{"id":3686,"date":"2011-05-16T12:21:31","date_gmt":"2011-05-16T16:21:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/lanternreview.com\/blog\/?p=3686"},"modified":"2011-05-12T11:27:34","modified_gmt":"2011-05-12T15:27:34","slug":"review-esther-lees-spit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/2011\/05\/16\/review-esther-lees-spit\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Esther Lee’s SPIT"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a> Spit<\/a> by Esther Lee | Elixir Press 2010 | $16<\/em><\/p>\n

What is spit, taken as the title of Esther Lee\u2019s first book of poetry? It can be derogatory, can be DNA and genealogy, can be sustenance and suckling, can be used to\u00a0form or deform the sounds we make when speaking. The poems in this collection are preoccupied with the mouth, which functions as a site of stagnation just as much as change. The book begins, \u201cWhen asked if I believe in absolute truths, I cite the lie.\u201d And a few lines down: \u201cOur mouths were stretched to the floor as punishment . . .\u201d In another poem, the mouth is a \u201crusted hollow,\u201d an irreparably broken car muffler. Later, in \u201cThe Real World Is Like This,<\/span>\u201d the sound of a mother\u2019s \u201cbird-throat\u201d suggests flight, then suggests the clicking sounds of the speaker\u2019s tap shoes driving a rift between her and her sister and, she says, \u201cwhat my mouth can\u2019t afford.\u201d<\/p>\n

Astonishing for a first book, Lee\u2019s signature style is instantly recognizable by the accent she creates visually on the page. The front dedication to her family reads: \u201cI kiss one hundred time[ ].\u201d Generally brackets tell of absence, which can mean revision, loss, or a truncated excess\u2014and in these poems refer to text as much as to personal experience. In the dedication, it is a nod to her parents\u2019 accent. In the \u201cInterview with My [C]orean Father\u201d poems, the bracketed \u201cC\u201d reclaims and reshapes an ethnic label. It also points out how arbitrary are such naming practices, since Corean and Korean sound identical. In \u201cWe Are the Happiest Children in the World\u201d and \u201cIvan \/ Ivan,\u201d brackets proliferate lines to evoke at once caesura and transition, as we see in:<\/p>\n

I tell you I am here mingled [ ] with snow
\nyellow-white as the page [ ] I suckled from
\nmy grandmother\u2014strange mother\u2014and I [ ] grew<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

These brackets have a distinct flavor from backslashes, m-dashes, and ellipses; they are a ligature of grammatical pedantry (showing Lee in command of the language) and ungrammatical familiarity (an intuitive, poetic experimentation). They are a punctuation that Lee has made uniquely her own in these poems.<\/p>\n

Another trademark is Lee\u2019s blank missives, also the title of her first chapbook and interspersed throughout Spit<\/em>. The opening poem is titled, \u201cDear __________cate,\u201d and signed, \u201cYours, \/ __________cate.\u201d These symmetrical blanks suggest epistles sent\u00a0from one unfinished self to another, or between variable selves. They also invite the reader to participate in meaning-making. Some blanks require an obvious part of speech: __________est, __________phobic. Some suggest a theme or emotion: __________quito,\u00a0 __________pling. Others can be difficult to fill in, like __________eam, and resist the standard proportioning of suffixes. Part of Lee\u2019s play is appropriating the English language and making it her own.<\/p>\n

\u201cTongues for \u2018Typhoid Mary\u2019 \u201d unexpectedly thrusts Mary Mallon into a wordplay of difficult English sounds, including consonant clusters that might be mispronounced by an immigrant: \u201cfreshly fried \/ flying fish, shredded Swiss at sixish. Truly, rurally.\u201d Together with limerick-quick rhymes, Lee’s technique makes a fable out of Mary Mallon. Historically, she was the first known healthy typhoid-fever carrier, and the cognomen \u201cTyphoid Mary\u201d today conjures malignant ignorance and a refusal to cooperate with officials for the \u201cgreater good.\u201d Her story is also one of alienation and quarantine, all for the crime of inhabiting her own body. She even changed her name to Mary Brown, hoping to blend in. In Lee\u2019s poem, Mallon\u2019s immigrant background is subtle but present: \u201cEyeing her Irish wristwatch, she winced since \/ no selfish shellfish could ease her mood.\u201d The enjambment is telling.<\/p>\n

Lee\u2019s sly command of the language sometimes borders on evasion of plain statement; in other words, poetical occlusion. But behind the trumpet of her poems one can usually hear a gasp of breath, a human frailty and voice. And I wonder if her poetic vision is not unlike Mallarme’s, who wrote of the difficult poet: \u201che hesitates to divulge too brusquely things which do not yet exist; and thus, in his modesty, and to the mob’s amazement, he veils them over.\u201d These subdermal poems roil in family and experience, and get under your skin even when refusing a nominalist simplicity. They feel more than tell; they do more than mean. Take, for instance, the poet’s interviews with her father, which begin as a back-and-forth exchange, then fragment across the page until the conversation meets a gorgeous incoherence. In the third interview, the speaker asks, \u201cThen why stop playing soccer?\u201d and the father answers, \u201cI met you dressed as a bumblebee. My arms fit \/ around like a honeycomb.<\/em>\u201d To which the response is: \u201cThe leaking \/ fish market boxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

This first book of poems astounds the immigrant narrative. In Spit<\/em>, we learn that protest and testimony are insufficient lyrics of an older generation; yet, neither are these poems sounding the mechanical jazz of language poetry. Spit<\/em> is concentrated voice, kaleidoscopic narrative. Expect this poet to impact the present generation, to unveil the lies we tend to cite\u2014which no longer suffice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Spit by Esther Lee | Elixir Press 2010 | $16 What is spit, taken as the title of Esther Lee\u2019s first book of poetry? It can be derogatory, can be DNA and genealogy, can be sustenance and suckling, can be used to\u00a0form or deform the sounds we make when speaking. The poems in this collection […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[624,625],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/14"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3686"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3802,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3686\/revisions\/3802"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3686"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3686"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lanternreview.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3686"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}