PRAISE
For If This Makes You Nervous (Omnidawn Publishing)
Drawn into a heady swirl of images riding sinuous syntax, I was curved swiftly, slippery, but unblurred in Elena Karina Byrne’s If this Makes You Nervous. The poet strokes a verbal impasto with lines that spun me through kunst-struck odes to artists here and gone, sudden un-nostalgic memories, “time’s own vertigo,” and wild eros. Elegiac in mode, not mood, Byrne disinters vision after vision, breakneck and breathless from her “terror-hairless skull,” pounding, enveloping, and cutting the lyric into ekphrastic surrender. This is a stunning book. —Douglas Kearney
In this original and beguiling collection, Elena Karina Byrne offers us her private gallery and guides us through episodes of her life, revealing to us not only how works of art have instructed and nurtured her, but also how her life became imprinted on the art. As she engages with the art of visionaries, iconoclasts, and infidels (from Marcel Duchamp to Nan Goldin) they, in return, challenge her, “Can you circus act in color, grief-teach yourself / how to dance out the
floorboards away from the house into the fields again?” (“Can Cindy Sherman Wear my Hair?”). The art allows for her own reckoning, and with lush language and alluringly reckless syntax, she voices her urgent and vulnerable responses inseparable from the art itself. – Molly Bendall
Marcel Duchamp, Tony Oursler, Joseph Beuys, and Caravaggio (among others) supercharge Elena Karina Byrne's new book If This Makes You Nervous. Wildly fighting the ekphrastic, Byrne's poems get lapel-pulled-close to the dark overtones of being. “Did I mention you are me?” she asks. “I am riddled &/gated, keyed like a car in a future divebar's parking lot.” The “bled glitter” and exciting poetics of If This Makes You Nervous boils over with memory and meaning. Gorgeous “from the Mona & the Lisa” on.
–Terese Svoboda
NEIL LEADBEATER Book Review http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/April_2022_newsletter.htm#BOOKREVIEW1
If This Makes You Nervous
Author: Elena Karina Byrne
Published by: Omnidawn Publishing, Oakland, California (November 2021)
Paperback: 99 pages.
Poetry.
Former Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance editor and lecturer, Poetry Consultant and Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, poetry programs curator for the Craft Contemporary Museum, and Literary Programs Director for the historic Ruskin Art Club. Recent publications include No Don't (What Books Press, 2020) and Squander (Omnidawn, 2016). If This Makes You Nervous is her fifth full-length collection.
Let's begin with the title. Here, Byrne is already communicating with her readers. The first word is redolent with possibilities. The half sentence begs to be completed: 'If this makes you nervous...look away now', or 'If this makes you nervous...wait till you read / see this'. It is an invitation, more than that, a challenge to the reader and it has drawing power. The words in italics are my own but when the title finally tumbles out at the end of Byrne's poem 'Ed Ruscha First Blew the Dirty Whistle' it is expressed in yet another way: 'Honk if this makes you nervous or troubles that positive side of aggression'. There is an added dimension here given that 'Honk' happens to be the title of one of Ruscha's works. This is wholly unexpected and not at all what I originally had in mind, thinking that the title referred to the cover art instead. It is yet another example of how Byrne's poems spring surprises. Ruscha, who is the subject of this poem, is an American artist associated with West Coast Pop art. Like Byrne, his works provide a new way of looking at and thinking about what constitutes the American scene. While Ruscha connects the verbal with the visual, Byrne connects the visual with the verbal.
This collection of poems is divided into three sections of twenty-two poems each making sixty-six in all. The sections are marked 'Rock', 'Paper', and 'Scissors' after the children's game of chance played to settle disputes between two people. The game usually starts with scissors but, again, Byrne confounds us by ending it that way. Rock, paper and scissors are also materials / tools used by artists for the purposes of sculpture, painting and collage.
In these poems Byrne draws inspiration from sixty-six artists creating lyrical episodes of beauty and terror that are both personal and political with language that, at times, breaks the rules of syntax and, nearly always, linear narrative. Byrne, who once confessed that she wanted to be an artist until she was 13 years old....and then a poet, is clearly immersed in the world of art. Her father, Herbert Jepson was an artist and designer and she grew up among the artists of his generation. Her knowledge of the contemporary art scene in America is formidable and it forms the basis of the poems in this collection.
For the purposes of this review I have chosen to home in on one or two poems from each of the three sections to give readers a foretaste of what a Byrne poem looks like. Out of 'Rock' I have chosen 'A Walkabout in Andrew Wyeth's Painting', and 'William Wegman's Weimaraner William'.
*
Andrew Wyeth was an American visual artist who worked mainly in a regionalist style. His favourite subjects were to do with the land and the people around him in his hometown of Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania and the place where he spent his summers on Southern Island, Maine. Many of his paintings caught Byrne's focal attention as did the title of one of them that is called 'Squall'. Wyeth's painting makes connections with the ocean because, on the day that he painted it, his wife had gone out to watch a Friendship Sloop race. her absence from the house under a threatening sky became the inspiration of the composition. In the helpful notes at the back of the book, Byrne admits that she spent much of her life near the ocean and that, in her words, 'it was the implied emotion, overall color-feeling of longing and depression that was carried there, sometimes like a guilt-ridden memory'. 'Running / before a storm's roiling, [she] / learned to jump wide spaces, roof to roof' but, in the middle of this poem, she slips in a personal memory of guilt:
..........After giving
directions, I watched the woman, crossing our street, hit by a car the color
of dusk and she sank
at once, as if into a hole. I carried
that hole in my stomach for years. A sinkhole, also known as swallow hole,
a doline caused by some depression, by some form of ground collapse.
The imagery in the poem inhabits the territory of quicksand, ground collapse, ditches, war holes and numberless graves. Notice the double meaning inherent in the word 'depression' in the above quotation. Innocence is tempered by experience. 'When you are a child you can be anyone' but, when you are fully grown, the implication is that you can only be you and you have to live with whatever life throws at you and deal with it in the best way possible.
*The second of these two poems refers directly to the cover art: William Wegman's Untied On Tied Off, 1973. The reference to Weimaraner in Byrne's title is a nod to Wegman's fascination with this breed of dog and the way in which these dogs became a central figure in his photographs and videotapes. The poem itself, however, focuses on shoes although there is a moment when, glancing at the pair of shoes which she took off at a party and left with others by the door, she sees 'their Weimaraner-brown obedient mouths'. The vowel sounds in that phrase alone are memorable, let alone the image. Four or five lines in, Byrne poses the question about the extent to which a person can be identified by their shoes. Do shoes reveal something about your personality? What do your shoes 'say' about you? Can you judge people by the shoes that they wear? There is a sense in which shoes become a part of you. They accompany you everywhere. A comfortable pair can journey with you through life. So much for the adult viewpoint. Now to the children. 'Children / love or hate shoes as they do dogs teach them- / selves how to tie them up keeping / left & right side by side well-behaved / by the bed...' Another reference to the dogs comes barking back at us.*
From the middle section 'Paper' I have chosen to comment on 'If Contents In / Joseph Cornell's Box' and 'Where Is Dead Artist Jack Goldstein?' Joseph Cornell was an American visual artist and film-maker, one of the pioneers and most celebrated exponents of assemblage. Influenced by the Surrealists, he was also an avant-garde experimental filmmaker. Cornell was a recluse who used his signature glass-fronted 'shadow boxes' in which he deposited found objects as a kind of escape mechanism to express his recurrent themes of interest such as childhood, space, and birds. Even though he hardly ever ventured beyond New York State, he travelled through his creative imagination far and wide.
In Byrne's title, the word 'contents' carries several layers of meaning (a summary of things, insurance against loss, the distinct aspects of a work of art or, following the medieval Latin contenta, 'things contained'). There is a play on the terms 'shadow box' and 'shadow boxing'. Artistic expression is seen as a form of sport. The artist is sparring with the idea of travel whilst avoiding any direct engagement with it. he is sparring with it because, in his view, humble everyday objects are worth fighting for and preserving. The vocabulary used in the poem plays upon the tension that is inherent between the artist's reclusive nature and his interest in travel. It oscillates between these two opposing poles in several ways through the language of containment (box, home, skirt,) and openness (star, planet, universe, light, wanderlust) and also between small objects ( tortoise, doll, keys, coins, matches, bird) and large objects (champagne glass, boxer's gloves). How much of the world - its cork balls, metal springs, exotic birds and Renaissance portraits- can we contain in our imagination? Byrne places her words carefully on the page in much the same way that Cornell calibrated the arrangements of his objects in order to express his art. Something of the lyricism of Byrne's writing comes to the fore in these lines from the poem:
I can't find a contagion of wanderlust the plumage-distance in a red
bird's body now aviary-flown because we knew how long it would
take an apothecary's colors to come bottling home'*
Goldstein (1945-2003) was a Canadian-born, California-based performance and conceptual artist turned painter prominent during the 1980's art boom. In Byrne's title, the word 'dead' carries some significance on several counts. It references some of the artist's most celebrated work depicting streaking fighter jets, bombing raids and a performance piece entitled 'The Six-Minute Drown' in which the agonizing sounds of a drowning man reverberate for six minutes in total isolation. In the text that follows, Byrne writes about the time when Goldstein buried himself alive with a stethoscope attached to his chest, breathing air from plastic tubes while a red light above ground flashed to the rhythm of his heartbeat. She also references Goldstein's well-known Metro-Goldwyn Mayer film, a two--minute loop of the film studio's roaring lion mascot on a blood red field. The word 'dead' in her title is also a reminder of how an artist's work may not survive him for posterity and it is also a reminder of the tragic fact that Goldstein committed suicide.
........'In his films: the far white door slams over &
over just before a man, running, gets there, the MGM lion roars, roars.
One light bulb flickers in the grassdark, with his heartbeat six feet above
ground, above the buried man, him, listening, a bare pipe from which
to speak down like the ear canal of God. Jack's name is repeated over
& over, out loud. This intimate reaction repeats, repeats all night.'*
From the final section, 'Scissors', Byrne's poem 'Without Hokusai's Great Wave 1760 - 1849 There Would be No Modern Art' attracted my attention. The alternate long and short lines (the long lines are very long and the short lines are very short) mirrored the great length of Hokusai's wave and the small space given over to the three boats and their tiny human figures. In each case, the one threatens to engulf or overwhelm the other. Byrne's poem is awash with sea water: words like backwashed, ravine, flood, sea spray, wave, ash wash and rain permeate the poem. These are the words she chooses to use in order to whip up a storm which in turn, after the build-up, leads on to another of Hokusai's works in which he depicts a murdered actor, Kohada Koheiji, who rises from the dead to spook his wife and her lover. Hokusai depicts him as a skeleton with skin and hair still clinging to his skull. Hokusai's use of the recently introduced Prussian blue pigment was to revolutionise painting since it was hailed as being the first stable, long-lasting blue pigment to be discovered after Egyptian blue*
I began this review by mentioning Ed Ruscha. Ruscha once said "Art has to be something that makes you scratch your head," and Byrne fulfils this statement by writing poetry that makes you think. There's no denying that the reader has to work hard at these challenging poems but so much is discovered along the way that the reward is worth it.
Rob McLennon’s Blog Spot
https://robmclennan.blogspot.com/2023/02/elena-karina-byrne-if-this-makes-you.html
Thursday, February 16, 2023
Elena Karina Byrne, If This Makes You Nervous
IF CONTENTS IN / JOSEPH CORNELL’S BOX
I won’t give way
to false teeth left in a champagne glass after a fight
nor fall from the shadow box into the boxer’s black gloves
smoke your pipe in the tortoise north darkness
between stars
deranged on the moon’s Geographique map of your face rising like
one scrap planet one startled bluing childhood doll head that calls for
recriminating light Cassiopeia’s soul over another lover’s bent knee
I can’t find a contagion of wanderlust the plumage-distance in a red
bird’s body now aviary-flown because we knew how long it would
take an apothecary’s colors to come bottling home
You underestimate
me my family’s inheritance of feeling its open airless universe &
you pay the color white a visit you startled deadout-you collecting
keys & coin are afflicted by newsprint flesh waiting for stacks of
matches to strike light under the skirt’s twirl & heat’s abyss
I can’t for this, be contained!
Los Angeles, California poet and editor Elena Karina Byrne’s fifth poetry collection (and the first I’ve seen), following The Flammable Bird (Zoo Press, 2002), MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2008), Squander (Omnidawn, 2016) and If No Don’t (What Books Press, 2020), is If This Makes You Nervous (Oakland CA: Omnidawn, 2021), a book composed and curated as an art gallery within the bounds of a poetry collection. Set in three sections—“Rock,” “Paper” and “Scissors”—Byrne composes each of her lyrics focusing on and across a particular visual artist and their work, writing as celebration, description and critique, as well as weaving in layerings of the author’s own responses. As she writes towards the end of the poem “FAREWELL FACE & ONE OF PICASSO’S”: “Picasso knew so well what he had in front of him: women neither / affirmed or denied belonging. That’s why his painting could destroy them.” Byrne layers her own details in through each lyric, offering how these particular artworks and aritsts may have impacted her own thinking and life, allowing certain works to burrow deep, as the best kind of art hopes to do. “But who will witness / an error in these repetitions,” she offers, as part of the poem “INSTEAD, THE HEAD: LORNA SIMPSON,” “in all circles as you fall square, feel your / body parts, feel the ground sliding from under you like the very last part / of your photo skin wishing itself forward & away, its last text turned / film-back through US history’s hate still smelling like your burnt hair of / chip cookies & baby milk.”
Comparable to George Bowering’s infamous Curious (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1973), in which he composed poems for and around individual poets, Byrne’s poems write on and around each of her chosen subjects, and she moves through artists such as Andrew Wyeth, Laurie Anderson, Francis Bacon, Salvatore Dali, Diane Arbus, Caitlin Berrigan, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman and multiple others—sixty-six poems in total—across a space widely populated by an array of artists contemporary and historic. Each poem is thick with resonance and language twists, evocative with rhythm and sound across a visually descriptive narrative measure. As her powerful poem “STYLE OF IMPRISONMENT: DIANE ARBUS / PREDICTED THIS VIRUS” ends: “Even Jane Mansfield’s hair bow & my doctor’s Venice / bird mask hung for one cousin plague are not alone. It’s her / best shot at showing freaks alike where nature mirrors // our bathroom life & sets fire to itself in the heat.” [misspelling of “Jayne Mansfield” exists in the original text].
There are numerous questions and prompts that flow through these poems, questions and reactions that shift around parents, parenting, childhood, friends and losses, as well as a curious thread on mothering that works through the collection, as the poem “MOTHERWELL BLACK” ends: “Because maternal love is meant / to be echo-endless, something you want to throw yourself down into. / Because I’d throw myself in front of a revolver for them, dropping coins / like pulled fingernails or the memory of scars, still holding hands in / Spanish Franco’s frozen streets just to see black.”
Posted by rob mclennan at 8:31 AM Labels: Elena Karina Byrne, Omnidawn
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Book Review
North of Oxford, May 1 2023
NO, DON’T BY ELENA KARINA BYRNE
By Neil Leadbeater
Former Regional Director of the Poetry Society of America, Elena Karina Byrne is a freelance editor and lecturer, Poetry Consultant and Moderator for The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, poetry programs curator for the Craft Contemporary Museum and Literary Programs Director for the Ruskin Art Club. She is the author of five poetry collections including MASQUE (Tupelo Press, 2007) and Squander ((Omnidawn, 2016).
‘No, Don’t’ can be construed as a plea from the heart. It is something that the narrator is addressing to herself and to her readers. It is saying ‘No, you don’t have to capitulate, let anything distract you or throw you off course, especially fear, especially grief. The double negative adds emphasis to the plea.
Reading Byrne’s poems is the art-equivalent of looking at a collage. Quotations selected from philosophers, scientists, educators, artists and writers, are often used as launching pads for her texts. The texts themselves are embroidered with a collage of images, personal experience and playful language. This is what makes them multi-layered and complex and seemingly out of the box as far as linear narrative goes. The reader is invited to take a leap of faith between one sentence and the next and not to worry over how he or she got there. In musical terms, Byrne’s poems are more akin to a Lutoslawski symphony than a Bach fugue. To read them is to go on an exciting journey, never quite knowing where you are going to end up.
Unlike her previous collections, these poems are profoundly personal. The empirical ‘I’ makes its appearance in many of the poems in a move that is very much focused on the purely personal and subjective side of poetry. The contents are divided into two distinct sections. The first section is haunted by the loss of Byrne’s half-sister, memorialized in ‘Lynne’s Car Washed Violently Down Off The Cliff’ while the second section addresses more general issues that respond to the resurgence of hatred in America toward people of colour, immigrants, women, gay and trans communities and people in poverty.
The collection opens with a distant memory of Byrne, aged seven, being self-aware of her place in the omnipresent universe. Its unsettling title ‘During the Vietnam War’ is a reminder of just how fragile and threatening that universe can be. Lying on the wet grass and looking up at the sky, the mood is not so much of wonderment but defiance: ‘she was restless then & she was / glad she was not safe.’ Use of the third person personal pronoun lends the poem some distance.
‘Tomboy From The Art Room’ is set in the context of her growing up in an artistic family as a hyper-energized tomboy and is based on a dream about flying and being both a boy and a girl. An unsettling moment occurs in the second sentence which sets the tone for the remainder of the poem. Here she writes: ‘Can you see me riding that Native American horse saddle seat, / desert-out, with only oranges to eat, their white-waxed DDT skin flakes shining like / so many dead fish scales from my fingers…’ (The US banned the use of this insecticide in 1972). Another poem arising from childhood, ‘White Doll’ is equally unsettling. The sky is described as ‘a commotion / of high radioactive-white clouds’, the light at dusk is ‘inconsolable’, the Barbie doll sleeps on a bare floor ‘in knuckle-blue darkness’, the world is ‘drowning’ and ‘always in mourning’ and the house is ‘silent’.
Rain falls in torrents through several of these poems. In ‘Such Things In Animal Skin’ Byrne tells us that it was because of the rain that her half-sister died:
Her car, near the ocean, slid down a canyon and outside
mother-years passed over the continental divide
in the private garden stopped by snails and birds of paradise,
mocking birds mocking the grey darkness every summer since.
‘Cow Song’ is a poem that is based around herding calls used to call livestock down from the high mountain pastures in Scandinavia. Its tradition goes as far back as the Middle Ages when singers used to corral animals with a hypnotic melody known as a ‘kulning’ which can reportedly be heard by a cow that is 5 kilometers away from its caller:
I heard them, far-off, deep-calling
from behind death’s invisible floor door. Their wallow
metronome from the after rain mud was one giant body.
Arizona’s yellow arm length of light all
the way to my own body standing at the edge
of their field held me.
In Byrne’s poem, the singing becomes a grief song. A grief that refuses to move. In the title poem, ‘No, Don’t’, Byrne is the child ‘sitting on the winding Escher stairs’, a reference to the Dutch artist’s work ‘Relativity’ which depicts a world in which the normal laws of gravity do not apply. Byrne’s poem is addressed to ‘the two of me’ the two who belong to two different sources of gravity. Her cry from the heart is asymmetric and there is nothing of comfort here, only bewilderment at the experience of being pulled in two different ways between fear and desire.
‘The Devil’s Auction: Twelve Nights of Discouragement’ is an ekphrastic poem based on a photograph of the film actress Eliza Blasina dressed as a horse when she appeared in a prose melodrama in four acts called ‘The Devil’s Auction’ which was first staged on Broadway in 1867. The poem was written directly from the photo image.
Two poems which caught my attention from the second half of the book were ‘The Future Is A Beast Prelude’ and ‘Eclogue In Herzog’s Orange & White’. In the former, Byrne uses language to play on the theme of time in all its shifting phases: in the title we have the words ‘future’ and ‘prelude’ and in the poem we have words and phrases such as ‘in the instant’, ‘life after death’, ‘episode’, ‘duration’, ‘day or night, yesterday or today’ and the adjective ‘metronomic’ – the ultimate keeper of time. The arresting opening ‘Violence / is commissioned in the instant…’ is just as arresting at the end: ‘Dead, Father still / opens the door for Mother in the dream, / half singing.’ The latter is a pastoral based on Werner Herzog’s diary ‘Walking on Ice’. In the foreword, Herzog says that he received a call from Paris informing him that his close friend, the German film historian Lotte H Eisner was ill and dying. Determined to prevent this, Herzog set off on a three-week walk from Munich to Paris in the depths of winter. The rain that has fallen on many of Byrne’s poems returns again. Byrne, using Herzog’s diary as a backdrop for her own grief, scents the poem with oranges. She tells us in a note that her father, who had been born next to fields of orange groves, ate endless oranges and drank nine glasses of milk a day and that her mother loved all the variations of the colour orange to the extent that she often experienced entire dreams in the colour orange. Italicized lines in the poem refer to extracts from Herzog’s diary while the references to oranges become an outworking of grief for Byrne’s own life after loss.
These poems show us the vulnerable side of our human nature against the backdrop of the ephemeral beauty of the natural world. They are brave poems, written with unflinching honesty, straight from the heart.
You can find the book here: http://www.whatbookspress.com/no-dont.html
Neil Leadbeater is an author, essayist, poet and critic living in Edinburgh, Scotland. His short stories, articles and poems have been published widely in anthologies and journals both at home and abroad. His books include Librettos for the Black Madonna (White Adder Press, 2011); The Worcester Fragments (Original Plus, 2013); The Loveliest Vein of Our Lives (Poetry Space, 2014); Finding the River Horse (Littoral Press, 2017) and The Gloucester Fragments (Littoral Press, 2022). His work has been translated into French, Dutch, Nepali, Romanian, Spanish and Swedish.
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In Elena Karina Byrn’e spectacular No, Don't, we are immersed in a poetry of the kaleidoscopic past and an insufferable future: Pick/ the lock, you can’t, but you can carry a doorknob/ into the next life.’ Yes, these are brilliant poems of reckoning, with time, with death, and the nature of consciousness, all haunted by burns lost sister, memorialized in ‘Lynn's Car Washed Violently Down Off the Cliff.’ Burn is a poet with an astonishing gift for imagery and music: the curved/ inside of the mouth/ when singing is grief alone. Byrne writes in one poem, and in another, ‘I alone fear being alone, far from the blood vocabulary.’ Reading No, Don’t, I was reminded of Paul Valerie's definition of the poem as “that prolonged hesitation between sound and sense.” “Indeed, Byrne’s poems read like “a painting still wet between the girl's legs in a field of music.”
––Alison Benis White
Elena Karina burns new chapbook NO, DON’T hurls us into a muddy and kaleidoscopic garden full of grief, desire, unrest, and wild growth. Each poem seeks expanse vines of visceral feeling, twisting in the poet’s buzzing interiority: today all memory ruins downstream to the bee swarm. Burns language is rife with heart bending synesthesia and elegiac musicality: mole ribs broke in the hard ground, the green canary lungs/ were crushed by coal and a threshold torrent of deep sea/ anchovies were made where we couldn't see them school.' reading these poems, I am reminded of the voraciousness of the imagination. Like” filling up the water with knives, “this chapbook slices open the guts of fear trailing with resilience. ––Jane Wong
Ferocious in their intelligence, delightful in the beauty and insouciance that carry as lightly as a pair of opera gloves, these poems offer language, language, language as an antidote to cultural and personal amnesia, to childhood pain and adult pain; as an answer to the eternal conundrums of history and philosophy. NO, DON’T, the title tells us––don't be hoodwinked by the world, by the status quo; don't be silenced or sidelined by anything, much less grief. Rarely does a chapbook give birth to so many light-filled galaxies. Do read this essential new work by acclaimed poet Elena Karina Byrne. ––Gail Wronsky
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PRAISE FOR SQUANDER
BARBARA HOFFERT ON OCTOBER 17, 2016 LIBRARY JOURNAL
http://reviews.libraryjournal.com/2016/10/books/nonfic/arts-humanities/top-fall-poetry-great-reading-beyond-the-basics-from-veterans-and-newcomers-alike/
Top Fall Poetry: Great Reading Beyond the Basics from Veterans and Newcomers Alike // Byrne, Elena Karina. Squander. Omnidawn. Oct. 2016. 96p. ISBN 9781632430229. pap. $17.95. POETRY
If flesh (or any worldly thing) could be made word, it would be by Pushcart Prize winner Byrne. “Beget-began with the rain in velvet swags,” she says of downpour, while fire is “flame-hooded in city snow—/ who sulfurs, suffers for it.” And she makes ideas real and touchable, too: “Now/ consider the cement chair and know/ instead periphery” says the poem titled “Idea.” Byrne opens with a meditation on language (“because hunger once ate/ in a Feast of Lanterns, light caught in the mouth./ Babel: traders and navigators”), showing it at its protean finest, as her own poems are: sparkling, luminous, richly packed, and a real tumble into another state of mind. VERDICT From Shakespeare and stars to Rilke and lust, Byrne incarnates a wealth of subjects for smart, committed readers.
BARNES & NOBLE Praise for Squander https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/squander-elena-karina-byrne/1123604313
Overview
Squander occupies a place where “the mind’s upstairs windows [are] blown out”: a place of juxtapositional delight through sensory and conceptual dislocation. Poems based in word origins work as fables, and poems based in dialogue work within a select concordance from authors and artists. The consequent subject’s meaning is diverted and new vantage points are created. Squander’s energized music, its alliance with feeling’s final rhythm “makes us complicit” in the re-awaking of language
“This collection is a wise love affair that both clings to mean and lets it go. At times it reads almost as an erasure or ellipsis; the poems hold on to meaning with one hand while the other works to set it free. THIS! This quality of loving and letting go makes the collection a ‘must read.’”—Nicelle Davis, Light House Full Self
From the Publisher
Description
Squander occupies a place where “the mind’s upstairs windows [are] blown out”: a place of juxtapositional delight through sensory and conceptual dislocation. Its centripetal force arises from the risk of language and from a persuasion of alarming imagery. Poems based in word origins work as fables and poems based in dialogue work within a select concordance from authors and artists. The consequent subject’s meaning is diverted and new vantage points are created. Squander’s energized music, its alliance with feeling’s final rhythm “makes us complicit” in the re-awaking of language.
If you are lucky enough to be bewitched by Elena Karina Byrne’s brilliant poems, then you will travel across time, space, and the ocean of language. In her beautiful new book, Squander, Karina Byrne again douses the reader in her sparkle and luminosity, through poems triggered by Shakespeare, Amy Winehouse, Georgia O’Keefe, and Rilke. There’s a driving breathiness and breathlessness in Karina Byrne’s poems, as if a voice is haunting your ear, unveiling what a genius mind might see and feel through language. This is Karina Byrne’s deepest exploration of language yet; there’s no one writing like her and her voice is an essential one in American poetry.
––Victoria Chang, author of OBIT
Ultimately the title of the book tells all—squander, be willing to give, even to waste words; cast the net wide: “O Obedience like a horse, we are / trained to the bit, mouth-made. Heresy. Here. Say” says Elena Karina Byrne, and she practices with enthusiasm such preachment throughout the book. The intelligence here is always willing to sacrifice itself to energy—“turn a plum into/an orange//word into words”—and the result is an unforgettable exuberance of poetry. And of an enchanting intelligence.
––Bin Ramke, author of Missing the Moon
Fully recognizing that we are numerous, as are the snares and delights of the written word and the influences of history, Elena Karina Byrne’s “Squander” diligently investigates living in language—from attention to responsibility to knowledge—and creates a dedicated space for beauty to interrogate truth, encumbering our sometimes inexplicable world in a net of indelible lineages and connections.
––Maxine Chernoff, author of HERE
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LANA TURNER review by Calvin Bedient
Squander. By Elena Karina Byrne. (Omnidawn, 2016)
Lyricism meets a “squandering” experimental impulse in Elena Karina Byrne’s third book of poems, Squander—“squandering” as in not counting the lyrical chips, a poetics that succeeds only if most of the chips are blue. Byrne is awash in a sea of blue. Not that the hard edges of denotation are excluded; they are only subordinated. There is even plain speech about
Plain speech, bible
of blank pages, petty speech, breach of color
as well speech of unerasable color:
Oh, uneasiness origin. Anyone’s god confounded, and does... in language-cage, its fallen
bird’s orange feathers.
This last, in the opening poem, ”Language,” suggests that, out of deep unease as to life's sources, poetry dynamizes language into emotional form and hurls it against discourse’s language-cage, seeking an atmosphere as absolute as it is rarefied and infinite. But though the cage has many holes, it doesn't give. Anyhow, the lyrical impulse needs the melancholy of its resistance, on penalty of idiocy. So poetry's colorful feathers litter the cage floor. A squandering? Rather, a discovery of the possibility of a new atmosphere, after all, of an "intimate munificence [that] blazes forth with charm" (Mallarmé), inexhaustible inklings of a mystery that bathes in the noon of sonorities Byrne indeed writes near the border of the radical modern practice of deobjectiftying objects and quashing connectivity (a la Barbara Guest in her middle period), but she feels instructed from within to leave enough space for the thickness of signification and an agon of struggle against inhibitory laws and customs. Consider, for instance, from “Dostoyevsky’s Final Battle Feast,”
and he two declared atheists, moving on their way together like. good butter
cried with both hands, his to the funeral feast
Or consider her instruction to the reader to “Take Pilgrim’s Way, the Puritan route west” and, at length, when standing with “feet in the ash-ink sand,” be “ready to eat a calf in the cow’s belly to be beautiful” (“Place”). The literalist of the mind but not of the imagination will be delighted to know that the novelist Yukio Mishima “walked out onto the deck with another man under the pacific sky’s grief-
wide door lintel, under anchor-light,
expecting to see his past
like a woman (thirst that ate her) rise up
from sea bottom, bloated body of the long-drowned.
Thirsty, still. helplessly swallowing sea water, the past,
with her kimono sleeve
releasing tiny fish, her voice a great glass ball sliding up into her throat
now
To graph the movement here one would need to draw a line from Mishima up to the sky, which is a door like everything else but also his elected "anchor-light," thence down to his under-water past, where desire is both dead and alive and figured as a woman who still thirsts for what isn't potable, namely her past (here draw another line downward), which she helplessly swallows while a fishing boat’s glass ball rises up in her permanently speechless throat. The dislosure is that desire has no past that is not also a desire for its past (see “uneasiness origin” above) and cannot speak its truth. Consciously avoiding women, the homosexual Mishima is haunted by this female subconscious in which tiny phallic fish are loosened from a kimono sleeve.
Byrne is not often this simultaneously coherent on both the surface and the depths, but who is? Rimbaud and Mallarmé, perhaps. And of late, Lucie Brock-Broido. And Robert Fernandez in Pink Reef. And Richard Greenfield in his first book and his third, now in preparation. A few more. In all, very few. The two French poets founded a new lyricism more extreme than the usual kind, Rimbaud’s a biting green, Mallarmé’s a seafoam green (I somewhat know what I mean by this). In it, a deep figure makes the mise-en-scène shudder as if by an unconscious collision with the past. I could put this more rationally, but it is not a rational matter. It is poetry in which the tonal system, to draw a metaphor from music, is not abandoned but is positioned far off. Reconciliation is not the aim. All is already and indelibly “grief- / wide.” Nor, of course, is clear argumentation to be expected, or wanted. What runs through it resembles electrical pulsations, not a river. Grammar is only on the dock of the infinite, not in the sea; violations are allowed, for, as Lyotard said, “violence . . . belongs to the depth of language.”
Byrne’s speaker recognizes Rilke’s “grammarless face” in a gallery: “grammarless . . . as if / absent from the hours.” An astonishing lyricist himself, although not a new lyricist, Rilke escaped the post-lyrical deconstruction that followed Nietzsche and Freud. As for the new lyricism, it prefers to be scathed by it, but it isn't de-con-struct-ed to death, only down to the waist. Its intuition is that “Everything is gestation” (“Rilke, Somewhere in the Gallery”) and, at the same time, as was noted, grief-wide. The best passages in Squander are angel-verses if “the black pirate ship ribs of angels” is how it is.
--Calvin Bedient
for MASQUE
Each of Byrne’s poems begins with an epigraph, from sources as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde and the Bible. These help direct readers as Byrne seeks to mine the heavy ore of identity and cart it out on the masks we wear at different times. Perhaps most intriguing is the close relationship of the body to the self; no Cartesian dichotomies for her. For example, “Invisible Blessing Mask: Night,” with its invocation of marriage as a means of addressing the desire to differentiate one’s self from the beloved while at the same time abandoning our identity in union: “It has dissolved on the skin / where you’d rather not / say the words for conjugation, / separate the verb from the tense / nor ever harness what happened to you / when night put the lights out / on the tongue.” 4/17 Sacramento News and Review - It appeared both online and in their print edition: HYPERLINK "http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=654350"http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Content?oid=654350
There are such nice connections linking one poem to another. And with their famous energies, reading the whole thing is like riding an Arabian over one hill and then another, down one hill and down another. The scenery changes, the form changes, the pace slackens and quickens, but the whole thing is part of one journey… an astonishing and lovely experience, and all out of language chasmed with desire.
Forrest Gander — Comment for MASQUE
Elena Karina Byrne's second groundbreaking book of poems, MASQUE is comprised of a series of masks or voices (through a mask, as a mask) spoken from the literal or abstracted personas of identity, and so explores themes of the ever-changing exuberance of the self set against backdrops of history, science and nature, eros and language. Within the full force of metaphor, and the full range of address, these 'masks,' as dramatic lyrics and monologues speak to one another with visionary authority. Whether spoken in the voice of Magritte or from the vantage point of war, each mask comes alive 'between the divide,' within exile and belonging, providing a "peeping Tom's keyhole to this universe".
Brigit C. Hennessy — Amazon Review for MASQUE
Each of Byrne’s poems begins with an epigraph, from sources as diverse as Sylvia Plath, Oscar Wilde and the Bible. These help direct readers as Byrne seeks to mine the heavy ore of identity and cart it out on the masks we wear at different times. Perhaps most intriguing is the close relationship of the body to the self; no Cartesian dichotomies for her. For example, “Invisible Blessing Mask: Night,” with its invocation of marriage as a means of addressing the desire to differentiate one’s self from the beloved while at the same time abandoning our identity in union: “It has dissolved on the skin / where you’d rather not / say the words for conjugation, / separate the verb from the tense / nor ever harness what happened to you / when night put the lights out / on the tongue.”
Kel Munger — Sacramento News and Review for MASQUE
Elena Karina Byrne's second groundbreaking book of poems, Masque is comprised of a series of masks or voices (through a mask, as a mask) spoken from the literal or abstracted personas of identity, and so explores themes of the ever-changing exuberance of the self set against backdrops of history, science and nature, eros and language. Within the full force of metaphor, and the full range of address, these 'masks,' as dramatic lyrics and monologues speak to one another with visionary authority. Whether spoken in the voice of Magritte or from the vantage point of war, each mask comes alive 'between the divide,' within exile and belonging, providing a "peeping Tom's keyhole to this universe".--Brigit C. Hennessy
In verse simmering with sensuality, Elena Karina Byrne eloquently reveals, then carefully slices away, layer after layer of the masks we wear until our most secret selves are exposed. With imagery at once exotic and electric, individual pretense dissolves in the service of revelation, and we find ourselves irresistibly drawn into an internal dialogue that is unabashedly intimate. Find here a voice that is like no other we know. ----- Tupelo Press
for The Flammable Bird
What if language poets could do more than take language apart? What if they could take it apart and put it back together again in new and surprising ways right before your eyes, like a card trick or a tricky transmission or a psychic Tristan Tzara? Two poets, one from California and one who claims never to have been to California, have written very different books that nevertheless exhibit a common facility with language and intellect, a love of words and ideas, and a respectful understanding of the distance between them. Elena Karina Byrne’s Flammable Bird is a terrific first book, crackling with linguistic energy and burnished with a lovely patina of desire. Rodney Jones’ Kingdom of the Instant, his seventh book of poems, continues his canny rhetorical assault on American idiom and assumption in his characteristic molasses lyricism, backed by a knife-quick wit.
Byrne’s poems at their best want desperately and veer like swallows near cliffs, even when the subject would appear to appeal more to the intellect, as in several poems challenging the limits of language (“Ghost: A Love Story,” “When Words Fail the Body,” “Pigs Eye”) or in poems exploring relationships between science and religion (“God’s Watch,” Kierkegaard Knows No Shame”). “Darwin’s Windows,” for example, about a woman with a head injury who can’t copy squares but can draw church windows, reacquaints science with the human. The poem ends:
In a world of division, space means naming; a wasp curls into
A sweet pea and the world is enlarged all over again outside
Her window. You sit across the room, out of order
And the unnatural selection of History stains the church glass
Above you both: glass anonymous, glass-haunt, glass-us, glass
Of water and Darwin’s earth colored ghost kneels below
As if in overt reverence, with a pencil in one hand, the other full, closed on
Consideration, closed on the counted, colorless squares of broken glass.
The poem exposes the ambivalent relationship between religion and science, revealing deeper relationships between subjectivity and objectivity that scientific objectivism misses. Byrne attempts to tip the balance the other way, not to dismiss science, but to ameliorate the absence of the personal that science too frequently misses. So for Byrne “you are physics/ When light praises light in the insect skin of leaves.” Her language insists breathlessly and playfully, moving from pointed observation to specific image in a turn like, a bee to the next blossom. Her best poems are mercurial and possessed, enjambing through a tumult of images and ideas that surprise and arrest. Even the poems primarily driven by formal experimentation exhibit substance and power. Byrne has crafted an excellent, surprisingly mature first collection of poems.
Marty Williams — Book Review, SOLO 6 2003
Masque: Poems
Elena Karina Byrne
Tupelo Press
By Kel Munger
HYPERLINK "http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Contact?content=654350"kelm@newsreview.com
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This article was published on HYPERLINK "http://www.newsreview.com/chico/Archive?issue=654330"04.17.08, in SN&R.