Richard Loranger, author of multiple books including “Unit of Agency” available here at Collapse Press, wrote a thoughtful piece on “Find Me in the Iris” (Collapse Press) this month. Please visit www.richardloranger.com when you can and check back often. Richard comments on all kinds of topics over there, from books he is reading, books he has written, art, and more. Check out Non-Norm Part 1 and hear about Richard and others in Maintenant. His posts makes us want to buy even more books!
From Richard Loranger, poet:
Find Me in the Iris, E. Lynn Alexander (Collapse Press, Alameda, CA), 2022
Bottles. Corked. And Closed.
Women. Mothers.
Suspended
In their Ages
Selves, the slurry sediment
Their labels going brown.
E. Lynn Alexander’s work performs an interesting dichotomy by pushing you almost clinically away from its topic while stabbing you in the heart. The topic, as parsed above: women, enacted alternately as specimens in jars and as “Honey. Wheat. And Figs.” Alexander takes on the essential and difficult task of examining the lives and strife of women past, including her mother’s and, we gather, her own. In doing so, she and the work strive to understand the past in a way tangible enough to be used as a springboard to a future undetermined and a place not yet seen. We are spurred on by the line repeated throughout, “What will the grief of me teach you?” As the title suggests, Find Me in the Iris is in part a quest—to break through grief, to let the dead rest, to break out of precedent, to let the honey be the honey.
There’s a lot going on here in compelling language that wavers between rant and chant, but one of the things that struck me most was the book’s “form”. Posed as a series of poems that are a series of poems as well as an unbroken flow, beginning and ending with pages of text untitled and unannounced, this book with no page numbers comes across at times as one unbroken page or a page yearning to be pieced back together. This heightens the effect of forward motion but without the cultural milestones to let us know how far we’ve gone, and we can only hope that we are heading in the right direction. We plunge toward a tentative future on a quest where in the end “We step out from the shadows / In found forms” almost like a call from Adrienne Rich echoing fifty years later, an echo that is a new song carried on and strengthened by echoes, still fervent, still needed, still breaking through walls into open air.
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