Moody doesn’t stop at making the strange approachable; he flips that notion on its side and makes the everyday strange. In “Hum of the Fridge like Thought,” it is asserted that “when I open the fridge / in the middle of the night, I can hear / you thinking behind me” (7). The moments of understanding for this speaker rest in how the commonplace is perceived, the thinking we can hear. From the title poem, “Climate Reply”: “Ground warm with flesh, ears as if to watch” (3). Flesh merges with the world as sight is rendered useless; what’s left must be heard. The image of such a convergence, flesh and earth, grounds the imaginative and theoretical notion of ears watching. And that is what separates this chapbook from the many others that are pressed each year. Trey Moody strikes quick and deep with images and ideas that haunt long after.

Thematically the book is connected by Moody’s concern of the natural, though not exclusively for the natural—rather, the book travels the interplay between types of natural, which is to say the environment and humanity, or the human environment. Humanity claims levels of nature, be it naturalness in genetics, the nature of ourselves and who we are, or the Nature that exists outside our constructed worlds, as in the wilderness remaining undeveloped. Both situate a problem of knowledge. What can we predict and control about either? In “The Listener, The Land” Moody uses the rhythm of images to bring in this idea. A narrative of camping, of being in nature, rests underneath this poem. But the images suggest a taming. A “plastic bear” with “plastic claws” subdues what is formerly wild. It is the resultant image when you think you have everything under control. Reading these poems, one becomes aware that the speaker isn’t under control and has a sense that the world is not under control, either. The poem concludes: “this racket gets out of hand, and / in the quiet room I’ll stitch / your fabric name to the tops of trees” (2). Much like Wallace Stevens’ “Anecdote of the Jar,” this closing image places the human choice onto nature. There is a need to organize nature, but un-order belongs as much to humanity as to the wild itself. If there is a quiet room, it is one that the speaker is building.

This book differentiates itself from “nature poetry” with its interest in nature’s impact on the human. But using “impact” doesn’t give the full sense of what Moody creates in this book. The dialectic in these poems is one of influence. While the body is compared to a tree in “This Forest isn’t a Room,” in the poem “Birdsong” the human mind is numbed and memory becomes a “silent cloud of ash.” The natural world persists in providing possible guidance. The possibilities are what drive the dialectic between natural and unnatural. This happens in the series of connected poems “Dear Ghosts.” These poems lace domestic scenes with the fears lurking in the dark, which often become what is outside. In “Dear Ghosts” number 6, “Like Dust around the Light Fixture,” we get the space of these philosophical grounds. “So the morning came. The light bulb / didn’t matter. I unscrewed it, / something as warm as flesh, and put it in my pocket. / So you see, the days / were manageable. That is, the days / were when I missed you the most” (15). In order to see, we need light. That is how eyes work. But where does light come from? This poem asks that we turn off the lights when we can and take the flesh for what it is. Resolution of the dialectic is the noticing of the dialectic; really it’s about each other as much as where we are together.

These poems pull our eyes out of their sockets and it feels good.

For those who do not agree, it’s easy to insist on a divorce-agreement-style cultural polarity: E! and reality TV and bubblegum-pop music can go live with rich executive dad; PBS and NPR and Nick Drake will stay at mom’s plus take on her shifts at the food co-op when needed so she can successfully finish her masters degree in social activism. It’s easy to let the crossovers that remind us we once lived in the same house (the English-version Steig Larsson movie, the Kanye West/Bon Iver collaboration, Jason Wu for Target clothing) be our only form of conversation with one another, and ignore the rest. To ensure all visitations are still supervised by commerce, our governing form of identity, for what we buy and like is given context by what we do not buy and like. David Sedaris is not Larry the Cable Guy. Taylor Swift is not Willie Nelson. And Downton Abbey is not Keeping Up with the Kardashians.

And yet. Things are also not that divided nor pure. Monsanto’s GE crops have crossbred with organic counterparts miles away, lo, for they are under the same sky and subject to the same pollinating winds, as are our cultural and artistic hierarchies: Angelina Jolie is a Louis Vuitton spokesmodel, a UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador, and her kids love Cheetos. Colson Whitehead writeth of zombies. One can visibly see the Philip Glass/Justin Bieber radio single and Happy Meal conductor baton/vibrating toothbrush toy on the smog-filled technicolor horizon.

In other words—and this is the fundamental truth that reality TV depends upon (and simultaneously depends upon denying)—no one is that special (except celebrities). We’re all pretty much the same on most of the levels that matter. Like a good cult leader, reality TV convinces viewers that it is the key to transformation and a higher realm. You are just like the people on this show, it says. Except for not being famous and rich. You laugh and cry and get in fights with your mom. But if you laughed and cried and got into fights with your mom on a reality TV show, you would be famous and rich.

Durbin’s text masterfully troubles these siren-song waters, engaging the allure and the artificiality of the celebrity women depicted. A quatrain of female personae, the chapbook has four sections, the first of which, “The Hills,” opens to a color picture of Lauren Conrad playing Lauren Conrad on The Hills. It’s a still from a computer screen, a clip excerpted in what appears to be a YouTube video, and a small reflection from real life, sunlight pouring through vertical blinds, appears in the left-hand corner of the photo. Lauren is crying, a single tear drawing mascara down her cheek in a cinematic way that one can look at and say definitively, “that moment was created for film.”

Durbin’s narrator begins the chapter describing a scene from The Hills in a befitting prose-poem style, blocks of uniform text that are not broken into paragraphs. This effect radically minimizes the impact of the dialogue between the characters: the quotes are part of a uniform mass, another detail, another prop like the “necklace with large gold balls” and “garment rack of designer dresses” that the narrator points out. We see Lauren and Whitney as talking and stylized mannequins. The narrator describes only their exterior and words, the things a camera can see and hear, and like a camera, does so without analysis, for the details being given to the reader—what is being included (looks, material items, status symbols) and what is being left out (critical thought, emotion, deeper meaning)—instead say it all. The women are characterized by their bodies and what they’re wearing. What’s important about Heidi is that “Her legs are tan and she has a French manicure”.

The numbered sections of this chapter correspond to the show’s commercial breaks, and we enter each one in true linear form: readers are told what song is playing when the action starts again, what shots establish the setting. The choices Durbin makes in relaying information highlight the scene being constructed on The Hills in a way the show does not: the narrator spends several lines talking about the Guess by Marciano billboard, the woman on the billboard (whose description is fittingly close to the women on the show), the backdrop of the billboard (whose setting is fittingly close to ocean-side California where The Hills is filmed). Since this is text and not a flash on the screen, the comparison is allowed to linger: we see the ways that these actresses are selling things and how photographers/camera men are instructing them, the proximity between the show and its commercial break.

Next we move to another chapter bearing the same title as the show it concerns, Dynasty. Here the text comes after seven color still-shots of character Alexis throwing a vase at Krystle. Contexualizing The Hills’s reality TV by juxtaposing it with what it supposedly isn’t (a scripted soap opera) allows the parallels to show: again, we have rich women in designer clothing fighting with one another. As with the billboard in The Hills, here the narrator zeroes in on a detail that adds poignancy: “On the wall is a gilded portrait. It shows two ladies in bustled green velvet dresses carrying parasols” (23). Just like The Hills, we have scenes of wealthy women doing what they’ve been taught to do: dress nicely and compete fiercely. The text’s details also illustrate the ways advertising is targeted to audience; she points out the “flat ass” and “granny flats” on the actresses (23), the “yellow” teeth that were acceptable to middle-aged female viewers in the 1980s but wouldn’t fly with ZOOM-whitening Pilates-crazed stiletto youth of The Hills.

Setting up these two shows in dialogue, Durbin engages the comparison between Joan Collins and Lauren Conrad. I think about the requirements of an idealized mainstream female TV character in the early 1980s (white, rich, thin, beautiful, fights with other women) and apply it to MTV’s LC: she’s all of the above, but is even younger, even thinner. More scantily clad and much tamer, further shaved of emotional nuance. Reading Durbin’s “The Hills” chapter, one finds oneself quickly skimming over the characters’ empty dialogue lines. What they’re saying doesn’t matter; it isn’t supposed to. The gossip is there to distract viewers from realizing what they’re really getting hooked on is the backdrop. Lauren and Whitney need to stay empty ciphers that young girls can imagine themselves filling, stepping into shoes and handbags that cost more than the operating budget lines of some of the Red Cross’s more vital activities. Going to work at Vogue or Epic Records and texting your friends, eating nondescript green leaves at fancy restaurants. I’m allured too: it all looks beautiful. Even (perhaps especially) when she’s crying, Lauren looks very beautiful. Her pain will be gone by commercial break. And have you seen her car?

The third chapter, “Lindsay Lohan Arrives At Court,” describes the narrative behind her court appearance amidst a description and photo montage of Lohan, then goes into “UPDATE” mode, giving readers seven obsessive updates on Lohan’s court appearance between the hours of 1:12 to 3:08 PT. Three of the seven include descriptions of her fashion. There is only one description of her emotional state, a quotation that she “looks stressed,” looks being the operative word—this is what the camera and the viewers can capture, guess at. We get a colorful still from Entertainment Tonight HD, an exclusive, depicting not the courtroom but Lindsay at the place of the alleged crime—a necklace theft.

There is also a “Breaking News” excerpt featuring Lohan’s posted statement. She talks about a time that she was on the phone with her sister and “heard my voice which was odd”; her sister was watching a movie, and in the movie a character was watching a movie with Lohan acting in it. Here again, we return to questions of representation and authenticity, and also the ways that women are set up to compete. My mind immediately remembers that the dress Lindsay wore to this court appearance, “her white dress” as the text calls it, sold out the same day she appeared in TV on it. I also have to think about how she wore white for a reason, and wonder. Would it have still sold out if it were another color? Would Lohan have gotten to leave on bail if she had worn red?

The last section is called “Anna Nicole Show.” The Anna Nicole Show was a reality TV sitcom that did in fact appear on E!, but that’s not what this chapter concerns. Instead we’re given a description of a video that was shown in a courtroom by prosecutors hoping to convince the jury that Anna’s partner at the time of her death, Howard K. Stern, “conspired to keep Anna Nicole Smith in a drug stupor”. There are four voices in the video: Howard, Anna, a 7 year-old-girl, and a mechanical baby. In this final section, Durbin separates out the lines of each person, removing them from conversational context. We get all of Howard’s lines, then all of the girl’s lines, then all of Anna’s, then all of the mechanical baby’s. Like separating a vocal track from its instrumentation, the essence of each one is distilled, and we see an exploitative Howard directing, a confused Anna embarrassing herself (she confuses her pregnancy for gas and the doll for the baby she’s pregnant with), and the seven-year-old child growing scared, all while the mechanical baby cries. In court, Stern claimed Anna was acting; the CNN article Durbin excerpts for the chapter’s introduction later asks, “Real or pretend?” and also wonders if Smith knew Stern’s seeming intentions to profit from the video.

This video seems lascivious to the extreme: a man directing a clearly impaired and drugged woman to make a fool of herself on camera so he’ll have profitable footage. But Durbin’s set-up in this chapbook—these four videos laid together in proximity, and their differences—also allows the similarities to come through. How Lauren and her friends often get drunk on The Hills (Wikiquote cites Lauren as saying to Whitney, “Tell me if you think he’s cute ‘cause I’m drunk” in Season 3, Episode 1). How these young women starring in The Hills aren’t the ones editing the footage or constructing the story. How none of these women are. How what’s sold as relevant is what they’re wearing, what they look like. How Lindsay Lohan and Nicole Smith became a celebrity and then an addict, and the whole world watched. How their behavior, their roles, their lives on or off drugs, was all used as entertainment.

Fittingly, the chapbook’s dedication is to Josie Stevens (wife of guitarist Steve Stevens), who is on the E! reality show Married to Rock—Josie also supplies the chapbook’s sole blurb:

“I think it’s really cool that you write books about pop culture. I read your chapters on Lindsay Lohan & Anna Nicole Smith—love them both.”

The ambiguous pronoun “them” makes it unclear if Josie is saying she loved the chapters or loves Lohan and Smith (probably both). But this incertitude makes for a fun surface parallel: here is a blurb that, in one interpretation, compliments not the text itself but simply the celebrities the text engages. Here is yet another example of Durbin flexing her directorial composition skills; like any episodic TV show on its best behavior, the text comes full-circle, the contrived end intentionally referencing the contrived beginning to give audiences a false sense of journey: we’ve come so far that we ended up right back where we began. But in this book, the journey is real. We move through the socially prized well-bathed young women on The Hills to competitive female rage to trouble with the law to death by overdose. If it seems like these events are connected—if it seems like there’s a link and a path between these tales, it’s because there is, and Durbin draws out these common threads of excess between representation and destruction. Much has been written about the superficiality of reality TV, but not enough is out there about its complexity. Durbin’s book is a welcome reminder of just how bottomless, nuanced, and entrenched all the elements of reality TV are in society; how we cannot ignore or escape them because they’re pervasive to the extreme. But in the words of Lauren Conrad, “It looks good though.”

Long’s Still Life unfolds into one long elegiac museum of poetic, literary, historic, cultural, iconic, and musical significance and the surprise comes with his elegant treatment of subject matter. In “Still Life with Kafka Checking His Watch, Missing His Train,” the speaker situates us, as well as Kafka, in the everyday, in the instance, where

I wanted to start with an image of the sun
As you might have seen it, muted

By a thin sheet of ice on the windows,
The lovers inside spooning each other

On this cold morning, murmuring the harmonies
Inside solitude and honeysuckle and crepuscular

As you stroll down Altstadter Ring,
Past me waiting for the 7:40 train…

Probably as telling as any line in the book is in this poem, where the speaker identifies that “and when you pass by/I look through you, though I can’t entirely.” That seems to be the greater task in all of Long’s portraits. He treats his subjects carefully, allowing them their autonomy, their candid willingness to be witnessed as fallible and human.

Moreover, one of the most heartfelt and humble admissions that could be applied throughout the collection, comes in “Still Life with Lenny Bruce in Jail,” where because “This whole generation’s strung out,” (meaning, both Bruce’s as well as our own), the speaker watches the late Bruce inject heroin in his arm because “you don’t care, so I won’t too/As the cop down the hall watches me watch/You shoot up.” Such a line is important, not for the depiction of someone famous and controversial chasing the dragon, but because it illustrates that Long’s speaker is capable of being witnessed—just as we witness Bruce through his eyes, he is, and so are we, witnessed elsewhere. Just as with Long’s Kafka, we look at the subjects of Long’s still lives-in-motion, but we cannot see through him because he undercuts his speaker’s omniscience habitually, opting for the human, the tragically fucked up, and the carelessness-prone over the invisibly perfect.

The greatest chord of Still Life is the nature of who Long decides to write about here—to give motion and rightful admiration to individuals misunderstood, repressed, tortured, beaten, assassinated, self-destructed, and altogether beautiful. Malcolm X, Frederick Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln join the ranks of Paul Celan, Kafka, Hendrix, and Vallejo. This, undoubtedly, sings true of Long’s romanticism, but Long’s treatment of his subject matter is far from the romantic ideal. Like Long’s speaker, his portraits are fractured, broken, and imperfect. One merely recalls the trees in his “Still Life with Birch Trees in Minsk and a Portrait of Pushkin” that are beaten by the wind “into right angles” and may reside as emblematic for Pushkin as well as many others in the supporting cast of Long’s collection.

Doubly beautiful is how Long braids the personal narrative with the historical—or, rather, shared narratives of his subject matter in the hopes of re-authenticating them, while failing to elucidate the mysteries shrouding his own life. When looking at a poem, such as “Still Life with the Atlantic Ocean and Nina Simone as Soundtrack,” one wonders how we get from the observation, “Her grief was so violent she shook,” to an affirmation expressed so strikingly in the poet’s wonderful language:

All you need to do is believe

That, in this moment,
Stillness is the illusion that goes on and on,

That the Atlantic’s grief and Simone’s grief
Are parts of the same illusion that always fall

Into the design of a wave that refuses to break.

For our benefit, Long’s speaker does not rest on this illuminating mesh of wave with the tonal pangs of grief. It is a kind of braiding of narratives—shared, personal, actual, or invented—that weaves the self into the examination of the other:

Some illusion, like this salt air

That holds your parents now, long before they disappeared,

As far back as any beginning goes, further than 1972,
When a climax became your name;

The night your parents, after a bottle Pinot Noir
And a little Nina Simone on vinyl,

Did their best to destroy time
And ended up with you,

You beginning somewhere,
say Atlantic City,

With an ocean view and ocean sounds,
ocean rhythms,

All that motion fluid, explosive, distinct,
Never slow enough.

In this example, the speaker likens his own conception as a mere result of his parents “wasting time,” yet, that is the ethos of this collection throughout: the happy accident, the beautiful drunken dance of a couple in love and honeymooning, or vacationing, in Atlantic City. The final couplet of this example, moreover, speaks to the grandest paradox throughout Still Life—nothing is still, even in death, on the page, or in history. Time is merely an impurity to a grander vision, a crack in the already imperfect lens that we share.

A thing is in itself—
to name is to bring death to
—eulogy enough.

In her lecture, “Portraits and Repetition,” Gertrude Stein explained her process of writing portraits as

knowing that each one is themselves inside them and something about them perhaps everything about them will tell some one all about them that thing….I was making a continuous succession of the statement of what that person was until I had not many things but one thing.

The eulogy of The Madeleine Poems creates the singular body of the unnameable central figure of a Madeleine. The reality of the name is the cosmos of particulars that gives rise to their simultaneous erasure. It is the reader’s movement through the book that commands the resurrection and internment of image, body, and experience, which eventually leaves only the white space of the page: both beyond name and infinitely accepting of the opportunity to be named.

Such a book is less written than it is composed, creating centers for the music of Legault’s lines, which turn the mundane into a new phonics of meaning. The poems stutter to their rhymes and echo their own language constantly. They justify a new landscape: that is, both adjust and prove. There is a fresh quality to every word anchored on the line, and these moorings cast nets of meaning throughout the poems, stretching around the book like a skin that fits airtight and appears beautifully strange, as in “Madeline as Crusoe:”

and the connection is
what it was all along—

a new sense to us

of an old thing, a new
thing of an old thing made

anew—

The velar “-ing” sounds in combination with the resonating dipthongs of “new” “to” and “anew” envelop the initial multisyllabic “connection” and create the “new sense” of these lines, a quality derived more from musical quality than from sense. The important thing about Legault’s poems is that this guiding principle of his composition does not favor either music or sense-making but instead resonates in an indefinite space, a space that the reader is always arriving at and departing from. In “Madeleine as the Balloon and Size from Here,” Legault writes: “Everything quickly became penultimate—the feeling, not the act of some yet-to-be-had-arrival.” And that is exactly what the book produces: a feeling.

So, as the reader experiences the voyage, the book itself moves. There is never a certain direction, but it is apparent that the movement is both away from, and towards a language. Away from text, as the book recedes into the horizons of the page. The poems become sparser and more fragmented, eventually dwindling to only the sparkle of an asterisk on the final page. This movement towards silence is an approach to the world that is born from vision and a hesitancy to give name to. In the absence of language, the reader gains a tendency to understand what the last “languaged” section of the book explains: that “there is indeed // the inexpressible.”

The book begins, like any voyage, with departure:

Madeleine

Open The Book of Take and leave
open the book of your arrival.

          Call me the Madonna of chosen things.
     Know I am righteous and moth-like.

Wash me or tear me; knead me in lye;
know that I will outlast you.

     That it was hot,
the houses burned down;
     the way of fire even in spring then.

                         Woodsnail, breathe for me,
     or beware your life
     which I will take and shudder just to hold it.

Everyone was rich.
     We hunted wild animals.
The worst was when they looked at you.

The act of arriving in these poems is continuously left open, as indicated in the brilliant first linebreak of the poem above. Each line arrives at the boundaries of objects, here the moth-like “me” that is never named, and the hunt for the wild animals that is never resolved or explained. The poems traverse the fringes of understanding, and transcend the need to be understood in their own conviction, as the narrator of the shudders just to be as alive as the woodsnail. In this edge-skirting, the objects of the poems begin to separate from their assumed meanings, and, as in “Forest Gospel,” each becomes “a private thing.” The intricately woven patterns of the book are labyrinthine on account of this constant acknowledgement of the object-as-seen and the simultaneous and compound understanding (or revelation) of the object-as-is. The poems are both keys and questions. Who is speaking? Who are we and us? Is Madeleine a sui generis entity that haunts the text, acting as erasure of signified meaning? Or is Madeleine the larynx of the reader-as-poet, heaping meaning and assumption, implication and understanding onto each line of each poem, a journey out of all the centers in every direction?

The scatter-effect of such a compositional strategy produces a book that is unintelligible in the way that the most private and pleasurable experiences exist in memory outside of both language and time. The private meaning made via the text is transformational as an act of the reader’s powers of imagination under the influence of Legault’s “proper structure,” where “what / went in went out but multiplied” (“Madeleine as Crusoe”). Like shining a flashlight through cut glass, The Madeleine Poems make their own pattern and light as the reader moves through them, the beam of the gaze throwing color against the wall.

The composite portrait of the sound and sense, and arrival and departure of these poems is a result of vision and allusion, reference and difference. The succession of images and the speed with which the poems move, does not reveal an identity of what a Madeleine is, but instead leaves the reader the blank page, the single star that closes the book, from which pours our aloneness. “We are too much of us,” as stated in “Madeleine as the Balloon and Size from Here,” so Legault allows us to become ourselves, nameless, and depart.

Paul Legault:: The Madeleine Poems:: Omnidawn

Documentary poetry, a term that brackets together Place’s text with the disparate poetic projects of Muriel Rukeyser, Juliana Spahr, Claudia Rankine, Charles Reznikoff, Barrett Watten and countless others, stands more as a floating signifier than a tenable category. Characteristically, the label evokes a range of aesthetic impulses and ethical critiques that relax the boundaries of the page in order to bring the poem into a more direct relationship with the voices that for various sociopolitical reasons disrupt the teleological march towards progress and therefore stand to be silenced. Of course there are documentary poems that depart from this thumbnail description, but in general it is a mode of expression coeval with the generic concerns it incites. Bearing witness to the unpredictable particularity of these voices, silenced under piles of non-fictive material, the documentary poem counters the notion of fixed, insoluble genres by marrying aberrant content with a form equal itself to the unconventional. Thus the documentary poem questions the question of poetry’s waning efficacy as a delimiting genre. To carry this line of thinking to any useful conclusion strikes me as far too expansive a task to take up in a brief review. Nonetheless, I mention it here because it resonates so adamantly with the drive to document the documentary that Allison Cobb enunciates in her recent book Green-Wood.

Through a mixture of prose passages, lyrical sequences, and embedded quotations, Green-Wood delivers a disjunctive account of Brooklyn’s famous nineteenth-century cemetery of the same name. Referring to it as America’s first filing system, Cobb follows a historical index of headstones and exhumes a series of facts that connects America’s current political climate to topics as diverse as Emersonian self-reliance, Marxist interpretations of British Enclosure Acts, and Colonial Ornithology. The book’s ecological concerns are not limited to content. Through formal decisions, Cobb implicitly critiques the self-satisfaction associated with sentimental portrayals of paradise waxing parking lot. By organizing Green-Wood into succinct prose-blocks, Cobb uses juxtaposition to draw attention to the associative space that separates and connects any two prose-block passages. The intermediary space between passages becomes as important to the arc of the book as the content of any single passage. This formal choice demonstrates Cobb’s awareness that ecology is not merely the study of organisms; it also applies to the constant discovery of relations that connect and separate organisms to, and from, one another and their physical surroundings.

Rather than make superficial comments on a large swath of quotations from Green-Wood, I want to address a single passage, which touches upon three thematic concerns that recur throughout the book. On the first page Cobb writes:

Among the crowd I see Micah Garen, who will be kidnapped in Iraq while
shooting a documentary about looted artifacts. Fact means not “true.” But
“to make.” The fact of art a trace.

The statement offers both journalistic reportage and inferred commentary on the nature of aesthetic experience. By drawing our attention to the documentary filmmaker, Cobb foregrounds the self-referentiality of her own documentarian project. This kind of meta-gesture develops throughout the book into what I see as the first thematic concern: the poet’s sustained deliberation on the often unacknowledged instruments of knowledge production. In the above scene, Garen arises out of context. We see him enjoying life in the same physical body that will later become instrumentalized by the camera, and thereby sublimated in order to function as a part of the frame that separates and connects “real life” and documentary film. Here the filmmaker’s body stands at the mercy of someone else’s candid vision. Cobb records Garen outside of his role as filmmaker, producing the effect one might associate with coming upon a screwdriver left surprisingly on the bathroom sink. Taken out the expected context of the toolbox, the screwdriver becomes noticeable in a manner that highlights its stunning utility (Why is there a screwdriver in the bathroom, a screw must have been loose around the lightswitch plate). Likewise, when Cobb places Garen’s body inside a context different than the documentary film, she arrests the reader with the utilitarian function of his body, showing it to be a part of the filmic scaffolding that makes possible the documentary aesthetic. His emergence from the crowd, like Stetson in Eliot’s “The Burial of the Dead,” demonstrates Cobb’s quickness to notice the confrontation between everyday experience and documentary mediation that ultimately reveals the latter’s profound artifice.

Cobb’s decision to include the filmmaker into her depiction of the cemetery sets up the theme of intersecting contexts, earlier referred to as the book’s ecopoetics of relation. The Garen episode develops out of Cobb’s description of the cemetery on a day in which the management has agreed to open its historic catacombs to visitors. By meandering into the historic building, Garen activates the book’s sprawl to embrace one topic after another. Spotting the documentary filmmaker leads to a discussion about the Iraq war, and from there an observation on late capitalism in general. This overlapping propulsion enacts a salient commentary commensurable not only with an ecopoetics of relation, but also with Francis Fukuyama’s contentious conception of “The End of History.” The end of history, according to Fukuyama is tantamount to the flattening out of cultural difference under one homogenous market. Cobb, however, shows how this cultural flattening is anything but apolitical, when she reminds us that Garen’s position at the nexus of contemporary life depends upon his being kidnapped by Iraqi militants.

In her mentioning of trace, “The fact of art a trace,” we’re shown another theme that appears throughout Green-Wood: the discussion of art in terms of its material remnants, the residue of creativity. In the passage, we’re told that Garen’s work in Iraq involves accounting for archeological sites that were ransacked during the early stages of the war. His lot then is to document the absence produced by pillaging and warfare. The filmmaker is left with no option but to collect interviews in hopes of casting a keener lens on vacancy, since the artifacts are not visibly accessible. This rhymes with the poet’s task of building her utterance out of the invisible contents of a cemetery. Rather than interviews or accounts, Cobb’s compositional practice includes historical curiosities, common-book quotations and litanies, consisting of objects left by grave-side visitors at Green-Wood:

stars and stripes pinwheel
glow-in-the-dark angel
muddy stuffed bunny face down near Crescent Water
Batman action figure
frog riding a bicycle
Virgin of Guadalupe pen
DADDY WE MISS YOU pumpkin

These objects signal the bind inherent in the act of documenting that inherently produces absence. Such is Maurice Blanchot’s point in “Literature and the Right to Death,” where he recognizes literature as “a being deprived of its being”. Laid bare to strangers who happen upon the headstones (like the reader), these memorial arrangements abbreviate the departed into an empirical trace.

Also, the trace line touches upon a formal technique that appears throughout Green-Wood. Repeatedly, italicized statements cut the informative tone of Cobb’s prose-block with an indeterminate lyrical flourish. Oftentimes the use of italics implies that the emphasized line of text has been drawn from another source, one that can be traced, as it were, in the lengthy notes section at the end of the book. At other points, the italicized statements evade citation and seem to suggest a pattern of meta-commentary. In the Micah Garen passage, the italicized trace leads us to consider not only Garen’s elegiac footage of missing artifacts, but also the level to which an irreducible absent presence characterizes Cobb’s own writerly relationship to the empirical world. The phrase insinuates that the work of art evolves, and is then limited to, a factual dimension. The corporeality of the canvas, sculpture, and poem are hulls through which inspiration once passed.

With its exegetical prose, Green-Wood resembles the footnotes that might accompany the classically difficult Modernist long poem more than it does the actual Modernist long poem. And this will likely cause some to question the book’s generic fidelity. But the faithful reader will surely regard Cobb’s generic promiscuity as indistinguishable from her larger critique of problematic economies of exclusion—the cordoning off of the human from the non-human, and the garden from the wasteland. In so far as documentary poetry is far too broad a concept to function as a delimiting genre, it is serves as the perfect marker for Cobb’s brand of cross-genre work. For her, like Susan Howe and Robert Duncan, the truth of what a fact is lies in the term’s historical derivation, and that truth, contrary to popular belief, shows fact to be a form of social production, a gathering rather than a dividing of cultural values and observations. To think of fact in this way, socially constructed and process oriented, compels us then to re-imagine the parameters of Perloff’s question. One reason for writing something that doesn’t resemble “poetry” and then passing it off as such, could be to historicize and denaturalize the very notion of genres. Cobb confirms art and fact to be ineluctably commensurable with one another, conceiving both to be in essential correspondence with the trace. With Green-Wood, she maintains that the document, the archive, and the cemetery industrial complex—all facets of the empirical world—exceed their own non-fictive function and imprint themselves in patterns of prose upon the imagination.