Brown Profs, New (heavy.) Books

C.D. Wright has a new book out-- Rising, Falling, Hovering-- and it's very good.

The book consists of a long title piece (which came out in the Chicago Review a couple years ago) and a handful of other shorter poems. The whole thing meanders in the way that her books do-- interspersing the personal (bits of dialogue, anecdote, description) and various mutations of public language (hijacked "press-speak," advertising, dates and numbers). It's a world of shock and despair at continued war, in all its forms...as well as the shards of what it means to be a human found here.


Crying helps
Crying doesn't help

One wants to make oneself smaller than the mouse
under the icebox One wants to dry into invisible ink

One has a sense of something out there that needs saving
       and one ought to attach the buckle
to a heavy-gauge wire and pull him through



Wright's work is the best kind of political poetry: an open wound; work that pries open, rather than attempting to shut.

***

John Edgar Wideman, whose "fact & fiction" class I took at Brown, has a new book out, too. Fanon (Houghton-Mifflin, 2008) is a strange cobbling of, well, fact and fiction-- the culmination of a project on Fanon that Wideman was never able to fully realize. It's a meditation on disappointment-- with a society still failing to address race, and life, in meaningful ways; with one's own self and work-- that eats itself from the inside out, often within a single sentence. I took his class while he was working on this project, and just after I had read, and been absolutely destroyed by, The Wretched of the Earth (during my time off from school).

Wideman begins the book with a quote of Fanon's:

"The imaginary life cannot be isolated from real life, the concrete and the objective world constantly feed, permit, legitimate and found the imaginary. The imaginary consciousness is obviously unreal, but it feeds on the concrete world. The imagination and the imaginary are possible only to the extent that the real world belongs to us."

What makes this book so desperate, to me, is that the authoritative, hopeful note struck by Fanon is such a counterpoint to what follows. Wideman seems to be saying: this is a failed work of fiction insofar as it is a failed work of life. The world doesn't belong to us, yet.

***

under that big dry socket of god
the camera mounted to capture
ordinary traffic violations
fixes instead on your final face
a single frame of unadulterated
urgency is what you see, urgency it is