Life After Rugby by Eileen G'Sell (review)

The opening epigraphs by Simone Weil and Mike Tyson in Eileen G'Sell's stunning Life After Rugby foreshadow what is to come in G'Sell's tour de force of a debut collection. Masterful at juxtaposition and possessing an uncanny sense of the tremulous line where agency, violence, desire, and otherness collide, G'Sell's sinuous, protean poems defy, in turns, logic, reason, and gravity, while she inscribes the self and its instability in a way that shows language, mind, and landscape to be inextricably bound.

As with other self-definitional debut collections, such as Analicia Sotelo's Virgin or Kai Carlson-Wee's Rail, many of G'Sell's poems can be read as ars poeticas. From "I Am, As Always": "I am all the time consumable, clarified / butter in a bowl of milk." And from "Follow the Girl in the Red Boots":

I am tired of "Du bist wunderbar."I am smart as snow on Valentine's night.I am a place of silt and lonely anecdotes.Plenty of people are.

G'Sell is a master, not of disguise, but subterfuge. She finds, alarmingly, ways to imbue her poems with barbed wit, with genuine interrogations of intimacy, metaphysics, and the sublime. "There are places where the precipice / of reason is the reason. Hold on / to my wreckage or, please, let me go."

How and whether to believe are the collection's underlying metaphysical heft, and the speaker addresses these weighty themes with humor and élan: "Sometimes I believe if we all just believed, we'd all get to be adorable" ("After Camus Comes Out of a Coma"). And from the poem "Ilona's Eyelids": "The cold, soft lips of belief." Despite widely ranging dictions and epistemologies (e.g. between childhood and the lived present, between pop culture and classical literature), G'Sell manages to create both lyric tension as well as a devastating enigmatic quality, in forms both oblique and direct. Her poems, in short, are more door than key.

From "Real Butter":

"The secret is not hidingFrom the music at a party.We are more important than the secret,We are more practical than the secret, We are more secret than the secret,Which makes us the secret."

Here, love and other experiences not easily deconstructed are inextricable from filmic and literary modes. In this, the speaker foregrounds the text as well as the self as a constructed thing. "I am not your father, but I am cinematic" (from "Ode to Taxi Driver").

The chosen economy, in many poems in the collection, is libidinal, but in this context, the libido is also in service to performativity: the performance of the real.

From "Ode to Clint Eastwood":

"When I love it is like I am dyingTo make a very moving story.

When I move it is like I am dyingTo make a story that you love."

Speaking of movement, this collection is nothing if not kinetic. In this poem and others, the emphasis is not on static truths or realities but the elision of meaning in and through movement, akin to a jump shot in film. "Drive," in particular, marries ars poetica to a need for speed: "I was never your slushbox beautiful nothing I was agency movement clutch clutch clutch." The speaker in these muscular poems moves so quickly, and speaks so fluidly, that a reader might feel swindled if they didn't feel so provoked and charmed. No stranger to the politics of neo-sincerity (or post-irony), the speaker is also bent on deconstructing lyric modes which would couch truth in aesthetics: "I refuse to make this beautiful," says the speaker of "Like Good News from a Pretty Girl." Or from "Catastrophe Was Quite Polite": "Symmetry gets easy."

Intentionality also comes under scrutiny here and in multiple poems the speaker questions how our facility with a native language can contribute to modes of perception that do little more than reify already-known worlds. Here, the dissimilar and the strange take precedence in ways formal and thematic...