I’m hoping to have the time & inclination to mention why each of the previously mentioned books strikes me as notable & am starting with Sandra Simonds’ Warsaw Bikini.
Although I have supported & published her work at The Cultural Society (including a downloadable PDF mini-chapbook), I came relatively slowly to Simonds’ poems: their energy was difficult to resist, yet I found myself unsurely footed in their structures, which were much broader than I could grasp on a first or second reading. Once I got the hang of it, though, I was compelled by the long lines & quick, deep breaths that generate the poems’ contradictory nervous flow. An analogy might be running a length of chain-links through one’s hands, aware of each bump along the length of a secure whole. This whole extends best from poem to poem; that is, reading one of Simonds’ poems does not offer nearly as much meaning, rhythmic force, or thematic depth as reading several of them does. I am thus most moved by Warsaw Bikini’s extended & successful effort to determine glamour as a state of consciousness or being from which we sadly but consistently measure our shortcomings.
Warsaw Bikini relies on a lexicon that cross-fades between mainstream culture, sometimes-heavy makeup, variations on Freud’s Talking Cure, and a devotion to poetry as a medium of both understanding and inquiry. In its way it is campy, & like all effective camp it winks its way toward tragedy, both personal & political. It is not unusal in this unusal book to be confronted, in rapid succession, with parking lots, emotional trauma, fast food, literature, & class conflict. Most readers will recognize these places (my impulse is to call them ’spots’) and references handily, & frankly, it makes for fun & surprising reading. But Simonds’ skill is such that she employs these markers as the entertainments & distractions from which they’re derived. They become the objects, not the subjects of the poems, & the result is a highly effective & utterly moving poetry that one learns to read by reading further.
