Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: That Which Comes After
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: https://www.alexis-pope.com/
CITY: Chicago
STATE: IL
COUNTRY: United States
NATIONALITY:
Her site says she’s living in Chicago, but Amazon say Brooklyn, NY.
RESEARCHER NOTES:
| LC control no.: | no2015025393 |
|---|---|
| LCCN Permalink: | https://lccn.loc.gov/no2015025393 |
| HEADING: | Pope, Alexis |
| 000 | 00873nz a2200205n 450 |
| 001 | 9790216 |
| 005 | 20150225073534.0 |
| 008 | 150224n| azannaabn |n aaa c |
| 010 | __ |a no2015025393 |
| 035 | __ |a (OCoLC)oca10096444 |
| 040 | __ |a InNd |b eng |e rda |c InNd |
| 053 | _0 |a PS3616.O6488 |
| 100 | 1_ |a Pope, Alexis |
| 370 | __ |e Brooklyn (New York, N.Y.) |f Ohio |
| 373 | __ |a Brooklyn College |
| 375 | __ |a female |
| 377 | __ |a eng |
| 670 | __ |a Soft threat, 2014: |b title page (Alexis Pope) page 108 (lives in Brooklyn; this is her first book) |
| 670 | __ |a Brooklyn poets, Alexis Pope, viewed February 19, 2015, via WWW |b (works as an editor for ILK; is completing an MFA at Brooklyn College) |
| 670 | __ |a Boxcar Poetry Review, Spring 2013, viewed February 19, 2015, via WWW |b (lives in Ohio; co-curates The Big Big Mess Reading Series; a contributing editor for Whiskey Island Magazine) |
PERSONAL
Children: one daughter.
EDUCATION:Brooklyn College, M.F.A.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Writer and educator. Brooklyn College, NY, instructor; ILK (literary journal), editor; Writers Center, Chicago, IL, instructor.
AWARDS:Joanna Cargill First Book Prize, for Soft Threat.
WRITINGS
Has also released poetry chapbooks, including Debt, girl erases girl, Bone Matter, and No Good. Contributor of poems and reviews to publications, including Columbia Poetry Review, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Forklift, HTML Giant, Octopus, and Washington Square.
SIDELIGHTS
Alexis Pope is a writer and teacher. She earned a master’s degree from Brooklyn College. Pope has worked as a writing instructor at Brooklyn College and at the Writers Center, in Chicago, Illinois. She also served as the editor of a literary journal called ILK. Pope has released poetry chapbooks, including Debt, girl erases girl, Bone Matter, and No Good. She has written poems and reviews that have appeared in publications, including Columbia Poetry Review, Coconut, Denver Quarterly, Entropy, Forklift, HTML Giant, Octopus, and Washington Square.
Soft Threat
In 2014, Pope released her first collection of poems, called Soft Threat. The volume won the Joanna Cargill First Book Prize. In an interview with a contributor to the Brooklyn Poets website, Pope stated: “I feel like so many of the poems in Soft Threat … are dealing or coping with the struggle of daily life. The grasping or aching for a change, but the constant lack of answers or resolution. There’s so much looking back. Every day, right? Every day there’s some memory reimagined. Sometimes it’s a happier time, sometimes not. And in every relationship we have, whether love or friendship or other, there is some dissolution, some breakapart/breakdown that needs to be worked through. I often felt a floating-ness when writing these poems.”
Among the poems in Soft Threat is “The Moon and the Pilot Light, For You.” In this piece, the narrator uses imagery involving water to describe a failing relationship. Rivers, rafts, and buoys are mentioned. The narrator goes on to bring up other natural imagery, including a forest, patches of clover, and sunflowers. Pope told the same contributor to the Brooklyn Poets website: “Here I see meditation, stasis, sorrow and loss. It ends naked, obviously. Because what else are we in our relationships, in our knowing of other people. Being human is weird.”
Bone Matter/This Will Be His Legacy
Also released in 2014 was Bone Matter/This Will Be His Legacy, a split volume featuring Pope’s poems combined with flash fiction from another writer, Aubrey Hirsch.
A writer on the Nanofiction website suggested: “The unassuming cover downplays the exquisite vibrancy of the stories and poems contained within. The variety of influences suggested by the poems and short shorts reveal the diversity of today’s publishing climate. Hirsch and Pope’s works, when read together, produce an energetic experience much like that of a well-planned open mic night.” The same writer added: “Bone Matter has plenty of violent moments, but the mental and physical effects of trauma blend together in a compelling and appealing way.” The writer continued: “Bone Matter as a whole seems like a tragic collection, but Pope writes her speakers with an awareness of their vulnerability.”
That Which Comes After
That Which Comes After, another poetry collection from Pope, finds a narrator discussing an unhealthy romantic relationship with a withholding partner. The narrator also discusses mental health and self-medicating.
“Pope’s great strength throughout is her surprising enjambments, which shift meaning and attention from one line to the next,” asserted a reviewer in Publishers Weekly. In a lengthy assessment of the collection on the Diagram website, a critic commented: “Alexis Pope’s That Which Comes After is a chronicle and archive of everything that comes after, encompassing both afterglow and aftermath, without the heavy hand of nostalgia or indifference which could potentially rob the work of honest insight and emotionality. The poems can be read as individualized poems, sure, but the work can also be read as a book-length poem, a testament not only to the form of the book-length poem genre, but also to the cohesiveness of the voice as a whole.” The same critic added: “It would be remiss to not mention that, individually with titles, the poems also have a dazzling, coherent, graceful life of their own.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Publishers Weekly, April 16, 2018, review of That Which Comes After, p. 71.
ONLINE
Alexis Pope website, https://www.alexis-pope.com/ (September 4, 2018).
Brooklyn Poets, http://brooklynpoets.org/ (October 26, 2014), author interview.
Diagram, http://www.thediagram.com/ (August 13, 2018), review of That Which Comes After.
Entropy, https://entropymag.org/ (June 8, 2016), Danielle Susi, author interview.
Nanofiction, http://nanofiction.org/ (July 6, 2015), Anna Saikin, review of Bone Matter/This Will Be His Legacy.
Alexis Pope is a queer poet and writer living in Chicago. Author of That Which Comes After (Big Lucks Books, 2018) and Soft Threat (2014), Pope has published four chapbooks, most recently Debt (Madhouse Press, 2017).
QUOTED: "I feel like so many of the poems in Soft Threat ... are dealing or coping with the struggle of daily life. The grasping or aching for a change, but the constant lack of answers or resolution. There’s so much looking back. Every day, right? Every day there’s some memory reimagined. Sometimes it’s a happier time, sometimes not. And in every relationship we have, whether love or friendship or other, there is some dissolution, some breakapart/breakdown that needs to be worked through. I often felt a floating-ness when writing these poems."
"Here I see meditation, stasis, sorrow and loss. It ends naked, obviously. Because what else are we in our relationships, in our knowing of other people. Being human is weird."
Poet Of The Week Alexis Pope
October 20–26, 2014
Alexis Pope’s debut collection Soft Threat (Coconut Books, 2014) was selected for the Joanna Cargill First Book Prize. She is the author of three chapbooks, Bone Matter (The Lettered Streets Press, 2014), No Good (H_NGM_N, 2013) and girl erases girl (dancing girl press, 2013). Her poetry can be found in Denver Quarterly, Washington Square, Octopus, Coconut, Columbia Poetry Review, Verse Daily, Spoke Too Soon: A Journal of the Longer, Forklift, Ohio and Sixth Finch, among others. Her reviews have appeared or are forthcoming in HTML Giant and Entropy. She works as an editor for ILK, is involved with Belladonna* Collective, and is completing an MFA at Brooklyn College. She lives in Prospect Heights.
Moon and The Pilot Light, For You
We keep rewinding past the spot
we were looking to replay. Five years
in which I felt like a buoy. It’s clear now
that I mistook comfort for fatigue. The way
my hands cramp in the center and we can
no longer hold onto the raft. I am done
with floating. In the distance, a graph
displaying exactly where it all went wrong.
In the center a violet glow where we got lost
in the lavender. The field next to the river.
I can see the blue on my arms, the fresh dew
and new sun rising over my damp shoulders.
Where did you run? Behind me in the forest
I hear a wolf permeate the air with a resistance
I have only come to expect from you, my pet.
These rocks are slippery and my feet are not
calloused enough. I’m listening for compassion.
Instead I find more clover. A trampled sunflower
where our naked bodies should be. The sky bends
forward to make me feel less alone, but all I see
is the endless space, the empty planets. The river
is full, reaching into what I cannot see.
And in your eyes, I am familiar. This match
won’t light underwater. Together we ate
through years and so much bread
dipped in soup. A taste of neglect on my skin.
Time keeps getting closer and closer. My hair
needs washing. I need to stand up straight
and walk naked into the courtyard
so you can see me from your window.
I will rain onto the sidewalk and get lost inside
everything I imagine water to be.
–Originally published in Stoked, Vol. VI, 2014.
Tell us about the making of this poem.
Oh, gosh. I’m trying to remember the making of this. I wrote this maybe a couple years ago now. I feel like so many of the poems in Soft Threat, where this one appears, are dealing or coping with the struggle of daily life. The grasping or aching for a change, but the constant lack of answers or resolution. There’s so much looking back. Every day, right? Every day there’s some memory reimagined. Sometimes it’s a happier time, sometimes not. And in every relationship we have, whether love or friendship or other, there is some dissolution, some breakapart/breakdown that needs to be worked through.
I often felt a floating-ness when writing these poems. And I see that here. In what I’m working on now there’s an intense drive, a painful expulsion or necessary excavation. I’m focusing more on femininity and the body and ritual. Here I see meditation, stasis, sorrow and loss. It ends naked, obviously. Because what else are we in our relationships, in our knowing of other people. Being human is weird.
What are you working on right now?
Too much!
I have a manuscript I’m trying to work with, move around. The working title is in lieu of suicide, but that probably won’t stick. There’s a chapbook (BODIES) I’m trying to place, and a newer one I just finished comprised of mostly “domestic poems” (which aren’t, like, exactly what they sound like). Also working on a series of “Ritual Training” poems, along with some shorter prose style pieces, and editing a few (super) long poems. In addition to all that, I’m trying to write more reviews. But my reviews are more like ‘readings’ or a ‘hey, let me take a walk with your poem and make out.’
Oh, I’m also finishing an MFA in Poetry at Brooklyn College, working with the amazing folks at Belladonna* and a handful of other poetry-related odd jobs. Sometimes I’m not sure we can ever do enough.
What’s a good day for you?
Wake up around 7am, grind some beans for the French press, walk my daughter the five blocks to school, walk back to my apartment and write. If it’s a really good day I have enough money to leave the house and grab more coffee elsewhere or *maybe* even buy something from Unnameable. Some of the best days involve nothing pressing, no deadlines, a really knockout book and some grass to sit on. That, or I’ll walk down to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden or check out whatever is new at the Brooklyn Museum. Not a lot of days go like this, but when they do it’s pretty ok.
How long have you lived in Brooklyn? What neighborhood do you live in? What do you like most about it?
I moved to Brooklyn about a year and a half ago, and live in Prospect Heights. I did consider moving this past June, but my PTSD from getting this apartment in the first place was still too much to deal with. There’s a lot to like and dislike about this neighborhood. I mean, there’s no shortage of places to go and things to do, but I would like to be somewhere where I could, you know, be surrounded by less rich people.
When I moved here I didn’t really know anything about Brooklyn. As in, neighborhoods and such. I have like a running list of next places to live. But maybe that’s what NYC is. A constant search for the better place to be. Meaning, a place you can ‘afford’ and an apartment you can stand (or stretch out in). Right now my goal is, like, a closet and a bedroom with a window. So, you know, aiming high.
Share with us a defining Brooklyn experience, good, bad or in between.
This is hard because simply living here is always good, bad or in between. There are the ‘I love NY’ days and the ‘F*%$ New York’ days. I think the fact that everyone understands this is interesting. Last night, on my way to a friend’s place to have a wine and workshop thing, I was walking down Bergen (turning left on Grand) and was simultaneously thinking how beautiful and strange it was here. Like, the beauty I see in some industrial style buildings, some brownstones, some garbage blowing tumbleweed-style across the sidewalk at night. Anyway, I actually think that’s what I love: the constant involvement of the city in your life, the constant conversation you have with it. It’s sort of like this other person you live inside and sometimes hate but can’t (and don’t want to) escape. That’s normal though, when you’re living inside someone.
Also: the emergency room at Methodist Hospital at, like, 1am.
But really: finally walking out of the subway at midnight when you had to be in Manhattan for some weird obligation and you step out, and you’re in Brooklyn and you’re like ‘yeah, this is good.’
Favorite Brooklyn poet(s), dead and/or alive?
Are there any poets in Brooklyn?
Favorite Brooklyn bookstore(s)?
Without a doubt Unnameable. I live a block from there, so after the first few months living here I had to ban myself from even walking in unless I could afford something. Because, honestly, there is no way to leave that place without buying at least three books. (Apparently I’m in a lot of love/hate relationships, one of which is walking through the rocks in their back space during a reading.) Also, there’s Berl’s which is such an amazing thing even to exist, and Mellow Pages because it’s the most welcoming and supportive spot. There’s always a friend there and an escape from the ‘typical’ poetry reading.
Favorite places to read and write in Brooklyn (besides home, assuming you like to be there)?
I’ve been writing mostly at home lately, but if I do go out to read and write I usually walk over to Sit & Wonder on Washington. The employees are generally sweet, they make a mean Americano, and play good music. I’ll try Outpost sometimes because they’re open later but the house music usually forces me out within an hour. Lincoln Station when I want wine with my poems, which is always. In the summer: parks. The train is probably the best place to get reading done, though.
Favorite places to go in Brooklyn not involving reading or writing?
I love eating, so I’m in a pretty great city. Sunshine Company has the best cocktails ever and is worth the splurge for dinner or brunch, whathaveyou. The Grand Army Greenmarket on Saturdays, Brooklyn Botanic Garden, Nighthawk Cinema, Ovenly, Brooklyn Label, McCarren Park, Prospect Park, Do or Dine, Dynaco. I mean, there’s a lot. The Narrows seems to be a spot I’ve been to frequently in the last couple months, and Tutu’s because a disco ball and really good fries. Basically: feed me.
But my favorite place is Claire Devoogd’s apartment. Do you know Claire? You should.
Last awesome book(s)/poem(s) you read?
Recently finished Elizabeth Colen’s The Green Condition, which has been sitting inside me for a while now. About to open Claudia Rankine’s Citizen in the next day or so, which I’ve been putting off because I know I won’t move until I finish it. CD Wright’s One Big Self is the thing I’m going to sit down with today for a class I’m taking at Hunter. (I read Deepstep Come Shining last year and died.) OH! A couple months ago I went to the park with Janice Lee’s Damnation and can’t stop thinking about it. And ohmygod Coeur de Lion by Ariana Reines which I read for the first time (how did I not read this earlier?) a couple weeks ago. Some books you can’t underline shit because it would just be the whole book.
Fill in the blanks in these lines by Whitman:
I celebrate
my blankness
And what I press
against you should hold
very close For every minute
you aren’t touching me
as good as I touch you.
If you have time, write a nine-line poem using these end-words (in whatever order) from Jay Z’s “Brooklyn Go Hard”: father, Dodger, jack, rob, sin, pen, love, Brooklyn, Biggie.
Brooklyn go hard
Biggie on a brick wall
Sin I swallow inside for love or
Something silver some pen that
Robs me of a past w/o a father
Flip over the Dodger’s game
Bright tongue in the solution
Find you under my bed
Why Brooklyn?
Where else is it this OK to be a writer, a poet especially. I’ve never felt so normal.
Home
Food
Dinnerview: Alexis Pope
written by Danielle Susi June 8, 2016
Alexis Pope is the author of Soft Threat (2014), as well as three chapbooks. Recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in Denver Quarterly, cream city review, Poor Claudia, Prelude, and The Volta, among others. She received her MFA from Brooklyn College, where she taught Composition and was a member of the Belladonna* Collective. Pope now lives in Chicago with her daughter, works in a very tall building, and recently ‘taught poetry’ for The Writers Center.
Here, she talks inherited snacking instincts, ice cream in bed, and the way meals make families.
On her all-time favorite meal:
I don’t know that I can pick an all-time favorite. I’m a Libra, so making my mind up about anything is more than a chore. Like, the favorite anything questions almost put me into a mild form of panic. I don’t want to choose one meal over another so as not to hurt feelings / of the food, of the people I did or did not eat it with. So I’ll do this:
My dad was in town a couple weeks ago and because we haven’t really spent time alone together since my daughter was born, I wanted to have a conversation like we used to over a meal he can’t get in Ohio. We went to an upscale cocktail joint that is very cozy and casual. I drank an Old Fashioned and he had some local beer, I think Daisy Cutter, and we ordered hard boiled eggs (I grew up with that egg stench in the house every time he’d make egg salad / we’re both fans) that each came in these little dishes and neither of us knew what to do so we just did. After that we walked across the street and ordered the same drinks and a cheese plate with all the extras (I inherited my dad’s snacking instincts: cheese with apples, cream cheese on anything, peanut butter always, and more cheese), which we devoured happily.
The main coarse was fried chicken and biscuits (There’s a place where I grew up that was known for its fried chicken and every time we went to my grandma’s we’d order a big bucket with a side of JoJos) but the chicken thighs were beaten/flattened and seasoned and fried and then rolled up and sliced into circles—roulette, I think. These biscuits were something else and I’m not going to describe them, but the conversation was able to take place, move through corridors of memory, open and unfold due to the meal.
On what the light looks like during her favorite meal of the day:
Meals are intense times of the day when there’s a four-year-old you’re feeding. But if I get a morning, it’s coffee and toast with butter while the dark turns light. No music yet except the wind and birds, rattle of the El. I miss Brooklyn for the sunsets though. I’d sit on my fire escape with a glass of wine and watch the shades collide until there was nothing. The traffic lights reflecting on the street.
On snacking while writing:
I’m more of a water/coffee/tea while writing person.
On her go-to late-night snack:
Ice cream in bed with one big spoon, dark chocolate with sea salt kept cold in the fridge, salty crackers with a strong cheese—these are a few of my favorite things.
On her food quirks:
Salt and vinegar potato chips dipped in ketchup. The end.
On her final meal request:
God, this is hard—but I think it’d be a big spread across a large table with room enough for everyone I love. We all bring a dish that means something to us, or simply was made with our own hands. And we share it all, passing it around.
Over the winter I got to prepare and eat a week’s worth of dinners with some dear friends, and I think you make your own family that way. It’s an intimate thing / adding spices together, sharing the chopping, mixing, stirring, and then to sit and taste what you each brought to the meal. That’s good. That’s all I could want for a last meal.
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QUOTED: "Pope's great strength throughout is her surprising enjambments, which shift meaning and attention from one line to the next."
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That Which Comes After
Publishers Weekly.
265.16 (Apr. 16, 2018): p71. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
That Which Comes After
Alexis Pope. Big Lucks, $12 trade paper (114p) ISBN 978-1-941985-43-4
Pope (Soft Threat) meditates on illness, the act of medicating, and the uncomfortable realities of a body's yearning amid a noxious relationship in her second collection, essentially a long poem in untitled sections that blend into one another. "Why would you tell me/ Your depression amplifies/ The pain I've not been allowed," Pope's speaker asks a now-absent counterpart. Her compressed shorthand reflects the movement of the mind and accounts, list-like, for the quotidian acts one must perform in the course of a day. Her line breaks and linguistic shifts often resemble an emotionally laden stammer: "Couldn't take me/ Into your arms last night/ Might be the last/ Where I tell you it's all/ This time I mean/ Don't take me back I won't/ Take you anywhere/ With that attitude." Pope's great strength throughout is her surprising enjambments, which shift meaning and attention from one line to the next. "Lie to me in the winter/ I'm doing better/ push my foot into the shoes/ lace doesn't make me sexier/ than I already am," she writes. By focusing on the internal and domestic spaces of body, bed, and home, Pope imbues them with value and complexity: "Trace the nostalgia/ Of this forfeiture/ As if I've built/ Anything with these hands." (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"That Which Comes After." Publishers Weekly, 16 Apr. 2018, p. 71. Book Review Index Plus,
http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A536532701/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS& xid=42202be3. Accessed 12 Aug. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A536532701
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QUOTED: "Alexis Pope's That Which Comes After is a chronicle and archive of everything that comes after, encompassing both afterglow and aftermath, without the heavy hand of nostalgia or indifference which could potentially rob the work of honest insight and emotionality. The poems can be read as individualized poems, sure, but the work can also be read as a book-length poem, a testament not only to the form of the book-length poem genre, but also to the cohesiveness of the voice as a whole."
"It would be remiss to not mention that, individually with titles, the poems also have a dazzling, coherent, graceful life of their own."
[ToC]
REVIEW
Alexis Pope, That Which Comes After, Big Lucks Books, 2018
[Review Guidelines]
That Which Comes After
Alexis Pope's That Which Comes After is a chronicle and archive of everything that comes after, encompassing both afterglow and aftermath, without the heavy hand of nostalgia or indifference which could potentially rob the work of honest insight and emotionality. The poems can be read as individualized poems, sure, but the work can also be read as a book-length poem, a testament not only to the form of the book-length poem genre, but also to the cohesiveness of the voice as a whole. A reader could so easily ignore the titles, allowing the book a different kind of life on the page; however, it would be remiss to not mention that, individually with titles, the poems also have a dazzling, coherent, graceful life of their own. Whether read as a collection or a book-length work, the voice of the speaker seamlessly obfuscates, eviscerates, remonstrates, and celebrates that which comes after in our lives, both presently, in the past, and in the projection of potentiality of what could come after in the future.
That Which Comes After also has an undeniable documentary poetics quality, as if the point-of-view is a lens through which the speaker channels the act of witness to and accounting of the joy and horror of life in equal measures. Each poem wields itself as a fluid zoom, connecting the language and mood one into the next in a trajectory resembling photography or film. For example, in "What Constitutes Winning" the speaker says:
Bright blue convertible
Could describe the first years
You've never let me
It's only now I'm realizing
My last years in monochrome
and in "If I Take My Pill":
My apologies
To the projector
Some pictures
Should never be.
In these moments, like so many in the work, the language and lines enact the very essence of film and witness—be it picture or video—allowing the reader into a visual juxtaposition of documenting like that of bright blue with essence of monochrome or a montage sequence as if through a projector, one slide after the next, of captured moments, even if they, as the speaker says, should never be. Still, they are immortalized throughout within a documentary medium (video, photo, text) to act as a witness.
What Does Come After?
And after what, exactly? Pope shows us the survival of what comes after an abusive relationship; suicide attempt(s)?; motherhood and miscarriage; loss of people, places, and things; the journey into maturity and adulthood; and even what can or should or does come after the minutiae of life—which can and will ultimately aid in saving us—such as hooking up with someone, cocktails, the Internet. It is the collocation of the enacting and documenting of the 'after' where the power of the poetry resides. For example, in the theme of an abusive relationship, the relationship of the I to the Other is explored in the revisiting, reimagining, living inside what comes after. In "What's the Saddest Song," the speaker says,
Do you even have
Plans for the future
Something he asked me
To remind I have nothing
Of value to offer
And in documenting moments where the expected is supposed to happen, we are encapsulated by losses and the absence of the other even when close. In "You Are Compared to Silence":
I wake at 5am contracting
Literal pain in my neck travels
The distance through
Approach another life
Where the one beside me
Gives a fuck about my pain
Or wants to help I'm not
Complaining but here I am
Through the investigation of the relationship, the I moves into an evolution of awareness of personhood, what has come after for her: "I think violence might be/more intimate but it's not," "Someplace new & without/A person I called my life," "You remind me how empty/Being covered can be," and "We exist in the ending for/Years rebuilt at our sides."
LOL (Haha Funny or Uncanny or Irony)
While the heaviness of the 'after' seems bleak, there is so much humor and levity in this book which feels like relief, both for the reader and for the speaker, true to life itself. This humor can be found in individual lines, moments, and what can be read as titles such as "I Am So Reckless in These Five-Dollar Jeans," "Bookshelves Can Be Sexy," "We Banged Each Other's Others," and "I Want Everyone to Like Me So Hard." In "I Want Everyone to Like Me So Hard," the speaker says,
Up in elementary school we tried
To imitate Aerosmith's Crazy
Remember how important music
Videos were to your childhood
If not you're too young to talk to me
and in "I Mean There Are Specific":
All my exes
Think I'm cute still
But also hate me
With this much
Lexapro sure it's possible
and in "In Peacetime We Feel the Same As":
Finish this Corona
We're too old to have such bad taste
These places of levity are not few-and-far between, but arrive exactly when needed, to allow the reader (and the speaker) to be reminded of the multiplicity that every situation and occurrence in our lives contain, to give us permission to laugh at the absurdity, and to remember the lightness that can line every burden that the 'after' itself carries.
That Which Comes After: And They All Lived Happily Ever After (The End)
By the end of the book, an awakening occurs—a personal and spiritual evolution of the speaker, a sense of growth and rebirth, of movement and making room for, and an acknowledgment that this evolution is only the beginning, a sense of thriving (and not just surviving) the 'after,' and the sense that, we, too, all of us, can thrive in our own 'after,' in whatever permutation it arrives for us. The speaker says, in "I've Lived Half Awake Before":
State my rebirth
All grown up
The distance between
Hatch an egg
...
Blacked out a name
Blacked out another
That's not resistance
But moving over
The reader (and the speaker/I) revels in a sense of closure and reassurance, even if the feeling is fleeting, as it is in life. Here, the final credits roll, and an ending (and beginning, which is the constant ouroboros we all face) will arrive in all of its glory, to teach and heal and pervade, and hopefully, triumph. Pope writes, in the final line, "Whatever you left with stays gone," and, we can only hope for this sentiment to be true. [KJS]
QUOTED: "The unassuming cover downplays the exquisite vibrancy of the stories and poems contained within. The variety of influences suggested by the poems and short shorts reveal the diversity of today’s publishing climate. Hirsch and Pope’s works, when read together, produce an energetic experience much like that of a well-planned open mic night."
"Bone Matter has plenty of violent moments, but the mental and physical effects of trauma blend together in a compelling and appealing way."
"Bone Matter as a whole seems like a tragic collection, but Pope writes her speakers with an awareness of their vulnerability."
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Browse: Home / News & Features / REVIEWS / 2015 / July / Alexis Pope, Bone Matter and Aubrey Hirsch, This Will Be His Legacy
Alexis Pope, Bone Matter and Aubrey Hirsch, This Will Be His Legacy
Anna Saikin
July 6, 2015 · in REVIEWS
Alexis Pope, Bone Matter and Aubrey Hirsch, This Will Be His Legacy
Split Series Volume 1
The Lettered Streets Press, 2014
92 pp.
ISBN: 978-0-991863-1-0
Alexis Pope’s Bone Matter and Aubrey Hirsch’s This Will Be His Legacy form two halves of the first volume of Lettered Street Press’s Split Series. The press is a “collective of sorts” based out of Seattle and Chicago, and publishes poetry, fiction, nonfiction, and hybrid genres. The series is bound in a pastel modernist interpretation of an eighteenth-century marbled hardcover, with the chapbooks’ title and author printed on each side in a white all-caps serif font in a black box. The unassuming cover downplays the exquisite vibrancy of the stories and poems contained within. The variety of influences suggested by the poems and short shorts reveal the diversity of today’s publishing climate. Hirsch and Pope’s works, when read together, produce an energetic experience much like that of a well-planned open mic night.
tumblr_inline_nkk4itH6Lx1sgvzteThat’s not to say that the two chapbooks tackle similar territory, or even present their topics in a similar manner. Hirsch’s This Will Be His Legacy is a flash fiction collection of pseudohistorical biographies. She describes the characters’ lives as they appear off stage, focusing on events and possibilities that aren’t taught in high school history classes. The collection begins with “Amelia,” a romantic story that describes what really happened on Amelia Earhart’s fateful trip across the Atlantic in a Lockheed Electra with her navigator, Fred Noonan. As Amelia resists the names that society wants to call her, she “concentrates instead on her flying” and her eventual escape. Amelia’s alternative history provides a romantic twist on the pioneering feminist’s life. Other notable flash fictions in the collection include “The Nine Innings of Morrie Rath,” the story of the hitter struck by a ball when the World Series was rigged in 1919, recounted as if his entire life is a baseball game. Rath’s disappointment and inability to find closure with his life’s defining event appear like stages of grief and rage, and Hirsch handles his evolving emotions with clarity and compassion Although Rath’s tragedy seemingly has little to do with Amelia’s disappearance, both stories emphasize the complex afterlives of individuals who have been defined by a singular event.
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Though some of the stories are experimental, Hirsch also excels at narrative style. “Michael Collins” describes Collins’s experience as the only Apollo 11 astronaut not to land on the moon. As a lonely man traveling through space, he enjoys a sublime solitude that is every bit as transcendent as that of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. Hirsch includes fictional characters as well, such as Rachel Garrett from the Star Trek universe, who time travels on the Enterprise without warning: “One moment, she’s seven years old eating pancakes with her mother, then she’s burying her first officer after a Klingon attack.” Garrett’s travels act as a metaphor for major events in her life and allow Hirsch to explore the deeper meanings of our experiences without sounding trite.
Pope’s poetry in Bone Matter takes a more personal approach. Recurring images such as seas, caves, and water tie the collection together, and while the chapbook does not follow a single narrative thread, many of the poems deal with the wreckage of broken hearts, waves, or structures. Bone Matter has plenty of violent moments, but the mental and physical effects of trauma blend together in a compelling and appealing way. The fragmented poem “Love Song for the After,” for example, describes the emotional aftereffects that happen when a baby is lost in utero. As the speaker tries to escape her feelings, she uses ambiguous phrases to signal the poem’s undefined agency: “I happen upon / a muscle spasm or does that / happen upon me?” The speaker in “Monologue for an Empty Bay” also suffers a breakdown after a relationship ends, but the poem wavers on whether she wants out before, during, or after her liaison ends. Frequently repeated words including “never,” “almost,” and “maybe” have the effect of negating or rejecting possibilities before they are even uttered and suggest that despite her soul-searching, the speaker herself doesn’t know the answer.
tumblr_inline_nkk418gd9L1sgvzteBone Matter as a whole seems like a tragic collection, but Pope writes her speakers with an awareness of their vulnerability as they seemingly blame themselves for things out of their control. The speakers have an unfulfilled need and, despite their aversion to trauma, are uncompromising as they try to heal their wounds. The last poem, “Between the End Scene & Your Mouth” provides the chapbook with moment of closure during a dramatic pause that clicks: “& there is no one here to tell me how wrong I am // When I say no one, I mean // her.” Pope uses italics sparingly, so the nameless “her” resonates with a power that reverberates through the previous poems. While “Between the End Scene & Your Mouth” ends with sadness, the poem gestures toward hope since the speaker at least discovers the source of her listless wanderings.
After consuming This Will Be His Legacy and Bone Matter, I found it impossible to imagine reading one without the other. Both collections suggest that the stories told about us are not always what we would choose, but ones we can accept as part of our personal narrative. The Split Series proves that reading across genres enriches our understanding of both. Readers of both flash fiction and poetry will find much in this collection to satisfy their curiosity, and writers may be inspired to seek collaborators for their next chapbook. This impressive volume shows off the talents of its authors while introducing what has the potential to be a fascinating series. The second volume, featuring Melanie Sweeney and Jasmine Dreame Wagner is set to be released in late May, and promises to be just as shining as the first offering.
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