The Separatrix Gives Us Our Fragments: Reviewing MxT by Sina Queyras

"If anyone can write a Cindy Sherman still, Sina Queyras can," writes Michaela Mullin at Nomadic Sojourns, of Queyras's newest book, MxT (or Memory x Time) (Coach House Books 2014). Queyras, acclaimed poet and critic and very much known for her editorial hand at the ever-more-central Lemon Hound, has also made something of a "91-page masterpiece," if you will. Here, "the calculations and diagrammatic sorting—of breath and feeling and the Milky Way—are like small prayers for knowing, and small understandings of not-knowings." More:

Her poetics is an unpinning of memory + time, and that is a long and beautiful and seemingly simple problem. But when X factors in, to multiply, to give answer to that which can then always be divided, the nature of whole numbers falls apart, and we have fractions of things, of life, we have the separatrix which gives us our fragments, but keeps them close, at our heels:

“… come lichen, come moss, come caper, come cougar with your soft portals, come doe with your thin springs, come childhoods with your fist of leashes, come, my modernist loves, and latch a past in a Jello-o mould, float my heart in a rose bowl, my sincerity in a flan, I would be ornamental for you, I would spread, I would, like the hook of barbed wire, my other half useless without the knot, and coil my lamp for you.” (45)

They are beckoned; they follow. The peregrine parts follow the host, magnetized to us like memories to objects, to songs, to smell. And the water of which we are made finds a way to escape, in a victory over what we are “made of,” to become us: “The body is fluid: I am leaking. / I know longer care who sees me leak.”

This small book leaks grief in the most musical way: “The past is knowable, or so she likes to think, but no, no, she knows it isn’t so, the path with its spiral of revelations. She elbows, she knees locked, tongue parted, spit, not letting anything inside or out, she a sack of sadness, a lost limb in search of a body” (58). And then later, when life has leaked out to empty, to ground, to zero, she shapes memories in the form of the dead: “My loved ones like a dandelion to the wind. I have everything to live for and nowhere to be…The dead know this. They are constantly tying a thread around your ankle. They attach bells to your hair.” (58)

You can find an excerpt from MxT here; and enjoy the full review, despite its author's feeling that the piece is "unhelpful." It's not!