Review by New York Times Review
NOBODY HAS TO tell Juliana Spahr that the personal is political: She has spent her career inventing verse and prose forms that show how our intimate feelings emerge, like knots in nets or waves at sea, from systems much larger than any one person's control. "This Connection of Everyone With Lungs" (2005) examined the global effects of 9/11 through the metaphor of polluted air; the piled-up details in "Well Then There Now" (2011) looked at Spahr's years in Hawaii, and at her origins in Appalachia, as if to ask where she could call home. Now Spahr lives in the San Francisco Bay Area; she joined the encampments and protests of Occupy Oakland in 2011, though she and her young son "never spent the night." "That Winter the Wolf Came" is Spahr's Occupy book: Its nine thoughtful, wiry works (three in prose, six in verse) ask how it felt and what it means to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism, a not-quite-despondent environmental observer and an anxious parent today. It's hard to quote Spahr in ways that show how good she is, because, phrase by phrase, she keeps her writing austere. It depends on successive overlaps, on slow builds, so that over several pages we discover (for example) what the BP oil spill, the dispersal of Occupy by the police, the price of Brent crude, the flights of brent geese and the repetitions in pop songs have in common: They let singers "during the ongoing oil wars" - or birds displaced from flight paths, or protesters swept from a park - "understand something about what is being lost." Land and sea, oil and water, corporations and human beings: For Spahr these things can no longer be considered separately. Spahr and her child, and you and I, are already caught up in the dangerous skein of financial instruments and hydrological disequilibrium. "I hold out my hand./I hand over/and I pass on.... I hold out my hand and take engine oil additive into me and then I pass on this engine oil additive to this other thing that once was me, this not really me." That's Spahr's disconcerting description of breast-feeding in our era of BPA and chlorinated naphthalenes. Other connections cross national borders, link species and generate hope: "The red snapper spreads itself out in the artificial reefs of oil platforms," thriving in the dangerous new place. To save the climate and the oceans, activists (Spahr implies) must become as international as the fish, the tankers and the contaminants, "traveling through the circuits that already exist." Like Claudia Rankine's celebrated "Citizen," Spahr's book is a set of interlocking parts, some lyrical, some starkly factual, best read whole. Like "Citizen," it can leave you somber, or angrily alert, or simply impressed. Her "poem about oil extraction in iambic pentameter" tells the story of the Deepwater Horizon spill blow by blow: "It is almost at ten/O'clock when mud begins its overflow-/Ing of the line and then on the rig floor." Facing the excessive power of oil, Spahr's poetic "line" itself breaks up, gives way. Yet Spahr sees a future for her radical cause. One essay remembers the movement, which she names "Non-Revolution," as if it were a lover, with "this odd patch of hair on its lower back": "I wanted to be with Non-Revolution and everyone Non-Revolution was with." Her last poem, "Turnt" (as in "turned up": excited or intoxicated), recreates a violent night when she and her friends were "turnt to mere vandals at moments." At others, they saw - and she can make us see - a new world: "We were together but we were in it alone at the same time. Except the state was there with us We knew history. We knew we would not be together long." What does it mean to remain a disillusioned opponent of capitalism today? STEPHEN BURT is the author, most recently, of a poetry collection, "Belmont," and a volume of criticism, "Close Calls With Nonsense."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 23, 2015]
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In clear-spoken songs, this latest collection by critic and poet Spahr (This Connection of Everyone with Lungs) moves between poetry and prose as it inhabits the space of the "Non-Revolution." Whether marching with a child in protests that approach riots or considering the lives of geese in the context of modern oil wars, Spahr's attempts at understanding what to do in politically fraught times repeatedly return to the complicated project of simply understanding the times themselves. A poem in tight couplets, for instance, details in starkly affecting language the specifics of the explosion that initiated the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill: "Then drill pipe pressure high again. Then sea-/ Water is pumped. Kill line full. Kill line// Opened, bled to mini trip tank." When the pieces become more internal than documentary, they maintain the same directness of thought: "We lost all the skirmishes, even the one called the PR war./ But that winter, we were there./ Under a tarp. Close. Together/ Just dealing with. Together. Went looking and found coyotes." Beautiful and urgent, the pieces open up and allow the lyrical to inhabit logic, the political to become embodied. Spahr has been carefully developing a mode of writing over several books, and here it sings at its brilliant best. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Award-winning poet and activist Spahr recently joined with Jasper Bernes and Joshua Clover to found Commune Editions, a poetry press designed to further their political convictions; the radical press AK is distributing. In her first Commune title, Spahr links ecological and economic crisis in poems that are near-documentary ("The Brent Crude Oil Spot price is 112.11 when the police come the first time") or list-like and consciously repetitive so that we feel the weight of a natural world at risk ("If you were a snowy plover, you'd be surface feeding/ if you were a northern pintail, you'd be continually whistling"). VERDICT Forthright and artless; for the politically engaged, even if they don't read poetry. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
