Three New Chapbook Reviews at Entropy

Toby Altman writes for Entropy about new and forthcoming chapbooks, as part of a series called Transitory Poetics. On the deck today are three from New York/Chicago small press Projective Industries: Kate Schapira’s Someone is Here, Leora Fridman’s Obvious Metals, and Linda Russo’s picture everything closer visible. We're into these "thumbnails of an expansive publishing project." A glimpse into Fridman's work:

Fridman’s poems reappropriate the most basic formal and stylistic tools of historical poetry—the couplet, the tercet, the aphorism—in order to insist on their foundational uncertainity; their multiplicity: “We speak again. / We speak again,” writes Fridman in the chapbook’s opening poem “Tokyo Drift,” as if to announce the programmatic multiplicity of speaking in her poems. With their elisions, juxtapositions, and gaps in syntax, many of the poems in Obvious Metals feel like partially completed conversations. Indeed, most of the poems in the chapbook take their titles from poems by Carrie Lorig. Fridman doesn’t mention this until the last page of the chapbook, in the acknowledgments section. It’s the kind of acknowledgment that compels you to reread the poems you’ve just read with a retuned ear. These poems are partially located elsewhere. That ‘elsewhere’ is plural, impossible to specify. Sometimes they’re in conversation with Lorig’s poems (as in poems like “Poem for Carrie Lorig” which explicitly address her); sometimes, they converse with themselves. For example, the title of a poem in the first section of the chapbook, “What’s Fatty,” reappears mid-way through the second section, at the end of “I Write to Carrie in the Morning”:

I will all of this to pass me talk like the road rollicking up to sound like a good bird knows what’s fatty

By repeating Lorig’s line through her chapbook, Fridman blurs the boundaries between the three poems where it appears—and the two poets who use it. Moreover, she gradually dismantles the misogynistic discourse that the line quotes and critiques, unpolicing the policing of the body. In this sense, Fridman’s chapbook may be said to imagine collaboration as a feminist act, an act which multiplies the voice in order to make it an organ of critique.

Read it all at Entropy.