Zoë Hitzig Reviews Danniel Schoonebeek's Well-Armed Trébuchet

At BOMB Magazine, Zoë Hitzig goes from Rahm Emanuel to Philip Mirowski by way of contextualizing Danniel Schoonebeek's sophomore poetry collection, Trébuchet. It "challenges our contemporary American brand of capitalism and demands that we confront our own role in perpetuating it," she writes. "Schoonebeek's vision is one in which we 'war' against ourselves and destroy our means of production thereafter, as Rome sowed salt in the fields after conquering Carthage to render the following harvests unyielding." More:

He communicates his vision in incendiary poems that range from curt lyrics evoking antiquity ("Archilochos," "Telémakos," "Chorus," "Trojan") to prose poems written in present-day legalese ("Poem with a Gun to Its Head"). The poems scour the page in formal novelty—four have gutters down the center, one is an erasure, one is a diagram, one is horizontally rendered, and the final poem, "Dark-Eyed Junco Was Her Name," takes place over 43 pages, many of which hold just a handful of words. Often, Schoonebeek grapples with contemporary politics head-on in poems such as "Glasnost," "Reaganomics," and "Neutrality." But these critiques also take place within the context of an abstract, universal "kingdom" about which the book tells a folktale. This kingdom perennially destroys itself, only to rebuild the elements of war and capital: "new monuments / new gasworks and watchtowers, / new barriers, new thrones, and new battlements."

After the provocative title poem, which serves as a prologue, the book begins with an almost-classical invocation in "Nachtmusik:" "If the nightcrawlers sing through the loam tonight will I join them." In that same opening poem, Schoonebeek's speaker collapses history, setting his stage, "I woke & was ancient / next gutshot / next slack // next saw // the tramps sleeping / in Bank of America." With these short lines he takes us from antiquity to the present in a surprising enjambment. In "C'est la guerre," a poem spoken in long syntactically fragmentary lines, Schoonebeek takes issue with the resigned wartime expression often used to explain away hardship. The speaker suggests that we can no longer resign to the most troubling features of daily life. He wants to be seen bearing artifacts of his civilization—he threatens to "come to your door come winter" holding "a bouquet of railroad ties plucked from the Union Pacific" wearing "father's crushed suit and his cufflinks." This unsettling series of threats culminates in the question "who will witness me if I'm one page in a long book of ways to say no with no ending." Trébuchet is not "a long book of ways to say no with no ending"—rather it is, as its eponymous weapon, an instrument of destruction.

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