Alli Warren’s I Love It Though: A Resistance That Takes the Form of Longing

Alli Warren’s new book, I Love It Though (Nightboat Books, March 2017), is reviewed by Lauren Shufran at Entropy. Shufran remarks on a paradox familiar to those who reckon with notions of poetry community. “It’s as though the underlying inquiry I Love It Though softly proposes is: What does resistance look like for one who also possesses the (relatively) privileged option of non-resistance.” More:

Of course the book chooses resistance. In “A Yielding Hole For Light” and elsewhere, it is a resistance that arises first through form/s of attention to the immediate material world: the white bowl, the heat machine, the loons on the horizon. It is a resistance that arises not only from attending to these things, but from allowing the self to be destroyed by them. The poems never neglect the “soldiers spread[ing]” elsewhere, the burning embassies and the monuments falling into fires outside, the groups of boys being stopped-and-frisked, the “gentrified avenues & littered laneways,” the sounds of trains that recall us to how commerce never sleeps, the “endless / intergenerational chain / of patriarchal provision” in the courtroom, in the marketplace. That “All the evil things of the world will have full sway.” Indeed, these things are ineluctable; they regularly enter the world/s of the poems as they regularly enter our daily being/s; they destroy differently, I would say more conspicuously though that neglects every clandestine violence of the political state. To recognize that one can be destroyed through attention to mundane materiality is to de-mundanify the world. It is to disassemble the self in the face of the routine dismantling done to us by force, by social membership or not, by the unbearable facts of nation.

I Love It Though’s is also a resistance that takes the form of longing. The phrase “I want…” is practically the poems’ mantra, so much so that the book takes the shape/s of a series of imagined other worlds: “I want to rub along / the webbing I want nothing but / the cove’s yawning jaw”; “I want to open to remain coming lush adaptive ode I want / to arrange abreast along the marking underbrush and make refrain”; “I want to be absolved of regrets and relieved of nostalgia.” I linger on the word “courage”... 

Read on at Entropy.