience together, but as a complex system full of breakages, silences, obscurity, and impossibility. In this way, each collection successfully carries readers with them through the minute intimacies that language attempts, but often fails, to cultivate.
I
The Book Eaters by Carolina Hotchandani presents a central persona who indefatigably, with moments of both triumph and defeat, attempts to find cohesion in a world that seems to be disintegrating. At the same time, the poet presents a deep ambivalence about the capacity of language to capture complexity, from the tangled duties of motherhood to confronting a parent’s dementia to the fracturing of one’s geographic homeland. The poems celebrate words themselves and the silence between them, stories and the parts left out. There is constant movement, an unsettledness that remembers repetition but not what is actually repeated. In “The Boxes,” the speaker writes about constantly relocating as a child from one home to another. The words “we move” become a persistent refrain with very little description of the places the family lived. The memories themselves have not held, but the poetry clearly manifests the chaos of that constant motion. Many of the poems suggest that memory itself marks a kind of departure, a move from embodied reality to disembodied impression.
Hotchandani compresses deeply felt family traumas into crystallized, perfectly evocative lines, and, because she is a good poet, allows us into her suffering so we might understand more fully our own. The particulars of her biography act as a conduit into her reflections on words themselves, with all their “emptiness” and their failure to truly capture what she has witnessed. “Portrait of Aphasia on a Plum Tree” concentrates meaning into individual words like carbon is compressed into diamond. The poem begins: “Was it not then—as you reached for a word like a ball you’d kicked high.” The ball is a container for emptiness like a word is a container for thought, which is, ultimately, emptiness, too. The poem continues:
The father, losing words from aphasia, and the daughter, who has no words to describe her pain, mirror each other not through language, but specifically through its absence. In the first three lines, “the word” exists between the hollow space of the “ball” and the density of the “plum pit.” The word itself is neither empty nor full of meaning, but rather occupies an illicit space between two minds as they clamber to find each other.
Words are alive in Hotchandani’s poetry, trying to fulfil their purpose but finding it quite difficult to do so. They fail, they falter. Perhaps that’s where poetry steps in, a savior, a translator of the unconscious, an entry into the infinite unnamable abstractions that comprise our world. That is one idea. But I do not think it’s what the poet wants us to see. The truth is that words are always a lie, a mere sound or scrawl to symbolize the “solid thing” that is always just beyond their grasp. Poetry asks us to mistake the word for the thing itself. The key word here is “mistake.” Distortion. Dream. And hence, anxiety. This thing, language, that we rely on for intimacy, communion, and understanding is ultimately unstable, ill-equipped to be what we need it to be.
Hotchandani’s verse is most compelling when the poet offers questions with no answers and a sense of play with metaphor without needing to showcase its referent. In “Nesting,” the names of birds become a “hiding place” for words with other meanings: “(the flicker, the chat, the swift, the lark)”. Language is full of surprises and whimsy, but also, on the darker side, subterfuge and evasion. The poem continues:
And later in the poem:
Ideas “teeter” on the highwire of sounds that attempt to capture them, and words “echo” with the unfamiliar, the alienating, a set of things or ideas that belong to “someone else.” There is something unsettling here, as if language is a force acting with agency to bend us all to its will, to render us all “rhymes” of each other, like a row of birds silhouetted on a telephone line. Yet we want to resist such standardization
In the next section of the collection, the poet turns powerfully from aging and death to birth and motherhood. The poems bristle with all the anxieties and wonders of nurturing new life. The notion of infancy, with its wordlessness, its grunts and cries and reliance on the body to communicate, provides a centering counterpoint to the father’s aphasia, and allows the poet to continue her interrogation of language. In “A Vase on a Shelf,” words empty themselves of meaning like the pen empties itself of ink, like the mother empties herself in childbirth:
And in “Self-Portrait as a Woman’s Intention to Write,” the pristine grammar that characterizes most poems in the collection dissolves as the new mother confronts the reality of writing while caring for children. Motherhood and writing both present as imperatives that are also impossibilities, each marked by exasperation, exhilaration, desperation, circular logic, and an endless loop of tasks. The structured architecture of language has no place in this experience. It’s too messy, untethered, mirroring a state in which “the woman’s cry is louder than the child’s.”
The final section turns to the breast cancer diagnosis and treatment of the speaker’s mother. The collection sandwiches parenthood between two ailing parents, which is exactly what happens in middle age. It can often feel like a hollowing out of identity, with very little time for the self at precisely the time of life when one has become more wholly themselves. As she does throughout the collection, Hotchandani relates the experience to what it means for language. In “The Trees that Pointed to Trees,” she creates a poetic world absent of simile and metaphor, absent of that kind of artifice. In this vacuous space, “the drama is gone from her story” and “the trees will stand for trees alone.” Has life swallowed art? Or has it profoundly transformed our ability to stomach obfuscation? In a collection that structurally serves as a poetic memoir of birth, life, and death, language itself becomes a point of crisis, an absence that parades around as presence.
II
Cintia Santana brings this interrogation of language into even more desperate realms in The Disordered Alphabet. Her wonderfully strange and disorienting poems reveal a conscious anxiety about language in the modern age. Even the title of the collection presents an image of language in a state of disarray. Many of her poems deal with subjects for which there are no words: the generational impact of Hiroshima, revisiting a traumatic childhood home, family illness and deep grief. Here again, language fails, and what’s left is silence, which, in Santana’s poetry, carries perhaps more meaning than sound.
The first poem’s autological title begins the investigation. Simply titled “Word,” the first lines invoke the earliest known poet writing in English with the phrase “Widsith spoke”. Then, in what seems like an unleashing, the poet mourns the many ways words have gone awry since those ancient poetic origins.
The clever compounding of “wordpour” intimates a kind of deluge of words raining down on the heads of collective humanity, without our consent or understanding of its repercussions. The poem continues to accuse words of twisting themselves over time, “breaking” with their own meanings so deeply that they can’t be trusted. The poet describes an evolution in which the ancient runic word “wynn,” or joy, becomes, over time, the word “ruin” in modern English. Santana studies language almost as a virologist, asking with a kind of terror: “What was the matter with us / that we did not fear such / breaking?”
The notion of “breaking” operates as a structural refrain throughout Santana’s collection. The poet reminds us continually that a mere word can spin us into realms of fancy or jolt us into harsh reality. In “Let there be,” wordplay that dances across the page suddenly thrusts us into a violent human history:
The alliterative romp through “l” words is interrupted by the dash, then takes a sobering turn toward symbols of enslavement, cruelty, and war. This same technique appears more subtly in subsequent lines:
We skip along with language in this poem, enjoying the ways the words curl around each other, mirror each other, leap off the tongue in a series of sonic pleasures. And then, like a drop down a well, the word “lie” stops the laughter, puts an end to the joy. There is no concrete “lie” present, but the mere word, with all its accumulated traumas, reminds us that any utterance can also mean its opposite.
Alongside anxiety about the inimitable power of language, Santana delights in the music of words. She playfully “disorders” the alphabet, deconstructs words and strips them of cohesion, treats letters like a pianist who takes pleasure in each individual note as powerfully as in chords and arpeggios. The most delightful part of the collection is a series of epistolary poems addressed to letters of the alphabet. Several of the “Dear T” verses take the word “taken” to task; “Dear U” implicates the prefix “un” in our undoing; and “Dear Y” revels in repetition of the word “yes” while “Dear N” is full of “no’s.” In “R Writes Me a Letter,” the speaker of the poem, the letter “R,” boasts about its ability to render the word “Bid” into “bird” and to “Turn / ice in / -to rice,” and “road / to ode.” Anthropomorphizing letters in this way gives them agency, as if they collaborate in the wonders and terrors they incite. The question that arises from all of these poems is simple: do words make things possible? Or do they merely describe?
“Dear O” turns markedly away from wordplay and instead presents us with embodied feelings of grief and alienation, doubt and confusion. Santana explores all the sounds the letter “o” makes, but each new iteration leads back to an uneasiness about who we are in the world. Calling back to those famous lines from Hamlet, the poet reminds us that being alive often comes with a kind of existential dissonance: “Odd it is to be / or not to be.” The short “o” sound requires an open mouth while the “u” sound in “to” closes it up, an oppositional relationship that mirrors the two states of being/nonbeing at the heart of Shakespeare’s iconic question. Later in the poem, the letter becomes divorced from sound:
The poet calls out to the letter; the letter responds with silence. We see a face mouthing a letter with “rounded” lips but no sound. Language, meant to standardize the sounds and symbols that bring others into our understanding, here again in some way has a will of its own. There is a kind of pleading in this poem, an anxiety that just when one needs the letter “o” it will suddenly become dormant, without “voice.”
One of the most interesting parts of Santana’s collection is the set of poems written as a series of footnotes, as in an academic text, without their original referent. For example, “Notes to a Funeral” contains the following representative examples:
One effect of this poetic innovation, especially in a collection about the instability of sounds and symbols, is to disengage words from their contextual origins. If a word needs a referent like a footnote needs a text, Santana strips both of their central symbolic associations. Language seeks the power to connect, to organize, to represent and to refer. Santana plays tug-of-war with language, pulling with poetic force each word away from its accumulated meaning to re-shape it into a system that bends to her will. Footnote #12 in this same poem describes one critic’s notes on a Bach cello suite: “12. Suite, famous for its intimate sarabande, the second of only four movements without chords. Tortelier describes it as an extension of silence.” In effect, Santana’s poetry accomplishes a similar feat: she “shapes” language into an “extension of silence” that brings us into deeper awareness of both its expressive capacity and its provocative failures.
III
Courtney Bush’s poetry feels quietly aggressive, taut and consciously monotonous, like the ticking of a very loud clock. The formal repetition and absence of grammatical cues render each line coterminous yet precisely individualized, forcing us to make our own connections based on proximity rather than a defined sense of cohesion. One critic has noted about I Love Information that the poems are full of non-sequitur. This point is certainly valid; however, this characterization misses an interpretive opportunity. In any given moment, our thought processes are full of disconnected impressions, ideas, memories, emotions. The unifying element is the singular mind, just as the unifying element in Bush’s verse is the singular poem. The poetic structures actively reject linearity or any kind of narrative thread. The title of the collection, after all, is I Love Information, which is different than knowledge or wisdom. Information is mere data disconnected from the whole, fragmented and incongruous, yet ubiquitous. One might argue that the “Information Age” itself is marked by incongruity, monotony, and fracture. In this way, Bush’s poetry seems to capture, in its very structure, prevailing anxieties of the modern era.
Many poems in the collection seem to long for earlier times, either with a kind of flat affect or with distinct mourning. “Jubilate Agno” calls back to a very long and repetitious eighteenth-century religious poem by Christopher Smart. In both the original and in Bush’s echo, each poetic line represents a single entity of thought:
This excerpt illustrates Bush’s technique, which is to isolate with a distinct rhythm each segment of the whole. In effect, each line represents a piece of “information” that readers must labor to coalesce. These poems feel as much like incantations as they do fluid expressions of meaning.
Several poems are simply titled “Katelyn” and read like an intense longing for wholeness. The one-line statements seem to represent a kind of vacuousness, a thinness of perspective, an emptiness yawning itself out from the page and seeking to connect with what comes before and after. In the fifth of the Katelyn cycle,
There is sadness in these lines, a kind of “steeling” oneself to the world. Later in the poem, the lines turn philosophical:
The poem makes a point of disassociating “meaning” from human control. The ways in which language attempts to contort thought into “sentences” with a sense of purpose and with structural integrity entirely misrepresents the conditions of human existence, which is messy and fragmented and “made alive” just as much by the “forgetting” as by the expressions used to describe what has been forgotten.
The long poem titled “Seraphim or Nothing” begins with a dream about a former lover’s infidelity and then continues with an extensive montage of moments along life’s journey. Some moments are sweet, like when a friend loops the speaker’s hair around her ears, and others are the result of traumatic events such as alcoholism and violence. Once again, the poem works like memory, which does not function as a filing cabinet, but rather as a series of abstract impressions, lost emotions only vaguely re-felt while the business of life continues forward.
The poem seems “obsessive” itself in cataloguing these small moments, almost imitating what it feels like to scroll a social media feed with its endless stream of disparate, disconnected impulses to express a momentary thought.
Yet Bush is also in conversation with the other poets discussed in this review. The poet is deeply ambivalent about the role of language in an era concerned solely with data inventory. Later in the same poem she writes these lines:
This short set of lines comprises the central anxiety of the collection. The speaker seems to realize there is no way out of the conundrum: we do “ask experience to be language,” just as tennis balls are used to clean floors. There is a sense of internal desperation here, as if the failure of language in the modern age is tempered by the suggestion that perhaps we were expecting too much of it all along. In the titular poem, “I Love Information,” the speaker declares that the “words will do something they can’t.” Perhaps this paradox is the only way to encapsulate what these poets seem to be examining: words can no longer function in the way we need them to, but somehow, they will anyway. It’s a sentiment full of both hope and terror.
IV
Paul Killebrew’s collection presents two very different books of poetry collected into one volume. The first, Impersonal Rainbow, includes individual poems that are loosely structured and enigmatic, full of wordplay and free association. The second, The Bisexual Purge, is a tightly structured system of logical statements that exists somewhere between poetry, legal treatise, historical record, and critical theory. In both books, though, the instability of language is central to the poet’s investigation.
For example, the first poem in Impersonal Rainbow is titled “Frorm,” which is the word “form” with the addition of the letter “r” in a very difficult-to-pronounce position. Written from the perspective of form itself, the first lines intimate its intentions:
The poem becomes a kind of internal autological statement, with the title “breaking” the word “form” into something “larger” than itself. Already the reader is presented with a poetry that defies the habituated function of letters on the page. They exist not to establish communicative clarity, but rather to challenge us toward invention, fluidity, and disruption in structure and sense.
Some of the most striking images appear in “The Right to Be Past,” a poem that mourns the loss of coherence in the languages we use: “A newborn adjective squeals / in mixed light at dawn” and later “the undersea cave / of a dictionary’s ghost”. The new word comes forth into the world with a sound of sour, rancid anger, evoking a “squealing” pig. And then, we are transported to a haunted, voided dictionary, almost as if words themselves have been negated, abandoned, killed or simply left to die. The poem holds a great empathy for language, which, in today’s hyper-visual and oversaturated world, has been made redundant. The dictionary is given voice enough to lament its own punishment, its “sentence,” its “lonely incoherence”:
Killebrew, who is also a lawyer, writes the next section of the book, The Bisexual Purge, as a long meditation on many different aspects of modern life: cultural trends, professional encounters, sexuality, parenthood, queer history and theory, systemic discriminations, the legal system, and specific historical subjects such as conflicts with North Korea and Russia, the James Comey saga, and the lives of LGBTQ+ activists such as Kate Bornstein and June Jordon. The poems themselves are not traditionally “poetic,” meaning they do not function using literary devices such as metaphor, simile, alliteration or any other conventional techniques. Rather, each section reads like a long academic study, replete with footnotes, excerpts from primary sources, and analytical commentary.
The decision to formulate a poetry without poeticization renders the collection as a whole a kind of treatise on the nature of poetry itself. Is the contemporary world “beyond” poetry in some way? Can the elusive nature of verse truly capture the prosaic reality of modern life? Or is something more complex going on? We might return to a poem from Impersonal Rainbow titled “Linebreaks as Relief” for some context, or at least a clue to the poet’s intention. A line break alone does not render prose into poetry; however, when considered as a form of “relief,” a line break can certainly disassociate prose from its utilitarian origins, forcing us to look at language with new eyes and remove it from bureaucratic use. In one example, the speaker draws his work in the legal profession into conversation with his life as a poet:
Here we see poetry as the undisclosed “crime” that would require some sort of “justice” in the eyes of the administrative state. The poet is making a claim that poetry is legitimate even in areas of quotidian life that seem very far removed. Later in the same poem, the speaker laments that to these civic institutions, “I’m just a sentence to them, less than a sentence, / a sound that slips out when you speak.” Here again is the ambivalence about ways in which language has been stolen from art by grand forces of government and commerce. Even the poet has lost his footing as artist and is seen by powerful social systems as nothing more than a “sound.”
Killebrew’s two very different books of poetry placed side by side reveal a nuanced use of formal technique to create meaning. The Bisexual Purge centers on the misunderstood state of existence that bisexual people suffer, primarily as a result of beliefs that bisexuality is an “in-between” set of desires rather than an identity unto itself.
The two vastly different styles—The Impersonal Rainbow with its abstract, circular, imagistic and highly poetic language, and The Bisexual Purge with its straightforward, lucid, systematic reasoning—operate not on a spectrum of poetic form, but a firm declaration of specific stylistic expression. When placed side-by-side, the two mirror the poet’s claims for bisexual identity by rejecting any kind of “in-between-ness” and instead forming an identity each unto themselves.
Killebrew’s collection often feels like an inundation, a deluge of historical events, cultural touchstones, and moments of both social progress and regression. At times, reading the poems in sequence has the quality of an endless doom scrolling session, purposefully and thoughtfully crafted by a poet who knows how to capture the spirit of the age. In this way, it truly is a poetry of our times, as are all the collections under consideration in this review. Each poet in their own way interrogates our changing relationship with the spoken and written word. Killebrew captures what it feels like to be alive today: “I’m working within the constraint / of experience.” No longer is language the central “constraint” for poets, nor for any of us. We must make our own sense of “experience” now, for the words have failed, and even “shaped language” is no longer immortal.
Sarah D’Stair is the author of three novels, including Helen Bonaparte, finalist for the BookLife 2024 Award, Abstract, and Central Valley, and the poetry chapbook One Year of Desire. Her poetry, short fiction, and poetry reviews have appeared in numerous publications. She lives in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.