Hiya alliyah! Here is Lim with your review!
First Impressions
The first thing that strikes me about this poem is that it’s very complex. At times the speaker seems to self-contradict, but then returns a more nuanced interpretation that is not so contradictory on a second or third read. (so yes, these aren’t first-read impressions I’m sorry xD) I can say that one of my first-read thoughts was that the speaker’s tone seems a little frustrated, which I think I felt because of how the idea of the destination never being reachable was repeated, such as in the title (“may as well be infinite”) and the three lines in C. that make it seem like nothing here is being done “easily”. The poem makes me think of someone who’s trapped, with images like
“engraved in your bones”, and also isolated, given that the people mentioned in the poem are all far away, like the mother, 80% of America and the great-grandfather’s family.
Overall Narrative[b]
From what I gather, the poem seems to describe the speaker’s relationship to a ‘home’. I don’t think they are literally travelling in this piece, because of the contradictions and paradoxes employed like:
As well as “wildly far and impossibly close”, which seems purposeful.
Instead, it seems that the speaker is describing an account of physical places that might lead them to a physical ‘home’ but at the same time showing that their attitude towards those places makes them distant from home, if that makes sense. For example, “trying to cross these plains” suggests the speaker is in movement metaphorically/attitudinally, as it is followed up with figurative expressions like “moon caught burning in my throat”. Whereas the more literal part of that stanza seems to represent echoes of the physical/cultural place, employing the expression “where i'm from we don’t complain about the weather” and it also suggests that they’re already in the farm land described in the second-to-last stanza, even though this one is still located in the Chasm. (also noticed the transition from “I” to “we”.)
[b]Voice
Something that I appreciate about the poem is how you play with the speaker’s voice. At times it feels purposefully inconsistent to highlight the contradictory sides of the speaker: at home in the physical/cultural world, but not at home on some individual/ mental level. There is a contrast for example between these two:
thinking the sky looks like rain, thinking the sand feels tide-chased . . .
The imagery again is more figurative and it also blends what we usually consider to be separate aspects of nature together (sky/water and sand/sea). The voice here is more out-of-this-world and more like the speaker is saying thoughts in their own head.
i am from a river-city, a transit oasis, a curved wrist – hand-tilling the earth . . . brow
Whereas here the sensory descriptions increase as though this line is spoken from the physical level again, with images like “curved wrist” and “brush the sweat across your brow”. This voice seems more ‘social’ and grounded in the world.
I like that this contrast seems to be repeated across all sections of the ‘map’ – the voice at first seeming contemplative and spinning far away and then suddenly being grounded again. It’s an interesting thing to discover on a careful read, and it helps support the narrative of the speaker having contrary sides to themself.
Flow and Continuity
There were a couple of lines that remain a bit hard for me to process, so I thought I’d discuss them here.
In B. Steps – I felt like the switch from “you remember again to listen” to “you have 3 missed calls from your mother” was a bit odd. On one level, it’s abrupt and I think to good effect since I’m thinking missed calls are usually sudden realisations. On another level, I usually think of ‘seeing’ that I have a missed call, and not so much listening for it because well, it’s been missed. I could be misinterpreting something here though!
In E.
and surely the sun couldn’t become a cup of concave soil where light grows from the earth?
I couldn’t really understand how this related to the rest of the stanza, which seems to be about a farm divided a long time ago, and the speaker’s feeling of being cut off from something. The mix of sun/earth metaphors here is a bit hard to fit into that. The line also runs on for what feels like a long time, which makes it a little overwhelming for me.
I also thought the structure of “i don’t get lost . . . easily” felt a bit unsmooth? That might have been intentional, but the repeated “easily” sets it up to be a very symmetrical set of phrases, but the symmetry is interrupted by the second one being joined by an “or” and the last suddenly switching back to “I don’t”.
Imagery
As always I enjoy how you develop strands of imagery in your poetry! The whole poem seems to be set in a particular place: an agricultural/wilderness region that is occasionally juxtaposed with a distant “river-city”. I like the different views given on ‘water’, from the ocean to rain and the river. I thought that created a sense of breadth to them poem’s world and added opportunities to develop the speaker’s complex feelings, such as in “the river tied around my lungs” vs “we need the rain”.
Overall
I thought this was a solid poem overall that explores some of your key themes like home, distance, the past, and maybe paradoxes/opposites/ironies as well. The piece leaves me with a conflicted feeling and a sense of things still left unresolved.
Hope some of this helps and feel free to ask for more feedback!
-Lim
).
Points: 41664
Reviews: 542
Donate