Lisa Russ Spaar Reviews Second Books by Jennifer Chang & Susan Stewart

For her “Second Acts” column at the Los Angeles Review of Books this week, Lisa Russ Spaar looks at Susan Stewart's The Hive (University of Georgia Press, 2008) and Jennifer Chang's Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017). "Susan Stewart and Jennifer Chang seem like an obvious pairing; the two certainly share some scholarly and poetic DNA. Both are intrepid, lucid literary critics and poets of visceral intellection." More:

Stalking Chang’s poems is an awareness of never, of no, of nada — “Never is / a strange design, to name what can’t be / or won’t begin,” she writes in “Mount Pleasant” — and this sense of absence, this hole of aught, is the secret center of all lyric poetry. Chang confronts the poet’s essential quandary — how, and whether, to word the unwordable — again and again, perhaps most strikingly in “Dorothy Wordsworth,” which begins: “The daffodils can go fuck themselves. / I’m tired of their crowds, yellow rantings / about the spastic sun that shines and shines / and shines.” After rehearsing the “old joy” of “spring again,” Chang concludes her stunning poem with an unflinching expression of what it means to be a poet in the first place:

If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren’t you
meat? But I won’t be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

Both Chang and Stewart, then, foreground the machinations and motions of the lyric poem — site of sleight of hand, site of ritual, in which there is an economy of sacrifice — in verse of daring beauty, honesty, and depth...

 Read all about these second acts at LARB.