On Rodeo in Reverse by Lindsey Alexander

At its core, Lindsey Alexander's debut collection, Rodeo in Reverse, focuses on the tension between stillness and wildness. No surprise, then, that the collection takes the rodeo as its titular event. In rodeo, you begin in stillness, move through chaos for a short while, then end in stillness. The stillness that bookends the ride is not the same, though. You begin confidently and end rattled. These poems suggest that even the inverse—rattled to confident—is a wild ride, an escape. Just as the bronco refuses to stay in one place, Alexander's poems refuse to settle as well. We find ourselves in zoos and duels of spaghetti Westerns. We meet pioneers, homesteaders; Cher, Sonny and Chaz Bono; David Letterman, God, tornados. We move from Kentucky to Indiana. We contemplate mathematical sequences, transubstantiation, and hologram theories. We search and search more. Ultimately, the various Is in Alexander's poems seek escape domesticity.

Many of the collection's concerns—both thematic and craft—converge in "Still Life with Bread." The poem's speaker recalls from Hollywood and professors that "Domestic life is such a bore" (hints of Berryman's famous "Life, friends, is boring"). The characters exhibit little physical movement as we would expect in a still life poem. Yet, the perspective and the speaker's mind is skittery, associative, anxious.

The first stanza outlines the 'meaning' of objects in still life paintings: "They show perspective / but also class and skill, my sister of a museum curator / sort of taught me." The speaker quickly moves from the recollection of conventions of still life paintings into displayed bread dough and contemplates:

The beauty of     things, my favoriteof leather and fur, brass finish and cognac-dye, or,I'll cop to it: bedazzled, gluten-injected,arbitrary.

Semantically, things are fuzzy here. The above lines perhaps demand a slower reading pace than normal. Alexander reinforces this with heavy punctuation. Within four lines, the poet uses six commas, one colon, one period. She uses a line break which functions as visual caesura. These various haltings capture the uncertainty bound up in the "sort of" of the first stanza. The speaker's mind does not stop so easily, though. It moves smoothly into philosophizing, heady and heavily punctuated:

To know the self intimately who washesthe face, frames flowers pickedfrom neighbors' yards, poses in her comfortpose on the lawn chair. She is me; me equals                              mundane.

"But back to the bread—," the speaker states shortly after. Up to this point, the poem has demanded us climb its scaffolding of philosophy of art. The harder readers work to unwrap exactly what each assertion in the poem "means," the more serious readers become. The more furrowed are their brows. Alexander knows this. You have been peering into a still life chock full of objects, but in the final two stanzas, the poet urges, let's focus on the bread. With a tonal flip, we are surprised by leveling humor:

…the flour scrapedover the copper measuring cup's lip, anxiety beating its steady digital alert—It's time! My husband can shout

He is risen!like from the Bible, only it's funny                              because

it's not about a Savior.A savior might look leftward (as one mustfrom the right hand of the Father) and notea certain stoutheartedness here in Indiana, in our bad jokesand repetition, each morning breaking miracles ofmore then more more.

You cannot deny Alexander's range. We see a stanza stuffed with stops and starts atop a stanza smoothed-out—with one period, two commas, a parenthetical—as the poem gears up for landing. Overall, the poet's impulse to test the limits of the poem borders on greedy. The poem is filtered through the speaker's perspective, it rotates around the locus of observation of art and domestic realms. The eye is not fixed around one event, and readers who are used to this approach may have adverse reactions to the poem's jitteriness.

Alexander is a poet of oscillation and variation...