Iteration Nets by Karla Kelsey (review)

colorado review 162 suggesting that these comforts pale when paired with the sixteen men reduced to “ashes,” of whom no memory will remain. The book as a whole, much like this fable, renders difficult subjects with lyricism and grace. In short, Craig Morgan Teicher’s Cradle Book and Sarah Goldstein’s Fables offer insightful social commentary, delivered in plaintive, beautifully written prose. Both collections are filled with formal choices that align meaningfully with the author’s work. Iteration Nets, by Karla Kelsey Ahsahta Press, 2010 reviewed by Jesse Damiani Improvisation dances with tradition in Karla Kelsey’s sophomore collection, Iteration Nets—a book obsessed with the notion of intertextuality and the development of meaning. Drawing upon influences ranging from St. Augustine to Gertrude Stein, Kelsey crafts a text that uses the heritage and tradition of the English language to link the outside world with the created world the poems inhabit and then re-inhabit. The first section, “Sonnet Packet Enclosures,” is a progression of nineteen sonnets. As explained in the Process Note, the original a, b, c, d, e (etc.) lines of each sonnet are pulled from an external text. The subsequent a, b, c, d, and e rhyming lines are Zukofsky-esque translations—lines built to offer a “loose homophonic” mirror to drive the language. In the section’s most accomplished poems, this repackaging not only maintains sonic consistency via immanence, but also furthers the thematic evolution of the poem, as evidenced in “12.1”: Mind enduring. Rotation of worlds enduring. I am on his shoulders and he is to me a machine, time’s end during location of words interring iamb songs, this smoldered land. Flee this tomb. Be. Say I’m seen. In structuring these sonnets based on sonic and syllabic reinterpretation , Kelsey manipulates the idea of slippage to confront 163 Book Notes (and ultimately support) the avant-garde argument that language is inoperative—that complete and immediate comprehension of a sender’s desired meaning by the receiver is a logistical impossibility. In fact, these poems push directly into those very moments: the crucial junctures in which the inevitability of language actually induces multiple interpretations. In response to this lack of absolute specificity (at least in the way of transcendent understanding), the poems tear into the subconscious, offering figurative and aesthetic re-creations of the complex psychological grappling that takes place in the speaker’s mind. In doing so, the poems reveal that nothing can be distilled to a single fixed meaning, and they revel in that unfettered freedom. What is established in the first movement forms the literal foundation for “Riven Arc Explosions,” the second section of the book. Operating within the construct of the prose poem, Kelsey uses formal liberation to cultivate more detailed passages that infuse philosophy and landscape into the once-snug spaces of the “Enclosures.” Despite the increased length, however, the language maintains muscularity in lyricism. The speaker juxtaposes image and rhetoric until the two become inextricably intertwined . In “7.2,” Kelsey establishes a voice seeking to make sense of the surrounding world through this process of juxtaposition : I threw away abstraction, or tried to throw away abstraction , thoughts such as: death is a non-relational possibility, etcetera. A mind-tried focus that inevitably failed. Precisely for this reason death is utterly relational , the world and me suspended in inquiring. Unlike the terse confidence of “7.1” (“I threw away abstraction. Mind-tried focus, / the world and me, / suspended in inquiring while I, / a purled en’my…”), the voice that emerges in “7.2” is desirous for space and the vulnerability necessary in learning via discourse. In the same way, the rest of the poems in this section correspond with their first-section counterparts. The speaker delves further into this cerebral panorama, ultimately finding herself watching “the sky crack open,” standing still in “the snow-stilled world” while “doves [pour] up.” Just as the first section undergirds the second, the second colorado review 164 supports the third, a section consisting of erasures of the poems found in section 2. White space dominates the page in “Fragile Ladder Barques,” punctuated by tight lyrical snippets. Visually, these poems are stunning, but what is more...