Rebecca Ariel Porte Reviews Ange Mlinko's Distant Mandate

Rebecca Ariel Porte reviews Ange Mlinko's Distant Mandate (Macmillan, 2017), for the recent issue of Chicago Review. "How confront the discontinuous nature of lived experience and the splendid sweep of its attachments, which comprehend mortality and affection, self-destruction and designer mirrors, bread and roses?" asks Porte. More:

...How account for the tragicomic lengths to which we’ll go to adjust our being to a world in which none of these things are entirely mutually exclusive?

One such means of adjustment might be to dwell in forms of poetry that traffic in this unruly polysemy, euphonious constraints that, like certain conventions of Gothic architecture, make heavy things appear light while not diminishing their mass by a single atom. Such a strategy might look less like coping and more like thriving, less like crawling and more like an arabesque. This is, perhaps, a roundabout way of hypothesizing about why Mlinko’s passion for accuracy—exactitude of diction, fidelity to a world that unforgivably loads its inhabitants with the burdens of love and death—results so often not in a realism of despair, but one of wit, irony, agility.

Consider “Cooked in Their Own Ink,” which invokes “Byblos—unreclaimed by the sea,” a Phoenician site in modern Lebanon, where one of the oldest alphabetic inscriptions known to archaeology has been uncovered. The poem does not ignore the successive waves of conflict that have left their mark on Byblos and environs (Mlinko lived, for a time, in Lebanon). Nor does it exile the possibility of flourishing in ongoing destruction: “orchards of pomegranate / and lemon flourish amid ruins” and “like the melting down of coins, / bells, the material persists.” The gift of the material lies in its transformative potential, the recuperation of fruit trees from spent soil, of metal from obsolete currency or clarions of celebration or alarm, though the poem is clear-eyed enough to know that transformation is not always an optimism. Those who have been “cooked in their own ink”—a poetic, if unkosher, way to be served up for a seaside dinner—are, as much as squids, the long succession of scholars, scribes, archivists, illuminators, book collectors, and poets—ink-users—who have added their own alphabetic traces to the palimpsest at Byblos. The result is a poem about the conditions for art-making as a necessary luxury in a world that often tries to enforce an impossible, generic rigidity on experience...

The full review is here.