Contemporary Authors

• Crawlspace - 2017 Bloof Books, https://smile.amazon.com/Crawlspace-Nikki-Wallschlaeger/dp/0996586857/ref=sr_1_1_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513738721&sr=8-1&keywords=Wallschlaeger%2C+Nikki
• Houses - 2015 Horse Less Press, https://smile.amazon.com/Houses-Nikki-Wallschlaeger/dp/0990813932/ref=sr_1_2_twi_pap_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513738721&sr=8-2&keywords=Wallschlaeger%2C+Nikki

• Nikki Wallschlaeger - http://nikkiwallschlaeger.com/

  Nikki Wallschlaeger

  Her work recently has been featured in jubilat, Georgia Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Witness, PoetryNow podcast through the Poetry Foundation and others. She is the author of the full-length collections Houses (Horseless Press 2015) and Crawlspace (Bloof 2017) as well as the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel from Bloof Books (2016). Her bio can be found at the Poetry Foundation < click here>. She lives in Wisconsin.

• Poetry Foundation - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/nikki-wallschlaeger

  Nikki Wallschlaeger is the author of the full-length collections Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) and Houses (Horseless Press, 2015), as well as the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel from Bloof Books (2016). Her work has been featured or is forthcoming in the Brooklyn Rail, LIT, jubilat, Apogee, Georgia Review, Witness, Denver Quarterly, Spoon River Review, and others. She was an editor for Bettering American Poetry Anthology 2015, a project promoting the work of marginalized writers. She lives in Wisconsin.
  Poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger

  All Kinds of Fires Inside Our Heads

• The Georgia Review - https://thegeorgiareview.com/authors/wallschlaeger-nikki/

  Nikki Wallschlaeger

  Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has recently appeared in P-Queue, Brooklyn Rail, LIT, jubilat, Apogee, and elsewhere. She is the author of the full-length collection Houses (Horse Less Press, 2015) and the graphic chapbook I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (Bloof Books, 2016). Her second full-length book, Crawlspace, is forthcoming from Bloof Books in 2017.

• Elective Affinities - http://electiveaffinitiesusa.blogspot.com/2014/09/nikki-wallschlaeger.html

  Nikki Wallschlaeger

  Nikki Wallschlaeger’s work has been featured in Spork, Likewise Folio, Horse Less Review, Storyscape Journal, Coconut ,The Account, Fanzine & others. She is the author of the chapbook The Frogs at Night ( Shirt Pocket Press) and the chapbook I Would Be the Happiest Bird (Horseless Press). Her first full-length book of poems, HOUSES, is forthcoming from Horseless Press in 2015. She’s also an Assistant Poetry Editor at Coconut Poetry. She lives in Milwaukee, WI and you can reach her at www.nikkiwallschlaeger.com

  Poetry as
  1 survival
  2 witness
  3 salvation

  Poetics

  I don’t remember when I read my first poem. It wasn’t like that for me, I was not influenced by a particular voice or poet that made me consciously decide to take up the craft. That came later, after years of writing on my own. What I do remember is being an angry, depressed and suicidal teenager who wanted to create places for the forces inside myself that I was only beginning to understand.
  In Break Every Rule, Carole Maso talks about how she came into writing her lush lyrical novels by “the shelter of the alphabet.” Looking back, I realize I was doing just that- using language, which is not owned by anyone, to make a place for myself I could exist in. Every letter, every syllable glows with possibility of carving out poems of witness, survival, and salvation. Poems of resistance to the utter monotony of systemic violence. Everyone deserves a home and mine is poetry, where displacement demands “building a home out of language.”

  Affinities

  Wanda Coleman, Carole Maso, Ai, Kim Hyesoon, Susan Briante, Jenny Zhang, Elisabeth Workman, Kathryn L. Pringle, Tim Earley, CA Conrad, Aime Cesaire, James Baldwin, Vanessa Place, Laura Goldstein, Feng Sun Chen, Diane Wakoski, Patricia Smith, Lorca, Mary Reufle, Sherman Alexie, Jackie Wang, Horseless Press, Action Books, Bloof Books, Coconut Books, Les Figues Press, Semiotext(e),Trembling Pillows Press & Wave Books, Ugly Duckling Presse, Octopus Books & many many others.

  Poems by Nikki Wallschlaeger

  From Crawlspace, a work in progress

  Sonnet (24)

  Humoring your nana, humoring the paperboy, humoring a minority

  The long lashed umbrella apartments of animals in duress.

  Everyone here is an individual with individual strategies

  on how to interpret the handling of goats during peak hours.

  Some of the animals knew I was capable of caring for them

  beyond filling their food buckets varying from borough to barn.

  Some of them would never trust me if I was the last ally on earth.

  Please don’t guilt me about your problems when I ring you up.

  But at the very least seeing what’s under the bandages he says

  in a patented voice that I need to wait for detailed instructions

  on the pretense of applying consideration I feel anxious space.

  I recently read in a national newspaper that youth & adulthood

  are for ego structure & old age is saved for cherishing reflection.

  People do walk a certain way when their needs are being met.

  Sonnet (26)

  Weight grabbed onto/into me

  Happens every so often you know

  The urban fields burning with segue

  It’s how my mentorships wanted it

  Passions and especially our dissents

  Quilted in duck-down expansive coats

  the demand for symmetry is golden

  first having enough labor to supply it,

  then owning the language to write it.

  I’ve learned to be careful about chairs.

  A seedbank across the street that says

  Cover your coin cough. I am a clever girl

  winnowing through a cleverer education,

  benign humans in factory faded t-shirts.

  Sonnet (28)

  A circlet of murdered boys marching over your head.

  Just like the 50’s cartoons we used to watch as children

  Waiting to see what would happen if the angry chicken

  Crossed the road. Birds speed when you’re blacked out

  They’re our golden oldies we haunt you to remember

  When you finally come back to consciousness, my little

  Cracked snowglobe. But you go home to your bungalow

  Far away from where I live, where the good folks serve

  King Cotton casseroles at least once a week for dinner,

  Clicking of food handled briefly by the bagboys you ate.

  I am usually betrayed by teachable moments in the valley,

  There’s bound to be someone playing an acoustic guitar.

  The roosters shooting over their Canterbury prune wine

  It comes in elegant bread puddins of my heart’s sweepings.

Crawlspace
Publishers Weekly.
264.16 (Apr. 17, 2017): p42. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Crawlspace
Nikki Wallschlaeger. Bloof, $15 trade paper (80p) ISBN 978-0-9965868-5-6
"I feel anxious space," writes Wallschlaeger (Houses) in this righteous and revelatory collection of sonnets that illuminate the liminal zones between the urban and suburban, blackness and whiteness, wealth and struggle, and much more. The sonnet form functions as a container for poems that would otherwise sprawl in multiple dimensions at once. Some of the sonnets layer upon each other to create linked sequences that contain contradictions; for example, Wallschlaeger asks "What is the difference between/ a house and a mall really?" In the universe of these poems, nothing is merely what its surface indicates, as when Wallschlaeger slyly remarks upon America's school-to-prison pipeline: schools, which have long doubled as fallout shelters, are where children learn "how to surrender their hands to the air." Racial and economic inequality receive withering attacks. "I'm eating frozen food right now and/ places like Rodeo Drive exist," she writes. "I've been refused service at diners/ in northern Wisconsin so I'm supposed to be grateful// that you're liberal enough to serve me in a restaurant." In one sequence the speaker ruminates on exclusive, bourgeois restaurants; in another, "a city planner/ kayaks down the river of my pain/ his briefcase full of rare truffles." Permeated by animus towards racism and capitalism, Wallschlaeger's latest collection is political, personal, and timely. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Crawlspace." Publishers Weekly, 17 Apr. 2017, p. 42. PowerSearch, http://link.galegroup.com
/apps/doc/A490820761/GPS?u=schlager&sid=GPS&xid=aaa7c2aa. Accessed 19 Dec. 2017. Gale Document Number: GALE|A490820761
1 of 1 12/19/17, 8:57 PM

• THE VOLTA BLOG
  https://thevoltablog.wordpress.com/2015/12/01/review-houses-by-nikki-wallschlaeger/
  Word count: 1141

  December 1, 2015
  REVIEW: Houses by Nikki Wallschlaeger

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  by Eric Sneathen

  But what if your house is already haunted or under siege? This is where Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses begins, with homes already populated with ghosts and buckling under regimes of effacement.

  A kind of walking tour, Wallschlaeger’s debut collection charts a path through a neighborhood of prose poems, or “houses,” wherein each poem-house is named by a different color. At first the colors are familiar, seemingly inspired by a ten-pack of Crayola crayons—“Pink House,” “Red House,” “Yellow House,” “Green House.” But such familiarity soon expires as we explore hues only available in the larger, more expensive packs of crayons—“Gold House,” “Mint Green House,” “Taupe House”—finally wending our way into territory ever farther from our Crayola-ized antecedents—“Fandango House,” “Smoke House,” “Willpower Orange House.”

  Certainly there’s a movement here from the familiar to the unfamiliar, from simplicity to complexity, from what’s near the center of color to what’s at its outskirts. And this movement also registers at the level of the construction of Wallschlaeger’s poems, many of which incorporate a large amount of repetition. This is especially, though not exclusively, evident toward the beginning of the book, where the colors are most familiar, simple, central. The opening poem, “Pink House,” illustrates this: “Pink houses are nice. A nice house. A red worm shitting berries. A baby magnolia tree. A homing marrow. An arduous alley twirl. New pink hightops, we have a new neighbor.” Especially compared to later poems, the sentences of “Pink House” are short, even quaint, often domestic. But this domesticity speaks to the domestication of what the structure of the house-as-poem—here, its list-likeness, its fragmentation arising from heavy use of nouns without verbs, subjects frozen without action—must disavow: the long history of subjugation that has brought us home to the twenty-first century. This reading of structures of disavowal is especially biting in the poem’s final stanza: “Certainly a homebody. Certainly an estranged somebody, tearing pink in the spring. I cannot post how flowers yell, but how was my baby’s day at school? Brown/pink cheeks of children in weather. A crisis messed mother, but moving right along.” This mother hurries through the house briskly—a woman swept along with the disjunctive quicksilvering of “Pink House,” she’s only briefly glimpsed, caught as but one image in flood of snapshots.

  This disjunctive character of the poems grows in quality and quantity. For example, I find the initial stanzas from “Beau Blue House,” one of the final poems in Houses, more mysterious than the stanzas of earlier poems: “Well I declare. Rebranded coliseums, Mazdas for the Romans. I smell gas on your breath. It’s never too early for colanders of hairshirt powder. / I smell very strong in the afternoon, on my showering fast. Without it, I’d be an indifferent passerby wearing Laura Ashley organdie, / for my folks at the Dixie-Doxie club.” There’s a greater density of allusions here; the tone has been pitched toward camp, the diction distinctly more Southern. It’s here, in this description of “Beau Blue House,” that I find myself pausing to challenge a reading of Houses as a collection that represents a mere progression of complexity. While strolling through Houses, often I am permitted to peek into homes I do not understand, and sometimes into others of which I think, I might love it here, but my intimacy with the varied logics and images of individual houses may actually reveal to me my own complicities and notions of comfort. Houses often seems to flip the relationship of audience-art object-artist, reading the reader and his notions of home. In the case of “Beau Blue House, I feel compelled to recognize the alienness of its diction and tone as the consequence of what I’m at home with, what’s in my house. If I read the colors of Houses as a progression or disintegration from center to periphery, I reveal something about myself.

  To reveal something about myself: I felt comfortable—okay, a little uneasy, but mostly comfortable—when I first read the ending of “Pink House,” but now, after re-reading it for this review, I feel nauseated: “And a nice house for you, a pink house, two family house, nice yard, a chokecherry tree in back for the kids to climb.” Attending to Wallschlaeger’s more prominent use of allusion later in the book, this poem’s final image of the chokecherry recalls for me the ghastly scene from Toni Morrison’s Beloved, in which the main character, Sethe, who has escaped from slavery in Kentucky, reveals to her lover a constellation of scars that she refers to as her “chokecherry tree.” I read the kids of “Pink House” as figures of so-called progress, climbing up that ghastly embodiment of Sethe’s dehumanization at Sweet Home, the name of the plantation where she was enslaved and raped by its owner and his two sons. That is, in “Pink House,” I read an allegory of the project of American civilization, in the guise of an innocent climb through the canopy, built upon slavery, violence, and immiseration.

  In moments such as these, where the dissonance between mere image and allusion, not to mention personal resonance, becomes most fraught, Houses reveals Wallschlaeger at her most potent. She has constructed in her poems trapdoors and alleyways through history, where the roof of one house is revealed to be buried under by the floor of another, the gorgeousness of this stanza is bought by the jaggedness of that one. Or, as it is put in “Orange House,” a moment I’d like to read as Wallschlaeger’s statement of ars poetica, “I am gondolier from a family of gondoliers, he said, it’s a tradition, a creative tradition, for us to navigate what you take for granted.” In the tradition of Harryette Mullen’s Trimmings and S*PeRM**K*T and Lyn Hejinian’s “Rejection of Closure,” Houses speaks back to and strikes out hegemonic myths of origin and originality, telos and teleology. Houses refuses to flee from the “irrevocable condition” of home sweet home, instead it holds fast, as we read in the final poem of the collection, “My House”: “Holding what I’m really saying. Holding how I cuddle my cat. Holding how I hold it together. Holding another paycheck, a ghost homespun from spools of watery veal, / Holding all the residual toeholds that are telling me to do this.”

  Eric Sneathen is a poet and PhD student who splits his time between Oakland and Santa Cruz. He is the author of Snail Poems, forthcoming from Krupskaya in 2016.

  Horse Less Press (2015): $15.00

• Novella
  http://novellamag.com/novel-ideas-houses-by-nikki-wallschlaeger/
  Word count: 429

  Novel Ideas: Houses by Nikki Wallschlaeger
  By Novella
  20 Jul 2016

  img_5996-0

  TEXT: Snigdha Koirala

  The white gaze — looking at the world through white privilege — is something writers of colour have battled through and through. Toni Morrison refused it, said ‘there was this free space opened up by refusing to respond every minute to…somebody else’s gaze’; Claudia Rankine stares back at it, uses her poetry to dismantle the delusion that comes with the gaze. Nikki Wallschlaeger, author of Houses (Horseless Press) – a collection of prose poetry exploring race — sits somewhere in the middle. She looks it in the eye, but looks beyond it as well; she is unafraid to acknowledge it, but careful not to give it the centre stage.

  ‘White House’, one of the poems in Houses and perhaps the boldest in the collection, stares back at the gaze. In it, Wallschlaeger writes ‘Our people sure have strong arms…Those Ionic columns forced to hold up that cotton pickin house. That’s why the white house gets repainted every year, they’re afraid the cracks will show. Black cracks.’ She takes the most iconic building in American history – one that, up until recently, has been entirely operated by whiteness – and frames it in the context of her own people’s experiences. The White House, she shows the readers, isn’t just a symbol of democracy, but also one of white privilege gained through black oppression.

  Not all the poems in the collection, however, are as bold. In ‘Bronze House’, for instance, the speaker explores her relationship with her mother. The poem, in and of itself, exists outside the concepts of white power and the white gaze, but looking at the collection as a whole, the reader understands where the speaker falls in the enforced racial hierarchy. In doing this, Wallschlaeger shows the reader that the speaker is affected by and lives with the white gaze, but is far from being defined by it.

  Houses captures the complexities of living in a society dominated by white supremacy: where whiteness is the norm. We find mostly white authors in bookstores, we learn mostly about white men in history class, we watch films with mostly white actors (sometimes even portraying characters of colour), and as such, we have come to think of white as default. But Wallschlaeger, like many writers of colour before and alongside her, goes against this grain: she redefines the norm, and in doing so, creates a collection empowering to read.

• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/06/the-rumpus-poetry-book-club-chat-with-nikki-wallschlaeger/
  Word count: 2583

  The Rumpus Poetry Book Club Chat with Nikki Wallschlaeger

  By The Rumpus Book Club

  June 13th, 2017

  The Rumpus Poetry Book Club chats with Nikki Wallschlaeger about her new collection Crawlspace, why she chose to work with the sonnet form, and how segregation in American never ended.

  This is an edited transcript of the book club discussion. Every month the Rumpus Poetry Book Club hosts an online discussion with the book club members and the author, and we post an edited version online as an interview. To join the Rumpus Poetry Book Club, click here.

  This Rumpus Book Club interview was edited by Brian Spears.

  ***

  Brian S: In the piece I wrote about choosing this book, I mentioned how much I liked your use of the sonnet form. Can you talk some about why you chose this form for the book?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I chose it because it operates as a restraint I can work with. In the Publishers Weekly review they were spot on about the sonnet being a container for what was going on in each of them—and so were you Brian—to keep them contained.

  Brian S: But it’s a restraint you pushed against a lot in the book. Which is the point I guess.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes absolutely. I wanted to express how I felt living in the city, beyond what I did with Houses. To explore more of the energy that kept Houses, and its neighborhoods, alive, struggling. The bodies of women especially who keep households alive. So there’s a lot of voices of women in the book—wives, slaves, servants, who are muttering under their breath that became poems of both their interior lives with the exteriors that they labor in.

  Brian S: I was really drawn by Sonnet 28, with the references to the 1950s and King Cotton casseroles and basically segregation, I suppose, because I’m seeing that rhetoric so much more in daily life now, more than I did as a much less aware kid in the South.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: That’s one of the strongest poems of the whole book, I think. Growing up, I also remember Bugs Bunny getting knocked out—and birds flying over his head—but what’s been happening with so many cops killing black people for no reason other than being black I felt knocked out

  Brian S: That line “I am usually betrayed by teachable moments in the valley” was one I really felt driven by, in part because I’m much more cognizant of my own responsibility to not ignore those moments.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, I don’t want what happens to black lives to just be teachable. I want it to be a part of the same reality as white people, not as just something like a unit in class, because ultimately systemic racism is a human rights issue

  Brian S: Right, and white people have to be teaching each other about this. We read The Fire Next Time in a class I taught this last semester and I drove that point home again and again.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes absolutely. We live in such psychological and emotional segregation we don’t even realize it.

  Brian S: Because more than half the class were well-meaning but naïve white kids, like I was not so very long ago (except the kid part), and we need the hard talk more than anyone.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: And the education needs to become a part of consciousness or else people of color are “betrayed”—that’s the betrayal.

  Brian S: I was thinking about that the other night for a project I’m working on. How I’m more connected to people of color now because of social media than I was when I lived in more racially diverse places, and how fucked up that is.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Me, too, and I think that’s true for a lot of people or at least for us to be able to talk more honestly about what is happening.

  Brian S: And the ones doing the betraying aren’t the openly racist people—they’re the ones who claim to be allies and are hurt when they don’t get praise.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: America does not want to deal with race or class.

  Brian S: And it seems clear that it especially doesn’t want to admit there’s an overlap between the two.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes that certainly seems to happen a lot, both online and in real life.

  Brian S: I’m thinking about all the post-election news pieces about the working class that focused on “working class voters” without mentioning that people of color make up a huge proportion of that economic group.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes! That drives me crazy. I’ve lived in working-class black neighborhoods, which is really a demographic that both white people and the black middle class want to ignore.

  Brian S: I grew up in a working-class, mixed-race neighborhood that was next to a working-class black one—I walked to school through it, and hopped a 6-foot chainlink fence every day that the white people had had the city put up to “protect” themselves from the black kids who played in the same park their kids did.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Apparently Obama being president is supposed to have solved all of our black self esteem problems lol.

  Yes, I can relate to that. Milwaukee is highly segregated. Holton Avenue was the dividing line.

  Brian S: The thing I also remember from that was how in white neighborhoods, people with money didn’t live next to people without it, but that wasn’t the case in the black neighborhoods. It drove home that race was a bigger divider than money was.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, exactly. I volunteered at a black organization called Walnut Way on the north side of Milwaukee that strove to educate and be a community center about how redlining and the decision to build the highway through a black mixed-class neighborhood was a tactic to destroy black community. Now Milwaukee is one of the most segregated cities in the US.

  Brian S: I’ve only recently started to learn about that aspect of structural racism, but I’ve seen the ways policing has that same effect, and the two are absolutely connected. And I see it in the way schools are districted here in Des Moines.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes. I think its a pattern that sustains all American cities, even in the small town in northern Wisconsin I grew up in (of 30,000 people).

  Brian S: Like, Iowa is the sixth whitest state in the US, and while Des Moines is the most diverse city in the state, it’s still hella white. But the school in my neighborhood is like 95% Black and Hispanic. How does that happen by chance? It doesn’t.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yup. It’s intentional. Segregation has not ended.

  Brian S: Because my neighborhood used to be a lot blacker than it is now, and a lot of the white parents here just happen to decide that their kids will get a better education at the Montessori school or at one of the schools of choice even though the neighborhood school was literally just rebuilt and is the newest school in the system.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: What was great about Milwaukee is the Montessori school was public. My eldest kid went there until fourth grade. So it was a school that was more racially mixed than others; we were really lucky.

  Brian S: The one here is, too, but it’s a twenty-minute drive away in a suburb, and if you don’t have a car or the means to navigate the school system…

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Didn’t have to pay tuition, either. The one my eldest went to was right in the city but not far from the ‘burbs. There were three of them, though, throughout the metro area.

  Brian S: So before we run out of the hour and don’t talk more about your book… 🙂

  Sonnet 37 starts with the line “My joy, privately owned. My hair I only let down at home” and it struck me as a line that hits both on race and gender, because the eye is on you from different directions depending on who’s doing the looking, and by extension, the judging.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, I get annoyed at the whole “black girl magic” thing. My hair has been a source of curiosity that I’d rather keep to myself lol. So the poem is also like, Hey I can be myself at home—uncombed, no makeup, by myself.

  I get the most joy out of not being seen by others sometimes lol. Just me, myself, and I. Representation is a double edged sword.

  Brian S: But there’s this expectation that just being in the world means that you’re on display, which as a guy I really don’t have to deal with. Unless I find myself in a room full of single gay men, which is rare. I can be a slob in public and no one automatically judges me, or if they do, I have the privilege to not care.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, and black people, especially black women, are always on display. I don’t care if Vogue magazine has more black models. It just means more pressure, more beauty standards. I know some women enjoy them, but I don’t. I think fashion magazines are trash.

  Brian S: This is more an inside baseball question—are these poems ordered chronologically or did you number them after you had a manuscript together?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I like to write my books chronologically, so yes. I think its a good way to write so the reader can see the writer’s development throughout the book.

  Brian S: Is it my imagination or did the poems start to get longer as the book went on? Groups of sonnets instead of just fourteen lines?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Yes, they do. My irritation started to grow, I think, with the form. I wanted to get away with saying more so I extended them.

  Brian S: Yeah, I’m working on a manuscript (have been for about three years now) which started as sonnets and then I had to expand them, extend them, do groups. Sometimes fourteen lines isn’t enough space even when you use long lines.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Right. Sometimes you just have more to say.

  Brian S: But I really liked how Sonnet 55 just ran and ran. It was a good close to the book, given how tight the control had been throughout.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I love that poem.

  Brian S: You have reason to!

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I think I’ve pissed people off with that one.

  Brian S: Why is that?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: It’s so anti-capitalist people usually don’t know how to handle it.

  Brian S: I mean, capitalism is going to kill us all, right? I can acknowledge that I appreciate the comforts I get from it while also recognizing how shitty it is to most of the world and to the environment.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: It’s meant to be humorous and I do enjoy going to a good restaurant every now and then like anyone but I sincerely meant everything I said in that poem. Most people don’t want to think about where their comforts come from, especially if they think they deserve them.

  Brian S: What are your favorite poems to perform?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: That one lol. Sonnet 55, and “Silver House” and “White House” from Houses.

  Brian S: Do you say “buy my book” after you finish it?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Never lol.

  Brian S: That would probably undercut the message of the poem, I suppose.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: If someone wants to buy my book, they will. Sometimes they do and I’m asked to sign. I wish I knew more about the strangers that ask me to sign than just saying “enjoy.”

  Brian S: I think that’s about all you can do, though. I’ve had books signed by authors who want to chat before they do it, and I’m very conscious of the line behind me when they do.

  Who are you reading these days? Anything new on the horizon we should be aware of?

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I’ve dedicated my summer to the classics so the collected Anne Sexton is what I’m going through right now. But as far as fiction, Jacob Wren‘s 2 recent books: Rich and Poor and Polyamorous Love Song.

  Brian S: You know, I’ve never read Sexton beyond what’s usually anthologized. I should change that.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: She’s amazing. She had no fear when it came to her most hidden feelings.

  Brian S: It’s mostly been her takes on fairy tales, and I know she had way more in her arsenal than just that.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: I’m learning a lot about courage from her because like so many poets I too suffer from the Big D: Depression

  Brian S: Funny how she and Plath were kind of dismissed for that and Lowell was praised for being brave for doing the same thing.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Her poetry is so much more than that. Let me see… I read so much I know there’s more.

  Brian S: Me, too. And I didn’t recognize it for years. Therapy is everything and we’re lucky we have good insurance that covers it.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: there should be flowers by Jennifer Espinoza is excellent. There are some poets I immediately trust, and she’s one of them.

  Sara Woods, or Moss Angel, is writing the most phenomenal trans mythology. She’s ahead of everybody as far as I’m concerned.

  Brian S: Oh, I’m going to have to find that when it comes out.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Sea Witch Volume 1 is out—not sure if Volume 2 is?

  Jasmine Gibson is a black queer leftist poet that won’t let anyone rest. Try Drapetomania, by Commune Editions. You can get that online for free. Really excited to read more from her when it comes.

  Brian S: Thank you for joining us tonight, and for sending me that advance copy when I hit you up on Twitter. I really was blown away by this book.

  Nikki Wallschlaeger: Thank you! I’m glad you enjoyed it and engaged with it. Really, that’s all any serious writer can hope for.

• The Poetry Question
  https://thepoetryquestion.com/2015/07/15/review-houses-nikki-wallschlaeger-horse-less-press/
  Word count: 983

  REVIEW: HOUSES – NIKKI WALLSCHLAEGER (HORSE LESS PRESS)

  IMG_5996-0
  What is a house? And what does a house hold? Nikki Wallschlaeger both builds and dismantles, props up and tears down, the answers to these questions in Houses, her debut full-length collection of poetry from Horse Less Press. It may be worthwhile to note, before delving into the poetry itself, that the dictionary definition of “houses,” the term that names the book as a whole and repeats itself in each title throughout the book (“Red House,” “Black House,” Mint Green House,” “Marigold House,” and so on until the final poem, “My House”), doesn’t end with a structure composed of stiles, lintels, roof, floor, door. Of course, a house is first and foremost a residence, a place where people live, but it can also connote a household and even, according to one very well-worn copy of the Random House Webster College Dictionary, “a family, including ancestors and descendants.” These latter two definitions remain equally on point for a reading of Houses, a book that tackles not only place (“A blue house where water is responsible for all of our thinking” [from “Blue House”]) but also explores the lives of the people living within the houses, namely of the speaker herself and of her family (“She has about 30 cookie jars now…Someday I will have to sort them. I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge” [from “Bronze House”]).

  But “house” is also a verb, meaning to hold, and for our purposes, as we move through the book, perhaps the most important definition for our reading. Because each “house,” written in prose broken into paragraphs, sometimes hewn in half in the middle of a sentence or at the turn of a clause, works as a scrim that pulls itself over all of the previous houses, adding to our understanding, and in so doing building a collection of layers that manages, simultaneously, to be both finely nuanced (“So I built my first fire where the heads on the wall are stuffed w/glass eyes of the folks who stuffed them” [from “Bole House”]) and boldly declarative (“I want us to be safe // I want us to be safe” [from “Candy Apple Red House”]). As we page through the book, moving from house to house, we witness an accumulation of, the building of, a self. This self is built by the forces described in the poems—race, the sociopolitical stage on against/on which the speaker exists, the weight of the past and the hope of the future, memories of childhood, images of childbirth, and much, much more. Wallschlaeger writes about things, and addresses her subject matter in language that combines various shifts and tones. Look, for example, at these lines from “Harlequin Green House”:

  When he calls & asks for the minister of the house the inexhaustible need

  to undo myself will answer the lit phone by presenting the opposite moss dire of a language that’s patient. We as members of the ancestral revenge class

  to flummox an already undignified nation, deserve no less

  Here, Wallschlaeger combines abrupt lyric fluency (“the opposite moss dire of a language that’s patient”) with an infusion of political terminology (“When he calls & asks for the minister of the house”) into a typical household scene—perhaps a call from a telemarketer or, based on the context of the poem, more probably a pollster. By doing so, and by writing the lines that follow, the poet reminds the reader of the old adage, that the personal is political. That a “house” could be political is contextualized by two earlier poems in the book, which deliberately juxtapose each other in terms of the notion of what may be seen: “Black House” (“Invisible house”) and “White House.” The latter, of course, is perhaps the most visible house in the nation, but as the poem reminds us, it was built with black labor: “Our people sure have strong arms, she said. Those Ionic columns forced to hold up that cotton pickin house. That’s why the white house gets repainted every year, they’re afraid the cracks will show. Black cracks.” And thus house, the idea of what a house is, becomes a façade as well, hiding everything that it would show.

  Indeed, what lies beneath surface, what exists beneath the veneer as the speaker makes her way in the world—but, we might also consider, bubbles forth in virtual litany—is the theme of the book’s final poem, “My House,” a sprawling list comprised of masterful, thought-provoking, sometimes heart-wrenching statements of all that the speaker is “holding”:

  Holding another day, tomorrow, the next day, your days, the calendar home show. Holding all the walls. Holding all the fusty nails I’ve swallowed.

  Holding my hands across my chest while sleeping. Holding my hands. Holding popular kulture. Holding the last cop in the world. Holding something I’d actually do.

  Houses is a book of done things that confound, in the best possible way, by going further, by building, word by word, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph, a book of poems that lends itself to reading and rereading, to hanging on phrase by beautiful phrase, all inhabited by a thoroughly human presence. We find love, “a stranger that plans your future,” in this book (“Puce House”). We find hurt, we find agency, we find pith, we find hope. I give it my highest recommendation.

  You can get your copy of Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Houses directly from Horse Less Press here. Scroll down for the link.

  Full disclosure: though we’ve never met, I know Nikki Wallschlaeger through Facebook and we’ve both been published by Horse Less Press.

• Hyperallergic
  https://hyperallergic.com/390095/unruly-poems-that-illuminate-white-supremacy-in-everyday-life/
  Word count: 928

  Unruly Poems that Illuminate White Supremacy in Everyday Life

  Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger’s new book Crawlspace discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself.
  Iris CushingJuly 17, 2017
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  Nikki Wallschlaeger, Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017) (all images courtesy Bloof Books)

  The word “mortgage” comes from old French and means, literally, “dead pledge”: an arrangement that “dies” if a promised payment fails. The figure of death is etymologically built in to a very common kind of American debt that belongs to those lucky enough to own property. It’s the death pledge that gives us the right to our homes, the places that nurture and sustain our livelihoods and lives.

  Poet Nikki Wallschlaeger is keen on the complex relationship between debt and domestic life. Her new book Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017), a series of sonnets that consciously disrupt their own formal limits, discovers the violence embedded in our most familiar structures: mortgages, meals, rooms, houses, family relationships, and language itself. Wallschlaeger’s poems feel timely, as the links between property ownership, alienated labor, and the history of black slavery in the United States (“Greasy gangrene hamburger wrapper of a country,” in her words) become clearer by the day. She deploys a new vocabulary for talking about the legacies of slavery and white supremacy as they manifest in daily life — a vocabulary that is as damning as it is lush, as rich with sound as it is bright with image.

  The sonnets in Crawlspace begin in standard, contained 14-line form, and gradually lengthen and widen themselves to fill pages. Like the domestic spaces her language evokes, these pieces become unruly, revealing the mess behind polished exteriors. A whole world emerges as the pages progress, populated by hyperbolized pieces of reality, such as “fresh Klonopin ribbons,” “King Cotton Casseroles,” “unlikable women,” and “drool rot and toxic sprayed tongues.” Wallschlaeger’s sentences flow and twist, moving between description and history: “George Washington’s mouth comin at you/yappin some bullshit about honesty or was/that Abe Lincoln I dunno they start to fade/into the same knockoff appropriated war/bonnet or kente cloth bathing suit worn on/Cinco de Mayo in Daytona on college break.” She warps old truisms, like “it takes a village to raise a/ child in nude-colored handy cuffs.” Throughout these pieces, there’s a pervading sense that language itself is one of the structures that maintains racism, or “misogynoir grimcrack.” In breaking language’s formal rules, Wallschlaeger appears to also break the rules of systemic oppression.
  Nikki Wallschlaeger, I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel

  Many of the lines in Crawlspace appear in Wallschlaeger’s I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, a graphic chapbook published by Bloof Books in 2016. This book presents portraits of Mattel’s “Julia” Barbie doll (produced 1969–70 and modeled after TV star Diahann Carroll), bracketed by meme-style language. It’s a good visual companion to Crawlspace. The poet’s weariness with white male supremacy and female labor comes through perfectly in the wry face of Julia: “I wish you were a beer/ instead of a colorblind mansplainer,” reads one meme. In these pieces, as in Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger hits a delicious pitch somewhere between tragedy and humor; her singular first-person voice persists throughout the work, narrating the energy she draws, like a phoenix, from her own exhaustion.

  With Crawlspace, Wallschlaeger enters the tradition of poets and artists who illuminate black female subjectivity — Wanda Coleman, Carrie Mae Weems, Lucille Clifton, Lorna Simpson. The domestic scenes she makes in her poems complicate clichés of who black women in America are “supposed” to be. The fraught splendor of Kara Walker’s “A Subtlety, or the Marvelous Sugar Baby” comes to mind when Wallschlaeger speaks of “Writing under the constraints of your oppressors, whoever they are. / You start to articulate through the gold hippo lick of their loving war.” Hers is a poetry that is attentive to the nefariousness of American debt, that searches out what she as a black woman is owed, and what she is made to pay. She calls out the blood-ties between debt, cruelty, and this place we call home — and she has a great time doing it. Wallschlaeger’s voice is transformative in its capacity to articulate her lived experience. “We, as marked women transform/ ourselves,” she writes. “We are the wood violets & roses stretching in the rain.”

  Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace is now out from Bloof Books.
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• The Rumpus
  http://therumpus.net/2017/04/why-i-chose-nikki-wallschlaegers-crawlspace-for-the-rumpus-poetry-book-club/
  Word count: 710

  Why I Chose Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace for the Rumpus Poetry Book Club

  By Brian Spears

  April 18th, 2017

  I’m always interested in the work of poets who use form in subversive ways, and while it’s true that the sonnet has long ceased to be just a love song, what Nikki Wallschlaeger does with it in her new collection Crawlspace, soon to be released by Bloof Books, is brilliant. The book is a collection of fifty-five sonnets, and the hard limit of fourteen lines per poem (except when she chains them together in longer series) acts as gravitational force for poems that might otherwise go nova.

  But before I tell you more, a quick reminder that in order to receive your copy of Crawlspace, read along with the Poetry Book Club, and participate in our exclusive chat with Nikki, you’ll need to to subscribe by April 20!

  Let’s have a look at “Sonnet (28),” which first appeared at Elective Affinities:

  A circlet of murdered boys marching over your head.
  Just like the ’50’s cartoons we used to watch as children
  waiting to see what would happen if the angry chicken
  crossed the road. Birds speed when you’re blacked out,
  they’re our golden oldies we haunt you to remember
  when you finally come back to consciousness, my little
  cracked snowglobe. But you go home to your bungalow
  far away from where I live, where the good folks serve
  King Cotton casseroles at least once a week for dinner,
  clicking of food handled by the bagboys you ate.
  I am usually betrayed by teachable moments in the valley,
  there’s bound to be someone playing an acoustic guitar.
  The roosters shooting over their Canterbury prune wine
  it comes in elegant bread puddins of my heart’s sweepings.

  If I may return to my earlier metaphor, the form here envelops the helium and hydrogen of racism and violence, the “circlet of murdered boys” and the “good folks” who “serve King Cotton casseroles” and creates powerful heat and light from their fusion, but in a controlled way instead of the expanding destruction of a star in its death phase. That, along with the “oh shit, could that have been me?” reaction I had to “there’s bound to be someone playing an acoustic guitar” pushed home the way these poems challenge me as a reader.

  While these sonnets don’t generally adhere to the requirements of iambic pentameter and ABAB rhyme schemes, many of them do retain the power of the closing couplet to look back and comment on the poem as a whole. For instance, “Sonnet (10),” which first appeared at The The, lists the names of cribs: “Hampton, Worthington, / & the Shenandoah,” which evoke a very white, upper middle class perspective. There are “rollerbladers / wearing Fight the Power cotton tees,” which makes me think of white people (like me) who reach back to claim a piece of a cultural heritage that rose in opposition to the very thing they benefited from, namely white supremacy and structural racism. So the closing lines, “Somebody has a new idea / about 21st-century slum clearance” hints at the quieter (unless you live there) side of racism in the form of gentrification. It reminds me of lines from A Tribe Called Quest’s “We the People”: “N—s in the hood living in a fishbowl. / Gentrify here, now it’s not a shithole,” and the chorus where Q-Tip lists all the groups that must now go because white people have decided a neighborhood is desirable.

  Crawlspace is a potent book, and I look forward to discussing it both with our members and with Nikki Wallschlaeger at the end of May. And remember, to receive Crawlspace and join in our conversation, you need to subscribe to the Rumpus Poetry Book Club by April 20!

  Brian Spears's first collection of poetry, A Witness in Exile, is now available through Louisiana Literature Press, and at his personal website. He is the Poetry Editor for The Rumpus, and teaches poetry at Drake University. More from this author →

• The Bind
  https://www.thebind.net/blog/nikkiwalls-crawlspace
  Word count: 1334

  Review of Nikki Wallschlaeger's Crawlspace (Bloof Books, 2017)
  November 23, 2017

  Glitzy Subversion in Nikki Wallschlaeger’s Crawlspace
  by Rochelle Hurt

  Crawlspace Shopping List (all italics represent quotes from Wallschlaeger’s book)

  1. pie holes filled with magnificence
  2. spiral ham (Everyone has a spiral ham fetish)
  3. a rococo compass
  4. the iconic ‘50s / inspired Coca-Cola kitchen set
  5. rocking chair of rose water cyanide
  6. PT cruisers that nobody drives
  7. gewgaw bag of my money and marbles
  8. Fresh Klonopin ribbons for my daughters
  9. A protest sign hidden safely in Hattie’s famous / frown
  10. a loaded / handgun (you can buy them in the intestine / department)
  11. a silted crockpot of philosopher / dung
  12. the antebellum purling / dog tags of myself
  13. logos / of commercial femininity
  14. My joy, privately owned (What is the difference between / a house and a mall really?)

  Nikki Wallschaleger’s 2017 collection Crawlspace is full of knickknacks, trinkets, and gewgaws—the glittery disposable products of late capitalism that both perpetuate and distract from hegemonic violence. The list of quotes I've compiled above reflects some the ways that consumer culture shapes and antagonizes private lives in the book.

  The misuse and abuse of bodies is one visible consequence of this intersection between the personal and the commercial. One of my favorite poems in Crawlspace, Sonnet (7), illustrates the relationship between commercial excess and oppression of otherized bodies through dazzling and disorienting language. Wallschlaeger writes:

  Father, there’s a ruin in our bibelot.
  I light apple cigarettes when I look at the
  collection of misogynoir gimcrack you left
  behind. The FBI hosts symposiums and
  they’ve claimed the work of disco house
  Holton St. border from the black holocaust
  museum their evil metered laughter. Girl
  they just keep joking about us.

  The address to “Father” in the first line links the decadence of capitalism (“a ruin in our bibelot”) to patriarchy, a duo that has manufactured centuries of casual misogyny and racism in the name of entertainment, convenience, aspiration, and wealth. Meanwhile, we can get any kind of cigarette we want—a slow death dressed as consumer choice. In capitalist fashion, the bedazzled syntax of the next sentence doesn’t really mask the violence it contains, but it does provide an appealing container for it—a museum or a disco house maybe. (How much difference does it make when you’re in the gift shop?) The patriarchal and white supremacist violence that manifests as physical force used against Black women (domestic violence, police brutality, sexual assault) cannot be separated from the capitalist violence of consumerism (anti-Black media imagery and beauty products, decorative cultural appropriation, the oversexualization of women of color). The former is enabled by the latter; the latter is a distraction from the former. At the end of the poem, in relatively pared-down language, Wallschlaeger writes: “The way you took away my safety is fine,” and then, in the final couplet: “I’ve accepted that / I’m a black vagina.” The use of the body as decoration results in the reduction of people to their most vulnerable and commodifiable parts.
  Crawlspace_cover3.jpg

  All of the poems in Crawlspace are labeled as sonnets, and the sonnet form here is at once flexible and rigid. Wallschlaeger forgoes the rhyme scheme and strict meter of traditional sonnets, but often maintains the rhetorical structures, including turns like the one in the couplet quoted above. She also sticks to fourteen lines, though some sonnets are extended into multiple fourteen-line segments. Some sonnets have lines much longer than the traditional form, while others have very short lines—but all of the sonnets use the form as a means of restriction, a move that’s underscored by Wallschlaeger’s uncomfortable enjambment in poems like Sonnet (7) above. All the flexibility of line length, stanza structure, metrical patterns, and varied lineation exists only within the container of the sonnet form, which functions for Wallschlaeger as a means of capitalist control. She writes that the poems in the book come from “a series of sonnets that I’ve placed into small buildings, but since the bank owns the buildings that I move in, I am only paying mortgage.” In this light, the slight variations within the form, which by the end of the collection feels so dominant as to seem hegemonic, begin to look like survival mechanisms—or even, as Wallschlaeger sees them, subversions, “micro-victories against hegemony.”

  The association of the sonnet with love and romance then serves as a reminder of the ways in which hegemonic forces seep into everything—and how capitalism allows this to happen. “What is the difference between / a house and a mall really?” Wallschlaeger asks. Romantic and familial relationships, self-image, race and gender dynamics, sexuality, cooking, cars, furniture—it’s all produced or appropriated by this system. Even protest is “hidden safely in Hattie’s famous / frown” (or maybe Kendall Jenner’s famous smile). This is why Wallschaleger’s excessive linguistic patterns work so well—the piling up of concrete nouns, compounds, and adjectival phrases; the ecstatic and confrontational music; the repetition and listing to the point of exhaustion. We are meant to feel overwhelmed and exhausted—as exhausted, maybe, as Wallschlaeger’s speaker does: “I’ve been exhausted my entire life // I hate telling you / how I really feel.” By the four-part Sonnet (50), the speaker’s language has become so infused with the capitalist promise of improvement and its accompanying racist double standards that it is convulsive:

  I am
  mad mad. A bad bad girl who
  can never be sad when white
  people are good. Only white
  wives are good women even
  when they’re bad wives but
  when good women are sad
  good men don’t listen to
  them either however our
  shared sadness at being bad
  girls or good women does not
  live in the same neighborhood
  …
  you think we need to have to
  transmogrify into good women
  good wives with good men good
  educations good children good
  communities good poems good
  girlfriend good food good books
  good hair noses cufflinks good

  The poem doesn’t end so much as jump over the ledge it’s been approaching this whole time: “say I am not good JESUS will save me /sterilizations executions intoxications / sunless moonless nameless homeless.”

  Many of the poems toward the end of the collection address physical violence directly. In Sonnet (54), for example, Wallschlaeger writes of Michael Brown’s death, the use of his death in the name of art and entertainment, and the subsequent erasure of the state violence that caused his death, which in turn makes space for more violence: “he is still being killed in a diversity / of ways we are killed in a diversity of ways / I am killed in a diversity of ways & now / newspapers have started to write poems.” The relentless “diversity” of violence here echoes both the empty neoliberal calls for “diversity” as a flimsy solution to racial inequality and the relentless “diversity” of products and choices offered by late capitalism in the book’s previous poems. The echo is by design—a reminder that these are interdependent mechanisms of systemic oppression and none is extricable from the other.

  And yet, we shop. We buy. We watch CNN. We drink Pepsi. We light apple cigarettes inside our mortgaged sonnet houses because what else? Perhaps this is why the book’s excess is not merely tiring. All the trinkets and shiny stuff of this book make it pleasing, irresistible, exciting, tantalizing, an effect that is complicated—but not reduced—by the links the book makes between consumption and violence. The appeal of Wallschlaeger's language is that it is both pleasing and troubling, at once glitzy and subversive.

• Tourniquet Review
  https://tourniquetreview.com/blog/2017/12/2/madrid
  Word count: 4854

  On Nikki Wallschlaeger's Houses (2015) & Crawlspace (2017): A Notebook
  Anthony Madrid
  crawlspace and houses.jpg

  ❂

  I N T R O D U C T I O N

  The way I’m living, I tend to read around a hundred books a year. Of those hundred, twenty to twenty-five fit the following parameters:

  • poetry
  • poet under fifty
  • original work, not translations
  • book published in the last five years

  Predictably, around half of those were written by people I know. I’m not making these figures up; I’ve been keeping track. Result: every year I have approximately a dozen chances to discover something new and exciting.

  How many exciting discoveries should one expect, living as I do? Basically none. Most years, it is none. I like my friends’ books to one degree or another, and that’s that. My most common response is feeble approval. I am “willing to allow the book has the right to exist” and no more—which is exactly the response I myself get when I bubble-envelope my books to my dear ones. They “can’t wait to read it,” and that’s the last I hear of the matter.

  So the following parameters are somewhat severe:

  • poet under fifty
  • original work, not translations
  • book published in the last five years
  • poet not personally known to me
  • book is genuinely exciting / repays study / will be returned to many times

  —But you see where this is going. This year, I found something.

  Nobody told me to read Nikki Wallschlaeger. What happened was I saw her read in Chicago, the reading made no impression, I didn’t buy her book, and then more than a year later I did. At which point I started running from place to place, saying “Nikki Wallschlaeger, Nikki Wallschlaeger.”

  Now she has two books, and about those two books I have: objections, observations, thoughts. This present writing delivers these in the form of a touched-up notebook I’ve been accumulating, all through October and November 2017. The first section begins with me complaining about a very common vice that Wallschlaeger does not have. Except she kind of does. See below.

  S T R O P H I C P R O S E V S S O N N E T S

  Goethe says somewhere that when he gets to heaven he hopes it’s not populated by the people who believed in it. I think he says it in the Conversations with Eckermann. Anyhow, that’s exactly how I feel about interesting line breaks. I don’t say there are no interesting line breaks. But the people who believe in them are a pain in the ass.

  You have to understand how the devil works. He loves it when we kid ourselves, and when we flatter each other. Nothing pleases him more than the spectacle of poets developing highly sophisticated strategies for making poems that contain neither insight nor eloquence. He wants our poetry to be “good for other reasons”—which is to say, he wants a lot of vague, feckless stuff.

  The servants of the devil do not write prose and then cut it up into couplets and tercets. But they might as well. I’m always thinking: Why not be more honest and let your prose be prose? Can’t you see that all these more-or-less arbitrary line breaks only serve to make the poems harder to read and understand?

  Imagine somebody writing a novel and doing the paragraphing the way poets for the last thirty years have done stanzas. Basically you write a normal paragraph, and then every other paragraph in the whole novel has to have the same physical dimensions as that first paragraph—even if it means installing paragraph breaks where it makes no sense to do so. The purpose of paragraphing would be utterly defeated, replaced by something more “interesting.”

  Wallschlaeger’s practice is not in full sympathy with the above remarks. Actually, the first book mainly is, and the second book mainly is not. It seems to me telling that the first book is written according to a recipe of her own devising, whereas the second is supposed to be a set of sonnets.

  “A recipe of her own devising”—let me describe.

  Houses (2015) is written in strophic prose. There are no line breaks; instead, there are paragraphs. But the paragraphs are genuine strophes—rhythmic units, like the verses in a song. The effect doesn’t require each paragraph to end with a period. But it does require that each end with a rhythmic heave.

  Most art poetry of the last thirty years, you could totally change all the line breaks and stanzas and it wouldn’t make a dot of difference. Change the couplets to tercets, or vice versa—nobody would notice. Houses isn’t like that. For the most part.

  Wallschlaeger’s prose itself is Martian, ramjam with special effects. Crazy-nimble syntax with lots of chiasmus, long noun phrases that end in periods, surprise rhyme-sprinkles, anaphora and its opposite, and her special favorite, malapropisms:

  I basilisk in the sun [Houses, page15]
  he must gut the grass on the weekends [20]
  They stare at us from their monster salvaged pin-up trucks [21]
  so I am going to kiss my friends good fight [31]
  The most toxic of beta blockers in a 401K run [33]
  the ghostest of the mostest in the MTV graveyard [33]
  Around the turnip of the century [35]
  Welcome to subverbia [38]
  smoke is touring out of our mouths [44]
  add a touch of Cape Code [61]

  It is not quite true that every page of Houses manifests every one of the bells and whistles I just listed—but nearly. I’ll throw down a whole poem in a second, but first I want to underscore: The reader gets all these candies and rhythm too. This is why I experience the mechanics of this first book as a blast of fresh air. All manner of pretentious line breaks and stanzafication banished, like somebody whipping aside a shower curtain. Wsshhk!

  Blue House

  A blue house where water is responsible for all our thinkings. In the desert water is choosy, in the oases the palms are large and loud, chatter, piss, food. Clatter, room, lick. Sit on the toilet and read to me while I’m in the tub.

  I sit and rub the cat who licks from the faucet, she prefers water to be running into her, not placid meniscus like a dog pillow from the fireplace. He sleeps without frills, in the water bubble, but plenty of cat paws cat heads we ask politely to leave the room

  afterwards we read the diaper papers of our times. Warm feather water eased by pain and window of fogged glass blocks, you can hear the mens walking by. Once in a while we will hear someone say I saw something it’s a bathroom

  it’s a bathroom window, a naked woman hope, being all hawt, hair pinned up. An agreeable romance cutting through the yard but no, it’s usually you or me or the young un playing with blue dinghys and splashing bumble trucks I say did you wash your

  body properly with the washrag I gave you. Here are your pajamas it’s time to go to bed now that you are damp from your bath maybe you’ll dream about tadpoles.

  I’ve replicated the orthography of this neatly described domestic scene very closely, including the misspelling of dinghies. If you’re longing to get in there and put in some semicolons, I’m with ya. But do you see what I mean by “strophic prose”? Those white spaces are not arbitrary; they punctuate the rhythmic units. Even the one at the end there (“I say did you wash your // body properly…”) works fine, ’cuz when a pattern has been firmly established, divagations pop.

  (You know who else wrote in this form a lot? Czesław Miłosz. Especially after he won the Nobel in 1980. I riffled through his Collected the other day; must have been forty poems answering the above description, all in the last third of the book. And not one of ’em as memorable to me as the fifteen-or-so best pieces in Houses.)

  As for Wallschlaeger’s super-nimble syntax, look again at:

  it’s a bathroom window, a naked woman hope, being all hawt, hair pinned up.

  That’s efficiency. And revisit the pleasing diction here:

  An agreeable romance cutting through the yard but no, it’s usually you or me or the young un playing with blue dinghys and splashing bumble trucks

  That’s good writing. But never mind good writing for a second. Go back to the thing I was saying before, about how she basically invented this form for herself. Forty-six poems, every one of ’em titled “[such-and-such] House” (where such-and-such is a color, in every case but one), everything set up as strophic prose, with lots of special effects. TONAL PALETTE: witty and invulnerable, lots of irony and defiance. THEMES: race, childhood, family, domestic stuff.

  Such was the recipe. And every element of that recipe recurs in the second book, except for the form. Crawlspace (2017) has the exact same page count (sixty-two pages of poetry), but it’s only forty poems, all but one of which is either fourteen lines, or some multiple of fourteen (the longest piece is a sextuple sonnet). This is a form she did not invent.

  A good writer is a good writer, so it will surprise nobody that Crawlspace is a good read, well worth your time, full of good stuff, etc. But the form doesn’t do Wallschlaeger any favors, here. In the other book, the compression that naturally results from strophic structure prompted her to giddy invention, left and right. I feel certain that lots of people reading Houses are gonna say “I should do something like this.” But over the course of Crawlspace, you just watch the poet’s resistance to her chosen form grow stronger and stronger—and it was pretty strong to begin with. Upshot: she makes sonnets look like busywork.

  The tennis net is already long gone, on page one. No rhyme, no meter, line breaks that have nothing to do with rhythm. The rules are: “fourteen lines at all costs,” and “all lines equal in length.” ’Course, those are easy rules to follow if you don’t care where the line breaks go. (Also, in the first fifteen of the poems, she preserves the old Shakespearean final-couplet effect; thereafter, she dispenses with it. I, for one, was sorry to see it go.)

  That thing I said, before, about how one could change all the line breaks in most magazine verse and it wouldn’t matter? In my judgment, that’s true of all the poems in Crawlspace. Here, judge for yourself. Here’s one of the pieces I like; it’s a double sonnet:

  Sonnet (38)

  You liked the book I was reading
  matched my blouse & said so approvingly.
  Girls with portable accessories then a gentle
  corrective in the authors I should read next.
  I’m wondering what you have in mind for my
  next set of outfits that rhyme with poetry.
  The thing with alcohol: you are nicer to people
  who really don’t deserve it. You place your
  baggage in a clear hatbox next to his baggage
  on the airplane carousel. Our heads are bare
  with electronic trust, a bartender’s gun with
  all the boozy ways to mix the feels of strangers.
  Of course there’s the handful of cherries you’ve
  collected & even in my drunken topiary I roll my

  eyes. Maybe that’s my first mistake: forgetting
  they’re girls like me due to their overuse as logos
  of commercial femininity, cattle class sucking on
  their overpriced drinks. He admires my arm, how
  he could snap it like a branch, a swizzle stick in the
  shape of a shotgun. The candy rolls from his loins
  dusted with heavy K-hole pancake makeup. “You
  should swallow next time,” he says. By now I am
  eating the maraschino cherries like a good girl,
  they match the dress he just bought me on State
  Street. The petticoat is made from a special famine
  lace that spreads my legs wide whether I’m walking
  or sitting. He wants to be able to find me if I get lost
  in a crowd.

  Not saying the line breaks are indefensible. Go nuts. But, to me, they’re feckless. Just look at what the same poem might have looked like, if it had been a poem in Houses:

  You liked the book I was reading, matched my blouse and said so approvingly. Girls with portable accessories, then a gentle corrective in the authors I should read next. I’m wondering what you have in mind for my next set of outfits that rhyme with poetry.

  The thing with alcohol: you are nicer to people who really don’t deserve it. You place your baggage in a clear hatbox next to his baggage on the airplane carousel. Our heads are bare with electronic trust, a bartender’s gun with all the boozy ways to mix the feels of strangers.

  Of course there’s the handful of cherries you’ve collected and even in my drunken topiary I roll my eyes. Maybe that’s my first mistake: forgetting they’re girls like me, due to their overuse as logos of commercial femininity, cattle class sucking on their overpriced drinks.

  He admires my arm, how he could snap it like a branch, a swizzle stick in the shape of a shotgun. The candy rolls from his loins dusted with heavy K-hole pancake makeup. “You should swallow next time,” he says. By now I am eating the maraschino cherries like a good girl,

  they match the dress he just bought me on State Street. The petticoat is made from a special famine lace that spreads my legs wide whether I’m walking or sitting. He wants to be able to find me if I get lost in a crowd.

  If the above doesn’t convince you, I give up.

  O N C H A N N E L I N G T H E U N I N T E L L I G I B L E

  My standard method of studying books of contemporary poetry involves the use of a hand-held voice recorder—in particular this one:
  Voice Recorder.jpg

  It usually takes less than forty-five minutes to record a whole book, and once it’s recorded I can play it back over and over, while I do calligraphy. Having done this for years, I’m prepared to assert: At the very least, the thing you learn is which poems you genuinely like—as opposed to the ones you merely find “interesting” or whatever. Once you know the book, the very first words of the poems you actually like will cause a small, involuntary chest spasm that means “oh goody!”

  Unless……unless the first half of the poem makes no sense to you, and all the stuff you’re excited about is at the end. In that case, the pleasure will seem to come out of nowhere, every single time. The pleasure ambushes you. My metaphor for this is you’re looking at a hedge, and then suddenly a goose’s head pops out of it.

  As a critic, I’m uneasy about that hedge. I don’t like it that the hedge is just a foil. It makes me think why can’t I just have the goose? But the answer is obvious. The goose, just sitting there, is not as good as the goose that has just jack-in-the-boxed the shit out o’ you. On the other hand, imagine watching a YouTube video of twenty minutes of hedge, and then at the last second, goose. Twenty minutes is too much. So then the question becomes: OK how much hedge do you want? And, more: is one hedge really just as good as another? What can we do to get some really high-quality hedge?

  And now I impart an insight. Most people’s mistake is exactly that they think hedge is hedge. And worse, they think if hedge is boring, good! it will heighten the contrast with the goose’s head. Score one for the devil. He loves it when we find uses for the boring. Hence my uneasiness. Yet there is, after all, another possibility, and Wallschlaeger has found it. And it doesn’t require the artist to make her peace with boringness.

  The solution is to channel a certain amount of unintelligible-yet-beguiling spangablasm. The word that used to be used for this was “nonsense” but, these days, that word is apt to be confused with mere senselessness, so it’s probably just as well the term has been decommissioned. “Unintelligible-yet-beguiling spangablasm” is rather unwieldy, but I am trying to be precise here. Let me give you a few examples of the effect operating on the sentence level (all of ’em are from Houses). Some of the following are typical Wallschlaeger topiary, some are topiary + goose.

  Old weather wet teddy bears tied to the lampposts, color all gone, rain ran away with the shovel [page 22]

  There is no small talk anymore. There’s still warmth, but in a distracted silly-string sort of skeeball way. That’s to be expected. [27]

  His body rejected the new lung like my body rejected your dick, but here it is anyway, a fresh new track in the mud, filling with rain, & the children of frogs who have nothing to do with you. [41]

  The water in the drunk tank is filling bodies and I hope the new puppy shakes her raincoat off on the crowd playing with their pocketbooks. [52]

  On his right knee is a long radio wave of a birthmark, that’s where it’s been determined by DNA evidence that the first human crawled out of the culture club where I’ve worked as a valet for thirty-five years. [62]

  the merry sailor-suited clay bear of your efforts. We have diet sodas for the next sublimation, a wistful man sitting in a reproduction Viking ship somewhere in the united states. "I must’ve been a Viking in a past ¶ life," he says, "because I have a bottomless love for travel.” [73]

  That last one, you see what I mean by “hedge,” right? “Sailor-suited clay bear of your efforts”—? Who knows what she’s talking about, yet you feel she is talking about something. “We have diet sodas for the next sublimation,” comma, “a wistful man,”—etc. So, is the wistful man the next sublimation? Can’t tell. But the guy himself and what he says are clear as day. Thus, from the hedge: goose.

  Now, what follows is a case of the effect on a larger scale. Here, the first four stanzas are enjambed and seem radioactive with occult significance without ever yielding a single clear thought. Then the last three stanzas come out of nowhere, and together form a jewel of clarity and wit and understated irony:

  Glitter House

  Has nothing to do with you. I was going to say. I was going to say social thing. Social thing like pleather it’s a big one, shame. I wish we could go back & witness our friends’ births. What kind of scream or

  whimper micromanages you. Traces of languages, a baby with a gourd in my fist, covered with names. To be shameless with a shovel. Digging up a stage in a community theater. If we knew what we were

  getting ourselves into. The humanity of a people on the cover of Vogue, a basketball player next to a supermodel. I feel so good about my progress that I’ve fallen in love with life. Like no one else on earth

  they say the rich typhoon will be merciful. The shame of an abused people, the abused people making wars. I may be making you uncomfortable. You might cough or rattle off laundered seasons of impunity

  but I’m way ahead of you. I will open a show called “Angst in Young Millennials, a Retrospective” sponsored by a hip natural detergent. It will smell as fresh as an English daisy in a springtime garden

  you will walk away with one postcard of the young millennial of your choice. Feel free to use it as a smart & inexpensive way to dress up your refrigerator. Everyone deserves to feel inspired, right?

  Right. Now if you’ll step through the double French doors my team of international students will be happy to assist you.

  By my lights, that ending is exquisite, and I am willing to venture it is the more exquisite because it explodes out at you from a haze of unfollowable spangablasm. I have mentioned I am uneasy about this kind of thing, but I must also report the uneasiness does not occur to me when I am listening to my voice recordings of these books.

  Now, I do not wish to assert that Wallschlaeger never writes poems that are all “hedge.” It happens. But it’s infrequent. The fact is one never doubts one is in good hands, as each poem starts. One never thinks her secret goal is to get you to watch a shrub for twenty minutes.

  C O N C L U D I N G U N S C I E N T I F I C P O S T S C R I P T

  The following are miscellaneous notes that seemed too good to chuck. They are in random order.

  ❂

  There are at least four chapbooks. Head Theater (2007), I Would Be the Happiest Bird (2014), I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel (2016), and Pizza and Warfare (2017). I’ve never seen copies of the first two. Head Theater must have come out when she was twenty-four or twenty-five years old.

  I Hate Telling You How I Really Feel, which is one of the best four or five chapbooks I’ve ever seen, is available for free on the internet here. Hard copies, however, are unavailable at any price. It’s all images of black Barbie dolls, with meme-style slogans or put-downs or spangablasms, about half of which are drawn from the text of Crawlspace. Samples:

  CONFUSED FRIENDSHIP
  WITH COMPLIANCE AGAIN

  DOES THIS DRESS
  MAKE ME LOOK LESS OF A
  PERFECT VICTIM TO RALLY AROUND

  YOU'RE KILLING ME BROET

  EXHAUSTED FROM GIVING A FUCK

  Meanwhile, Pizza and Warfare just came out. If you’re reading all this and thinking Wallschlaeger’s stuff might be for you, you better order this one fast. Here’s the link. The copy I have in front of me says on its title page: “Out of a print run of 30, this is number 3.” The “30” is crossed out, and written above it is “15.” And to the right: “Sewn by MMC, drinking wine.” That’s probably Marty Cain, one of the chiefs at Garden-Door Press.

  Pizza and Warfare is exactly what I was hoping it would be: more information about Wallschlaeger’s family background. Houses and Crawlspace make you want to know about her long-gone black father and her more-or-less estranged white mother + the racial tensions every which way. Pizza is sixteen pages of exactly that, in prose. And, for the first time that I know of, Wallschlaeger admits to a certain amount of weakness, vulnerability. Act fast, supplies are limited.

  ❂

  Instantiations of the poet’s invulnerable, self-approving, abrasive persona:

  City citation says no food gardens allowed on front lawns, city citation says I can’t puff naked across my lawn. What will the neighbors think about my hairs. Maybe you shouldn’t be bothered by looking. [Houses, 20]

  This is why my grandma lived. We’re both wearing minkettes for the family funny farm portrait. Say cheese America! We’re eating watermelons. [Houses, 29]

  Being vegan is never enough. I don’t hate to break it to you. [Houses, 44]

  I’m just a tiny MILF fledgling lost on her way to Trader Joe’s [Houses, 48]

  Parakeets make the best erasure poems by shitting on the newspaper at the bottom of the birdcage. [Houses, 55]

  I smell very strong in the afternoon, on my showering fast. [Houses, 72]

  Or the ending to “Bronze House” [Houses, 32]:

  She [= Wallschlaeger’s mother] has about 30 cookie jars now, ranging from chicken little to baseball tart. Someday I will have to sort them. I will do something strange to pay homage to what we couldn’t bridge, I will bring the pieces of

  ceramic cows and giraffes and rearrange them into a pentagram on the sidewalk. As a teenager I refused to come home one night and got drunk, had sex, and passed out. The next day I was sentenced to 2 days

  in the county mental health facility. When you picked me up, you didn’t say a word. So the first shard, a piece of bear nose, goes here

  Indeed, the two books, taken together, are a tour-de-force of early-thirties hateful vitality.

  ❂

  Two poets are trying to cook a whole chicken on the stove. Why don’t they cut up the chicken first? Maybe that’s supposed to be my job and

  they’re afraid they might be racist if they ask me. I believe you’re supposed to hit your pride before you pass it. There’s just one catch: if I help you, I don’t want to see any Frank Ocean

  or Drake postings as proof that you’ve passed into the other language. We know you haven’t. Set the oven for 350 degrees to bake for the brownest, crispiest skin.

  About this, my friend Brendan’s comment was: “‘Passed into the other language’ is gold.”

  ❂

  One of her Tweets: “I’m going as a witch for Halloween who hears the kiddies knocking at the door and doesn’t answer it”

  ❂

  Wallschlaeger getting onto the page the kind of observation I associate with the D.H. Lawrence of Sons and Lovers: “I brought in logs for the fire. They did not fit so I made them fit. I felt arrogant.”

  ❂

  Last note. Since apparently it’s unGoogleable, I’ll enter into the record here the precise citation for the epigraph Wallschlaeger used for Crawlspace. Here’s how it appears in the book:

  all of us are tired
  and some of us are mad
  —Lucille Clifton

  Those are the last two lines of a poem called “The Old Availables Have,” which appears on page 5 of The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton: 1965–2010, ed. Kevin Young and Michael S. Glaser (BOA Editions, 2012). The piece is one of Clifton’s “uncollected” poems, written when she was between the ages of twenty-nine and thirty-three. Many of these were written to her children. She had six, all of ’em under the age of five in 1965, when she was just starting out. I speculate that the construction “all of us are tired / and some of us are mad” was suggested to Clifton by the following stanza in Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter,” which perhaps she had recently read to her little ones:

  “But wait a bit,” the Oysters cried,
  “Before we have our chat
  For some of us are out of breath
  And all of us are fat!”

  ❂

  ANTHONY MADRID lives in Victoria, Texas. His poems have appeared in Best American Poetry 2013, Boston Review, Fence, Harvard Review, Lana Turner, LIT, and Poetry. His second book is called TRY NEVER (Canarium Books).

  TOURNIQUET ©2017

• Anomoly
  https://medium.com/anomalyblog/review-of-crawlspace-by-nikki-wallschlaeger-b1a32d6576ce
  Word count: 1337

  REVIEW: Crawlspace, by Nikki Wallschlaeger
  Crawlspace, by Nikki Wallschlaeger. Bloof Books, 2017. 80 pages, poetry.

  I think we’ve all heard sonnets called “small houses” before or “little rooms,” their shape commonly squat and uniform, containers for intense emotion. In Nikki Wallschlaeger’s second book, Crawlspace, her sonnets are cramped structures, passageways through a larger space that doesn’t quite see them, a structural choice that asks us to think about life lived within constraint. Crawlspace is made up of 40 sonnets, with a table of contents that starts at “Sonnet (1)” and ends at “Sonnet (55)” — the book has its own crawlspaces, poems redacted or erased or just hidden behind a door that we do not have access to. Some things are private, okay?

  Each sonnet in Crawlspace is a little space of its own, self-contained, though there is a feeling of movement and a larger emotional narrative as we move through the book, a speaker that seems consistent from poem to poem. Wallschlaeger starts with 14-line sonnets that end in unrhymed couplets, and “Sonnet (23)” is the first that doesn’t end with this visual reminder of the form. Further along, we get doubled and tripled sonnets, 28 or 42 lines, sprawling across multiple pages but keeping the constraint of 14 lines per page. The last poem, “Sonnet (55),” is a sextupled sonnet, the longest in the book at 84 lines.

  Much of Wallschlaeger’s language is sonically driven, making unexpected jumps across lines like “That hope is just another bloated moat / is worth the ringworm, is it really so cute / badass in a democracy when you rave / of the grand narrative Pomeranian flap.” Some language is straightforward and pointed: “it bothered me that she chose to end a book on disaster communities with an / epilogue listing her credentials as a distinguished scholar when most of the / book consisted of interviews and stories from the victims themselves.”

  But I’ve started talking about form and movement here only as an entry point to think about Crawlspace holistically, to give you a sense of what you might look at if you read this book (and you should). Crawlspace is not just an exploration of what the modern sonnet might do — it’s a book that uses the sonnet as a framework to think about lives constrained by labor: labor in general, domestic labor, reproductive labor, Black labor, and in particular, the labor of Black women. What is a crawlspace if not the unacknowledged infrastructure of a larger house? What is white supremacy if not the unacknowledged infrastructure of the United States, and all the spaces within it where people of color are required to live?

  The men who have touched me casually.
  You grow, they grow, you grow, & they grow
  as the number of flip-flops increases worldwide.
  The horizon is personal, the horizon is a baggie.
  Every bureaucratic wonk has a stash somewhere,
  they place them over the heads of black schoolchildren,
  demanding their first breath is one of hyperventilation.

  There are many places in Crawlspace where Wallschlaeger makes it quite clear that the perspective we’re hearing is one of a Black woman in America, and “Sonnet (13)” is one where these inextricable layers of identity and experience coalesce: girlhood as public property, property increasing under capitalistic enterprise, and the claustrophobic way in which this country demands Black children behave. Even the horizon will get you. There is no way out. This point is emphasized later in lines like “you just learn how to live with sickness…you just learn how to survive with drought” and “I feel anxious space.” Only halfway through the book, lines like “You can only play with squirt guns / in the backyard never the front yard” are almost expected, a feeling that is echoed by the speaker in the very next line: “I may be saying the same thing again.” It’s that expectation that enacts exhaustion. “14 million blk folk / misdiagnosed not from medical / speculation but certainty that / we deserve this” are also exhausted. Dear America, “Greasy gangrene hamburger / wrapper of a country, you are incapable of sustaining a / relationship with anyone trying to move on their own.”

  The only poem that doesn’t follow Wallschlaeger’s formal rules is “Sonnet (48),” which stands out in its use of persona, and cuts off early on the last page. The speaker is clearly identified as “a hired slave maid,” a Black woman who literally gives her body to the “little white baby with / the crocodile eyes.” She speaks directly to the baby, saying, “I put more work in you / so you might as well be / mine.” Labor makes a complicated relationship between the two, and the poem ends with the speaker nursing the baby:

  She trails off at a moment where the two are physically connected — this last line contains the only caesura in the book. The moment is private, undescribed, and in leaving it unspoken, Wallschlaeger gives the speaker a bit of room. How does it feel to be made to reproduce the very framework that constrains you? If you don’t know (and I, myself, don’t), then you won’t find out here. There’s no place for voyeurism within this book.

  The emotional movement in Crawlspace is frustration, surface tension that presses against the edges of these sonnets. Our speaker is critical of the world around her, the world that builds and builds and withholds. In “Sonnet (35)”:

  Today is
  Day 2 of gratitude challenge.
  I decide that the rowers are
  laborers producing colon bags
  of teamwork that state farms
  cultivate as cheapie fertilizer,
  I don’t find wisdom desirable.
  Accrued by elevated slaughter
  there is no ground just growth,
  PT cruisers that nobody drives
  through the middles of woeful
  strip malls. At least you’d be
  awake for the disease

  In the context of Facebook memes that encourage us to post our daily thanks, even the creation of gratitude is rendered part of the capitalist economy. We’re all in charge of producing ever-more gratitude, working to produce emotions for others. We’re making “colon bags / of teamwork.” Under capitalism, “there is no ground just growth” and the level of sarcasm is biting. It all kind of explodes in “Sonnet (50),” beginning with “Everywhere brown people / are sad everywhere white / people are good” and ending with “sterilizations executions intoxications / sunless moonless nameless homeless.” Read this book for the inventive language and the formal play, but read it also for the thinking behind those choices, which is sharp and critical.

  We end with a poem that calls for the end of restaurants, making pointed statement after pointed statement about wealth and lack and access, about connections between wealth and white supremacy, the tyrannies of city living and celebrity: “That I’m supposed to feel grateful you act grateful / while pouring me a tasty Malbec paired with moldy / cheese.” Most of these sentences start with the word “that,” which builds the same sort of repetitive exhaustion we’ve been experiencing all along, and which is no less exhausting here. Our speaker is tired of this. Aren’t you tired of this?

  And yet: “By the glow of mycelium lakes who are connecting / the old-growth trees for shelter: We, as marked women transform / ourselves. We are the wood violets & roses stretching in the rain.” I keep returning to this line. Here in this book made up of tightly controlled sonnets, a constraint created within and upheld by the white European canon, in these hidden and forgotten spaces underneath the rotten floorboards of our democracy, language is blooming. Even under the intense pressure of white supremacy and capitalism, the networks of survival and transformation that Black women create, stems and roots and inexplicable thread-like systems, are reaching toward each other and holding up the world. Please read this book.