So if i said i would review every book i read, where does ‘a book’ begin? Obviously the categorisation is semi-arbitrary, and i’ve got some other reviews coming up in which i intend to say more about it. But for now; usually i would say that a book is anything longer than 23 pages, but i can waive that requirement for certain kinds of media. A poetry chapbook put out by a small press or even a big publishing house can easily hover around 40 page average, for ‘just’ a tenner plus postage and packaging. Eye Witness, by frog kosaric, comes in at a neat 23 pages but size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with it, and this collection goes the distance.
im getting big on form recently, she said like a dickhead. im increasingly intrigued by how a particular cultural form shapes how the material appears before you, shapes craft and interpretation. See, for example, Isiah Medina talking about the role of the cut, a distinctively cinematographic technique, in his work (link), or this series of essays about how the form of the console shapes the narrative experience of Metal Gear Solid 2 (link). Or take William Blake, a printmaker by profession, who saw his poetic works as basically visual medium, expressing a unity of word and image that was central to his distinctive spiritual vision, in contrast to his more prestigous artistic rivals at the Royal Academy.
Reading Eye Witness, i was struck by the visual form many of the poems take, relatively thin columns, rhythmic but still distinctively free verse. This is exactly what a lot of my poetry often comes out looking like, because i often write on my phone where it’s easy to slip into a rhythm that follows the size of the screen. To me, this is an outgrowth of something Audre Lorde pointed out, that poetry is one of the most class-accessible art forms because you can write them on your lunch breaks, even more so now nearly everyone has a notes app. i used to to write a lot on my commute to minimum wage service work, or on brief lunch breaks, or just to do some time-theft, so my phone often provided some formal conventions.
i don’t know if kosaric wrote this collection on her phone, but you can at least read a kind of shared affinity to my time-theft jottings or Blake’s big 18th century fuck you to wealthy painters like Reynolds across these poems. For example, in ‘That will be five cents a word, and pretending I love you is extra’, mocking Zoe Leonard’s 1992 poem, ‘I want a president’, she writes;
I don't want a trans president
like the poet got paid to say / I
want a Disney princess who
chooses to live in squalor because
it's easier than saying no
What follows echoes the rhythms of Leonard’s poem, just as candid but with new teeth, juxtaposing the glossy images of modern capitalist Americana against the brutal realities. This confident sense of rhythm is distinctive to so many of the poems in Eye Witness, like the endlessly doubling refrain in ‘Baptism #0’ - “dread nought dread nought” - or the more intravenous pulse of ‘The Land of Cockaigne’
… Every
morning feels like making peace with
an occupying power, slouching towards
a treaty, a collaboration, working
relationships. Time has softened every
weak heart, and all that's left is asking
quarter, pushing thru indignity indigent
talking terms, talking turkey, talking
mush mouthed & beetlestruck.
In kosaric’s hands rhythm can be both the infinite repetition of imperial-capital and its End of History, and the rhythms of another time echoing distantly under the surface; sometimes mocking, as in ‘That will be five cents a word…`’, sometimes tender, as in ‘Shabbos’;
… behold my skin, open for you
like a book of earthly make.
Pages, beloved, for them
tendons; for chapterheads
look only for bones. Offered,
beloved, my throat; offended,
beloved, how little to seize
you saw fit to do, how much
to grasp, how much to crush,
& the coldness of your grip,
fingers like heart like ice like
ice, like death in dotage.
and sometimes even articulating a brutal kind of hope, as in ‘Sour Grapes #505’, where the poem describes having your card declined trying to buy mayonnaise;
You can make it, you can
make it yourself -- you just
drown an egg in fat
and beat it until it's gone
It’s not an optimistic collection, by any means, but it doesn’t want to be. If anything, its honesty makes the small pleasures eked out from its words all the more satisfying, uncompromised, a language turned towards a life - some kind of life - even in the midst of endlessly sinking into the settler-fascist mud. “After all,” kosaric concludes,
… I should think,
the purpose of living is to
live, not to survive;
but.
—
UPDATE: i fucking forgot to link to where you can read Eye Witness cos ofc i did. it’s available for pay-what-you-want here: link
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