A Doorless Knocking Into Night (review)

As Richard Howard points out in his introduction, "there will be no more" work from Lexi Rudnitsky, the young poet who died in 2005 prior to the release of her first book. A Doorless Knocking into Night possesses the imagination, intelligence, and technical mastery that readers hope to see in a freshman collection but don't always find. Rudnitsky shifts between loosely formal poems and tightly constructed sonnets, creating an insistent narrative of desire and release; here is a text that maps out the geography of Eros and shows Rudnitsky to have been a poet of tremendous promise.

Divided into five sections, the book uses travel as an allegory for the Self's search for its other half, a Platonic journey that reshapes the ubiquitous—and generally problematic—"travel poem" into literature that chooses not to exoticize the Other. Rudnitsky avoids this pitfall by fashioning a speaker who is out of place everywhere, be it the sensual dreamscape of Latin America, the temporary respite of American suburbia, or the gritty, urban setting of New York City.

In Rudnitsky's work, the Other does not become an exotic; the Self is strange enough. The Self is contradictory and the speaker of these poems must continually maintain a distance from the world, even as she approaches it. In "Capodanno," the last poem of the opening section, the speaker describes fireworks and tries to understand their appeal, finally realizing she can "watch them from my hotel room, / high above the city." As with Baudelaire's metaphor of the poet as albatross, Rudnitsky's poet-speaker feels safest observing life from a great distance and elevation.

This is not to say that the poems are cerebral or detached from the physical. Just the opposite. Beginning with "Malaria," the title poem of the book's first section, Rudnitsky establishes the sensual preoccupations of her work: "Mosquitoes gather by puddles / on the dirt floor. Rain warps / the splintered board I sleep on. / Outside: explosions or thunder, / murder or disease. / A doorless knocking into night." And in "Brazil," the first of many sonnets, Rudnitsky imagines a former lover with his new flame.

I would like to hate that girl: her proprietary tonewhen I call one night to tell you good-bye.Perhaps her head rests on your collarbone;arachnine fingers creep up your thigh.But it takes years to learn how to touch you,and long before that you will have left her too.

The girlfriend's spider-like hand on her lover's leg, the intimate knowledge contained by touch—these details reveal a link between intellect and the body.

The book's second section, "Prudence Island," uses wordplay and associative leaps to establish a state of limbo. Jewish-themed poems like "The Word" and "Masada" present the speaker as an outsider to her own culture and religion. Lost, she waits for a new love affair, a new mode of thinking. An epigraph by Polish poet Wis™awa Szymborska contextual-izes the section's nonlinear, imagistic movements; "Mandatory Sentencing," with its disturbing lists and juxtapositions, could almost be mistaken for the work of Szymborska: "Dozens of manuals try to make Lacan comprehensible, but I can expose the original text. / If there are 54,000 impotent men and each penis averages six inches, how many miles of useless penis are we dealing with? // This is an open book exam." On the other hand, a four-lined, slant rhymed poem like "First Kiss" belongs unmistakably to Rudnitsky; the poem is an economical demonstration of her abilities as a formalist: "The night a boy's tongue / wriggled past my lips / the river ceased to run, / exposed a flopping fish."

"Exurbia" and "The Banker's Apartment," respectively the book's third and fourth sections, use sonnet sequences as a means to express journeys that are simultaneously physical and emotional. Rudnitsky is not the first poet to recognize the benefits of using linked sonnets to build a narrative. In Annie Finch's anthology An Exaltation of Forms, Marilyn Hacker explains in her essay why so many poets are drawn to...