having read three novels in three days

Before sleep last night, I read Julia Cohen’s The History of a Lake Never Drowns (just out with Dancing Girl Press). My immediate thought, post-reading: absence avenged by modifiers. We get a sense of the accumulative strategy in the lines: “We collect everything that can be touched to the body/ & bottle everything that cannot.” To bottle: to be put into a bottle, into an object that is a bottle, that is a container; to bottle (up); to bottle (inside) as a defensive strategy against the recollection of what “can [not] be touched to the body.” For me, reading these poems, adjectives stage a resistance to absence; they compound and armor the nouns throughout. Prepositional phrases extend like arms from other nouns, a reaching out, a clotting of space. The “I” hesitates when it is the subject of its own sentence; modifiers push the “I” out and give and give (to the “I” and to readers). We end with “Pelts of my name” – the warming part, that which can be shed/said/violently taken (by a voice? by writing?). We are told “No refuge is permanent,” but then we begin to wonder, is this because the nature of where we seek refuge is itself (relatively) ephemeral ([in] “The human voice/ [in] Pelts of my name” – should we read connection into the final lines of the poem), or do we refuse refuge its permanence by leaving, by bartering the pelt of its name for another refuge, fearing the “truth” of the claim “No refuge is permanent.” (If “The History of a Lake Never Drowns” is this because something else happens to it or because it’s afforded a permanence?) Or: the ephemeral is a good thing we are allowed to rest inside – thus we can enter these poems, dwell there, and have permission to leave without creating another absence, with our own experience further modifying.

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