Staff Picks: Mermaids, Wrestlers, and Gawkers
I’ve had Evie Shockley’s latest book, , on my to-be-read pile since last fall and was finally spurred by her Pulitzer nomination to pull it out of the stack. I don’t know that I’ve encountered a poet for whom language is so mutable, a poet so adept at dismantling and reconfiguring it before the reader’s eyes. In the opening poem, she writes, “do i have the rite to write the body ? the right body to remain silent ? , to have the remains , my main man, handy man, unhand me, uncuff me, so i can speak in my sign(nifying) language :: signs, wonders, miracles, temptations.” Each word is a vessel to be drained of meaning and then quickly refilled with fresh essence—emphatically, rhythmically, and sometimes onomatopoeically: “war can’t amass a brass tack. war’s / all bad acts and lack, scandal // and graft. watch flags clash and tanks // attack camps. arms crack—rat-a- /oncewere underwear : where / were the worst brutalities then?: buried under / in the most vulnerable organs and held / down by that busy muscle the tongue :: in / silence becomes : a word / like that runs into … thinkable : unthinkable.” Form is dictated by what the poem has to say and how Shockley chooses to say it. The poem “what’s not to liken,” for instance, is written as a multiple-choice questionnaire about the pool-party incident in McKinney, Texas, in June 2015, each question offering twinned options. Each choice is at once true and inaccurate, a remarkably sly blend of metaphor, fact, and anger. Was the girl shackled like “(a) a criminal” or “(b) a runaway slave”? In this case, was there a difference?
