Big bang poetry

To Light Out, Karen Weiser’s first collection of poetry, is an array of unexpected juxtapositions. It’s both static and music, big and small, solid and liquid. Perhaps she’s trying to define the murky spaces between, suggests David Kaufmann. In his review at Tablet Magazine, Kaufmann uses snippets of Weiser’s playful poems to fuel a meditation on mysticism, skepticism, and the cosmos in between:

A person sits next to a world of almost situations
making a living as a memoir
thoroughfares fill with drizzle scrambling
progressive strangers with their ding eyes
I am sure a fugue is near
in the almost-echo of park benches—
this is not the city of the blessed worker
Americana seduction like original face paint
reflected in a gridiron puddle

The lines veer off from each other after an initial point of contact—you can reconstruct how punctuation might connect them. There is even a kind of electrical tension between then words, especially when Weiser makes her nouns act as adjectives. You get the sense that the phrases “ding eyes” and “Americana seduction” are merely momentary hookups. Momentary, but not necessarily or completely arbitrary. Weiser’s disruptions serve a clear purpose. She is trying to get at something between the senses and between sense. She is trying to get at what she in one place calls “the ocean of more everything.”