Mande Zecca Finds the 'Metalyric' in Work by Stephanie Young, Ariana Reines, and Julian Talamantez Brolaski

A nice triple-threat for you: Stephanie Young's Pet Sounds (Nightboat, 2019), Ariana Reines's A Sand Book (Tin House, 2019), and Julian Talamantez Brolaski's Of Mongrelitude (Wave, 2017) are all considered as part of the "metalyrical" turn, according to Public Books's Mande Zecca. The metalyrical might mean, in this case, "poetry that interrogates the conditions of its own expression." Moving on:

These poets straddle the line between performance and authenticity, deconstructing rather than fully abandoning the lyric self. Their poetry feels personal while at the same time treating personality and intimacy as animating fictions—objects of poetic inquiry rather than givens of the lyric. Contending that intimacy is conveyed through form as much as content, they investigate poetry’s I-you address and proximity to song in new and surprising ways.

Of the three books, Pet Sounds is perhaps the most explicit in its examination of intimacy. The first poem in the book—a short, lyrical poem called “Congenital”—helps frame the stakes of the book as a whole by highlighting how language enmeshes the personal with the structural. The refrain of “Congenital” (“I come to you”) recalls Bernadette Mayer’s “First turn to me.…” and helps situate the poem as, at first glance, an erotic love lyric.

But Young’s poem also takes its figurative language from Marx—“capital comes dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt”—as well as from various institutional cultures, including finance and academia. Its intimate I-you address is refracted into the platitudes of the corporatized university, its evocations of passion are shadowed by the threat of eviction, and its bodily fluids mimic the flows of global finance. By casting the love lyric through the prism of 21st-century capitalism, “Congenital” insists that even those matters that seem most private (sex, love, care) are structured by outside forces.

Find the rest of this essay at Public Books.