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Antidotes for an Alibi

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Just finished reading Antidotes for an Alibi by Amy King. Lots of surprising twists and turns that often reminded me of Tomaz Salamun. Some of these twists take an antidotal form. Here are just a few of my favourites:

"No Murderer knows what's being prevented / at the end of a bandage at the end of a knife / at the end of blood and egg" ("Southern Folklore)

"Next door, all the president's men / play guess the tail on the donkey / with all the king's men, which / sums redundancy since an ass / is inadvertently an ass" ("Conspiracy Theory")

"I sip from tin coffee cups / the flavor of her past mouth." (Homage to the Ballad")

"outsourcing is a very cocktail / piano." ("Stay at Home")

"I ate the apples and grapes of the woman / who heroically overcame her hero status." ("Love in the Afternoon")

"The anatomy of anatomy is destiny. / We oblique points of tenderness." (Cloud to Shroud")

"Camus must meet his Kafka" ("Editing Booth")

and my absolute favourite line of the whole book:

"We honor you now by filling / your stance with holiday cookie." ("Disappearing Spouse")


I found this collection much more engaging than the typical young poet quirkyness (whatever generation of NY school). There is untamed desperation laced (as in poison). An updated existentialist angst. Language recognized as language. The problems of the personal lyric are not merely repeated as a pledge to what might be called the post-language school of poetics, but rather the lyric is wrestled with and worked through (but not worked out). I am really fascinated by the meetings of lyric and textual poetics. I am not as fascinated by the rejection of textual poetics in favor of the emotive lyric.

I have read many books of poetry driven by a disembodied philosophy. King's book is wise, full of wit, and fully embodied. King's work is more connected to the projects of say Mairead Byrne, Tomaz Salamun, and Nada Gordon than say Dean Young or Matthew Rohrer or James Tate. So if you like it fresh, pick up a copy of Andidotes for an Alibi. After reading this fab book, I am certainly going to check out more books from this exciting new press!

With the last lines of the final poem in _Antidotes for an Alibi_, the speaker says, "I go forever fragile over paper/ because I know māché prison rocks/ will make a miraculous bluebird someday." Those lines stick, and I will always picture this speaker walking about with reams of paper trailing behind her as she records life as she sees it, to hold the world accountable to her point of view. The playfulness in the language conjures images of a girl in a Catholic school uniform waiting in line at a tanning salon. The "word addict" in these poems seems to overdose a couple times, but something always resuscitates her.

So many books of poetry fail to keep the interest of the reader because of the lack of personality in the pages, but Amy King has managed to infuse her life into her poems without the uncomfortable invasiveness of the confessionals.

Don't just read this book because it's nominated for a Lambda Book Award. Read this book to experience Amy King's uncanny ability to maintain a sense of infinite wonder while simultaneously seeming ancient and jaded. "I confess/ to shaking like a lost dog at the feel of nothing at/ all against my skin, that this creamy absence could/ pass on into pauses forever, ones atheists hesitate/ but pray for nonetheless."

Amy King
Antidotes for an Alibi
BlazeVox Books
ISBN 0-9759227-5-0
2005

These poems read to me like poetry versions of flash fiction. Now, I like flash fiction very much, but I like the more fabulistic kind. Amy King is writing the fabulistic kind of flash fiction -- I want to say, "the good kind" -- in poetry. What does this mean? Well, when lineated, the line breaks in the poems point to the jumps in the narrative. When not, the poems still take the same little leaps that poems take. I guess I'm struggling with the new sentence this morning. I am not seeing "torsion" as I understand it, nor am I looking for it -- I am just saying that these poems have little leaps in them that flash fiction of a similar type does not. For example, this poem, "Evening In," is a story of screening a particular kind of call:


Evening In

Mother phoned the premature death
of father to me. A machine shuffled
her words. I played back the story
of my childhood and grieved.

Now, I would probably end the stanza here, or title it something different. In any case, the evening in begins with a message in a machine. I would think flash fiction might use "the machine" and not jump so quickly to "story of my childhood."


After
dinner, blocks of toddler teak wood
fell, then floated, mistaken for cork.
Household acts boiled over Aunt Max's
black pot rim where we succumbed
to the likelihood of work. We were all
enchanted when the little kettle dripped
and wrote proverbs to complete our pact
with amazing accents. Dessert hints
wafted past raised cups of homeground
coffee, whiskey-tinted, under
the blue haze of living room light.

In this second part of the poem, the progression is chronological. After dinner, some french press coffee and dessert. I don't think "household acts" and "dessert hints" would be in flash fiction. They are too mysterious. Interestingly, the references to fables and fiction continue, in "enchanted," "writing," "proverbs," "pact, " and "accents." The line break after "dripped" makes it unclear whether the kettle (presumably whistling) is writing or that "we" who are enchanted are writing. But overall, a little story of a poem, which is recognisably a poem, not fiction.

In the next-previous prose poem, "Land into Sea," the jumps are between sentences -- I don't see each sentence doing as much heavy lifting as in a poem, and I see bigger jumps between the sentences. I also see bigger jumps -- associative ones -- than in fabulistic flash fiction. It has the logic of some poems where the themes are established, play together a while, and then reach a conclusion. We start with a relatively concrete example, a fabulistic but also realistic fear:

On the car-hugging road, I am shocked that one day I fall
asleep and the stray dog could die.

Not the road is hugging the car, not the car the road (as car commercials would have -- did you know most city car commercials are filmed in downtown LA?). In any case, car, road, sleep, dog, death. Very clean and neat. Then, out of the shrubbery at the side of the road -- a crowd.

These orders of truth awaken self defense, so urge the crowd, "Betray yourselves." Every fugitive deserves retreat at depths the bathysphere can't reach.

Who is the fugitive? The narrator? The dog. The dog and the narrator. The narrator is more likely to fall asleep and die than fall asleep and kill a dog. I.e., life is fugitive. So you see, by figuring out the difference between the first sentnce and the second sentence, you've got poetry, because flash fiction tends to spell this sort of stuff out, not point all sorts of different directions. But, note, this is sentences which are addressing different people and having different characters, not necessarily "torque-ing" as I understand it.

since lame-o short reviews usually mention the title, I'll say -- I like this title and the way is points to the flash fiction in poetry theme. For what is an alibi, but a very specific sort of potentially verifiable narrative. And what is an antidote to that, but the fabulistic.