Chelsey Minnis, _Baby, I Don't Care_

I'M RELUCTANT TO talk about a book's design before I mention anything else, but the design in this instance (by Quemadura, which I think is Jeff Clark) is conspicuous.

It's a sizable book by poetry collection standards--about 250 6" x 8" pages--but the length is in large part accounted for by white space. Thirty-nine poems, generally six to eight five-line stanzas long--given ordinary typography, we would have a more normal 90-100 page book, I'm guessing. But here no page has more than two stanzas (ten lines), the title of each poem gets its own page, and the volume's title alone gets eight pages.

So, why? My guess: the design fetishizes the poetry a bit by surrounding with such an expanse of whiteness, which ironically highlights the ways the book is campaigning against the fetishization of poetry. As the title suggests, the poetry seems to be making an effort not to be taken seriously, even while the book's design suggests that one one to take the contents very seriously indeed.

I do not mean to suggest that Minnis is not a serious poet--only that here, as in Poemland, she seems to be throwing a snowball at poetry's silk hat, at various notions of decorum and dignity, at anything that seems over-earnest or po-faced or pompous about the enterprise.

The poems in Baby, I Don't Care seem all cut from the same cloth, not only in form (the five-line stanzas) but in tone and technique, a little bit as if Instagram poetry (with its colloquial language about the ups and down of amatory relationships) had been run through an Ashbery-izer (apparent non sequiturs that turn out to make all too much sense, surprising cultural reference points, acute self-awareness). Then imagine the whole thing read in a Marilyn Monroe voice.

Let's fall in love,
just the three of us.
Let's be objectionable and immoral and utterly no good.
Should we lie down right here and fight about it?
Now bring me  those dance instructions. ("Fun and Games")

"Do I mean things or not?" Minnis asks in "Breakdown." I would say no, she does not, unless she does, and that she keeps one guessing is what keeps one reading. The delights seem a little fewer and farther between than in Poemland, but that may just be an effect of the white space.