Loads of Learned Lumber

Saturday, September 1, 2018

Nikki Wallschlaeger, _Crawlspace_

A BOOK OF unrhymed sonnets, sometimes a bit Shakespearean (wallop in the final couplet), sometimes double or triple or even sextuple (last one in the volume). For me, the book was somewhat reminiscent of Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets in its a wide tonal range; this page might be almost like a journal, that one an exploration of a memory, this other a surreal fantasy, that one tender, this one angry, this other funny.

Wallschläger is good at having one foot on the ground while also shooting through the stratosphere. For instance, #45:

             I get dizzy in burgy
grocery stores, the prattling is
Gargantuan Antarctica dialect,
do I feel grateful their husbands
are downtown working instead
of mildewing here with a loaded
handgun, they got yr handguns
you can buy them in the intestine
department [...]

We're in touch with the familiar here, in the aisles of a grocery store with the husbands downtown, but we've also got Rabelais at the South Pole, an intestine department, and the image of a firearm-carrying man growing fungus. Wallschlaeger's enjambment makes the most of these dramatic shifts of register, a bit like Coltrane, with his abstract sheets of sound leaping out of a Broadway show tune.

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