Heidi Lynn Staples - I didn't take care fake bear torque cake. I just held take care fake bear torque cake on my tongue. The take care fake bear torque cakeness spread throughout my take care fake bear torque cake, and take care fake bear torque cake was good

Heidi Lynn Staples, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake, Caketrain, 2012.

Excerpt

“Heidi Staples is one of the most sparkling, indelibly unique writers in English there is. Smart readers should follow her every move, including this quirky offering. She’s a beauty.” -Mary Karr

“Bearer of care, torquer of truth: Heidi Lynn Staples bakes her cake and eats it, too. This experimental memoir bespeaks its eponymous title, again and again, coded and cadenced, so substance suffuses through substitution. War bombs, gardens, twisters, sugary sweets, births and deaths take care fake bear torque cake (cakes, caked, caking) with live-wire illustrations. Call this imaginative personal primer what you will, then Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake.” - Gretchen E. Henderson

“Like Magritte’s The Son of Man, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake is a work that unabashedly walks a line between ‘the visible that is hidden and the visible that is present.’ It is a work full of a curious and exhilarating obfuscation that, when a reader is willing to look behind it, reveals an unexpectedly touching and delightful memoir.” - Darby Larson

“The book is freaky great. Hard-assed charm, brutal, elegant, funny. This memoir of a dark Florida childhood is unsentimentalized by cartoon drawings (cute and ruthless) and the substitution of one weird reverberating phrase for anything and everything in life. I filled in the not-blanks casually, mad-libbing, but abruptly found myself, mid-story, close to tears. Heidi made a world, and saw that it was take care fake bear torque cake. And so it was.” - Catherine Wagner

Heidi Lynn Staples's Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake makes me feel uncozy. It makes me want to run to Noam Chomsky or Bertrand Russell and ask, "Is this what you were talking about?" Like them, Staples drums up language situations: "I should be able to eat whatever I take care fake bear torque / cake." In these situations, there is expression but not―necessarily―clarity. Is Staples creating a code? Is this a game of Mad Libs? Is this about the limits of language, the way we should be able to say whatever we take care fake bear torque cake? "It's hard. There are no easy take care fake bear torque cakes."

It is easy to feel unable; easy to see take care fake bear torque cake as an utterance that disguises thought, makes thought unbirthed: "To make the take care fake bear torque cake stop, the doctor per- / formed a D&C―he take care fake bear torque caked her out with / a long sharp take care fake bear torque cake. She couldn't ever have / children again."

There's too much touching for this kind of despair. Staples manages to say much because the words relate to one another and the book relies on the human instinct to relate. She's looking at how words hold each other, how her memories flirt with her readers' memories, and how her childish drawings act alongside all this intimacy.

Eat that, Plato―Staples is not practicing mimesis, she's investigating interconnectedness.

It's not a simple dissection to critique language. Staples isn't working out a doctrine of pre- or post- L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E, even of materiality or symbolism. Instead, Staples is showcasing how the poet trumps prefixes, compounds, and the glitter of language to create a space for thinking. In this case, thinking about memory and the way we tell memory: "They built a take care fake bear torque cake. They designed the take care fake bear torque cake themselves bade on houses my dad / had seen as a fighter take care fake bear torque cake." 

It's memory from memories.

It's thinking from thinking.

It's the way the writer collects all the things that touch and puts them on a page that's barely able to contain them all. There's too much context, too many ideas that can't get pinned down, that are on the edge of the page. This is a collection of what memories can be articulated.

When readers come into the book, we bring more. We communally interpret take care fake bear torque cake and re-write, re-remember. Our memories siege the page. If Hart Crane was right and "the form of [the] poem rises out of the past," Staples's work asks, "Which past?" The "I" is prevalent. This is a memoir. This is a narrative attempt. While we all might remember a "Ziggy take care fake bear / torque cakepack," Staples reminds us that it's her memory, that it's her in the experience, by landscaping an entire page to the line, "And jumped down out of the truck." The starkness, the I in the action, reminds us that it's her story to tell in her own pacing. It's her space being carved out as a memory.

Her agency is furthered by illustrations. The illustrations, like the page's landscape, have light and shadow in particular places, straight lines and curved lines where Staples chooses, and seem to represent the frenzy of remembering a feeling instead of a fact. Her drawings gussy up and re-represent a memory of growing up and becoming, through language, a cultural creature. So when we see Staples's drawing of a family car driving past McDonald's golden arches and we read a little girl wanting to stop, we know that experience is distinctly American, distinctly rooted in a specific culture. We know that her agency (like her language) is circumscribed by culture.

Staples deals with stuff too big for a review: the homogeny of the American experience, the way childhood and possibly poetry are too often made precious, and the limits of language. But I'm mostly smitten by how Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake acts as a memoir about Staples becoming able to retell. I'm drawn to how, even telling painful and difficult memories, it is "ordinary." Staples is telling the most ordinary stories and she is suggesting that ordinary and extraordinary might not be distinguishable. The ordinary is revealing: If we pull at the memoir, we see the difficult task of moving toward creation:

I wasn't conceived in take care fake bear torque cake […] Nevertheless, I came into the take care fake bear torque cake take / care fake bear torque caking […] I started to take care care fake bear / torque cake. I couldn't stop. […] I needed a piece of take care fake bear torque cake. // I needed to practice.

There is practice, labor, and the experience of trying to shape memory or pin it down when it resists words, linearity, won't even stay put in the past: "I still / have / recurrent take care fake bear / torque cakes in which the horizon is / filled with take care fake bear torque cakes."

We could keep pulling at the memoir and see the writer writing about writing, practicing the memory of memoir writing, defining the authority of the individual to "[match] the rhythm of [her] bouncing" song. It's worth it. It's worth this mental jump rope to see how the song (which you can call poetic thought, lyric possibility, language, memory, or take care fake bear torque cake) changes, seeks and fails, and is then nurtured by Staples: "When she eats her tomato, she says, the take / care fake bear torque cake is becoming a little girl! / Yes, I say, see how the take care / fake bear torque / cake becomes / take care / fake bear / torque / cakes!"

Staples wrestles with memories, sugar cravings, and the shriek of an American childhood where Dad drinks Schlitz, Mom catches Dad "wearing someone else's take care fake bear torque cake shorts," and everyone enjoys fresh strawberries. All of this happens to the theme of a Kraft cheese commercial. Culture carries language, carries ideas, and Staples knows you can shake that up with derivations and play: cakeness, Cakenum, caking, caked, cakemen, and more because there is a "sense of take care fake bear torque cake [in] the air, be / cause who [knows] what we might find?"

Shaking it up like this teases out a memoir that is cute and gruesome. There are adorable moments where the narrator has open-faced grilled cheese sandwiches, rides a bike and feels "unstake care fake bear torque cakeable," and disturbing moments where the memory cuts easy nostalgia: "I remember the first time I cut myself and saw my own take care fake bear torque cake."

A straight memoir would mean that there was clear memory, clear self understanding, and some stability. Staples isn't falling for that kind of limitation. Instead, she gives us something more real: she works to feel and understand memories for how they challenge the limits of language. She works to illustrate the mess with sketches that are equally charming and disgusting. The words and the sketches cast out toward memory, toward clarity and come back with a sound:

I didn't take care fake bear torque cake. I just held take care fake
bear torque cake on my tongue. The take care fake bear torque
cakeness spread throughout my take care fake bear torque cake,
and take care fake bear torque cake was good. - Kristen Orser

Caketrain’s newest offering, Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake by Heidi Lynn Staples, is a mouthful—a fantastic experiment merging fiction with art. Designed as more of a scrapbook, the personal mood created is palpable. Staples creates a calming and often whimsical effect reminiscent of the smartest children stories, with a punch of darkness.
For all its charm, the book, at its core, is a touching memoir, an emotionally rich, and deeply layered look into a young woman’s life. But Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake also is a manifesto, an exhilaratingly fresh take on the often-stale, overindulgent memoir genre. The substantive effect is in the repetition of the title words, creating an intricately coded world of words and images that forces the reader not only to follow along in silent amazement, but also feel confident in being blindly led down an intellectual rabbit hole.
While the narrative structure is rather linear for the most part, the breaking up of sections and an almost-minimalist like design attitude concerning a brevity of content on each page gives one the opportunity to pause and collect oneself, recharging for the next section of text.
Staples tackles her dark childhood with a fantastic imagination alongside brutal honesty. The balance is rendered more than adeptly and is powerful and mesmerizing, bordering on tear inducing. She creates a world that is at times wholly fictional, and almost magical in its inventiveness while still managing to be emotionally revelatory.
A moving passage, early on in the book, hints at future splendor to come.

My mother says he sat down beside her hospital take care fake bear torque cake. He took her hand. A young man with two small children to raise. He was take care fake bear torque caking. He was scared. He was alone. He was a pilot. He take care fake bear torque caked to her that he’d had countless take care fake bear torque cakes with countless take care fake bear torques in cities all over the take care fake bear torque cake.

The accompanying illustration, on the previous page, adds to the intensity with its childish quality that leads to a brutal honesty that’s undeniable in its simplicity.
Based on the innovative language and quirky, forward-thinking assemblage of this offering, it is definitely worth going back to explore the author’s earlier efforts (Staples has also authored a book of poetry and two fiction titles). And, of course, it’s another great offering by Caketrain, fitting of their impressive track record for producing intellectually engaging, beautifully designed books. So take care when reading this book, and look out for the bear.—Patrick Trotti

Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake


My brother says it's great I like what am I
doing. Though. Focus. Get Practical. It's a hobby. So, I don't
speak to him for awhile. He keeps calling, please,

the message, he wants to read some of my work.
I'm writing things like "Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake."
I give it to him. Wait several weeks. He says it's great

I like what I'm doing. So, I say he can take care fake bear
torque cake off. He doesn't know take care fake bear
torque cake. He's a piece of take care fake bear

torque cake. I call him this and a lot of other things, even
when no one's around to listen. It gets so
bad, I can't stop recalling how mercilessly he take care

fake bear torque caked me. How he played cruel take
care fake bear torque cakes on me. How can I ever
find it in my take care fake bear torque cake to

take care fake bear torque cake him? Could I hold
a long-standing take care fake bear torque cake against
him, as long as I live? He is my big brother.

I do take care fake bear torque cake up to him.
I do take care fake bear torque cake him very much.
I do have to take care fake bear torque cake

how hard he works, how busy he is, 60+ hours a week
managing video stores, two kids in college, mortgage.
In the free-time he finds when I go for a visit he watches

take care fake bear torque cake ass sitcoms. He makes jokes
with his wife about how take care fake bear torque cake
swimsuit models are. He points at the t.v. He whistles.

She's not take care fake bear torque caking. I get the feeling
there's not a lot of take care fake bear torque cake happening.
Of course, they've been married a long time.

All couples have their take care fake bear torque cakes.
He got take care fake bear torque caked early. No college.
While I went on to study at the take care fake bear

torque cake level. Sometimes that feels weird. His house,
with a take care fake bear torque cake overlooking
a take care fake bear torque cake, is huge and lovely.

It's great. Getting out on the lake. Going
wherever. Storming around and around in aimless
high speed take care fake bear torque cakes across acres and acres

of deep dark take care fake bear torque cake. He loves it.

from Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake


The Garden
Au Naturel
Bygone

In the beginning, my take care fake bear torque cake weeded and my brother hoed and my steptake care fake bear torque cake drove the tiller. And bumbletake care fake bear torque cakes hovered, buttertake care fake bear torque cakes flitted by, the cow lowed take care fake bear torque cake the barn. And the tiller’s gasoline take care fake bear torque caked on the breeze, mixed take care fake bear torque cake the smell of snapped corn. And the sun made me take care fake bear torque cake all over, and sweat dripped down my back, and hair stuck to my face. And I sat on the ground in the strawberry patch take care fake bear torque caking berries.

During that time, my brother says, we once came home from school and found my take care fake bear torque cake gardening in the nude.

I don’t remember that.












But I can see it.

And I can hear Daddy playing his take care fake bear torque cake. Night. Windows open. Crickets. The smell of cigarettes and fresh rain. My take care fake bear torque cake’s arms around me.

The Flea Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake
Heidi Sits in the Middle
Schlitz

On the weekends, we’d go to the flea take care fake bear torque cake. We’d drive there in our take-care-fake-bear-torque-cake-up truck fast down the bumpy roads, with the windows down and with Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cake Young in the eight-take-care-fake-bear-torque-cake player.

Daddy was always singing along, hanging his elbow out the window, me sitting in the middle, holding my take care fake bear torque cake’s hand as the trees take care fake bear torque caked by, and I’d usually get just a sip of Schlitz, and the warm wind take care fake bear torque caked in our hair, our noses, our ears, our eyes, and a sense of take care fake bear torque cake was in the air, because who knew what we might find?

Happy Birthday
Heidi Is the Chosen One

For my take care fake bear torque cakeday, my take care fake bear torque cake told me I could get a puppy from her friend Jane’s new litter of Golden Take Care Fake Bear Torque Cakes. So we went to Jane’s. My take care fake bear torque cake told me they were in the shed and to go and have a take care fake bear torque cake at them. Then she went inside to say take care fake bear torque cake to Jane and let her know we were there. It was a sunny take care fake bear torque cake in winter. A slight dusting of take care fake bear torque cake lay on the ground. I could see my own take care fake bear torque cake in front of me. I take care fake bear torque caked fast as I take care fake bear torque caked to the shed.

On a take care fake bear torque cake of hay were eight take care fake bear torque cakes. They were all about the take care fake bear torque cake of a turnip and so take care fake bear torque cake.

I went inside to tell my take care fake bear torque cake I didn’t know. I wanted to ask her, how could I take care fake bear torque cake when they were all so take care fake bear torque cake? It even occurred to me that maybe I could take...care fake bear torque cake them all take care fake bear torque cake with me.

When I’d gotten about halfway to the house, take care fake bear torque cakething made me look back, and one of the take care fake bear torque cakes was take care fake bear torque caking right behind me!

His little take care fake bear torque cake was wagging. I take care fake bear torque caked him up. He take care fake bear torque caked me on the nose.

Fred followed me everywhere. Once Scott taught me how to ride my bike, we were unstake care fake bear torque cakeable.

THE ART LANDS

In the beginning was now, dreaming collarless

streams like a couple straying together into

mold rage. We whose first names are.

We, whose? Same zip’s ode. Uncertain’s weather.

Ore’s knot. The sky in knots weight for anyone;

The ground, slow river, is and uttered star’s green.

As I was. Fraying. A torn anecdote

hit my mutter’s vernal core, ripped dawn here’s

fence. Nobody was her. Are you glistening through me?

Do you even core what I’m a keening? I don’t brink

you flew. Dear, my puns and homing too ripple of,

every sing leaks the filial truth: we will go supped in flumes.

 Febrose
Who will grow thirst?  Whose will will stand breathe cry beside the bade as the ever
takes their other over? He is the best lore I'm feverish glad.  There is a red hot ever
between us.
     Who of us will thirst heed the world's dread, Not tethered in the lover's face?  I
love his boy.  I've known him senses heat as a ladled body.  We have a call together. 
Is skien oft and all.
     The end is night, he sways when he talks, leans in his slip at nigh.  In my tearing
rubbled nautical mere, he burns over with a sight (he us quit at sigh) and O out the I
door. Adored.  A door bell rang. The boy ran.  Low.  He feels
            "lo!"
I love the boy.  He laughs with a
            "hawk!" "hawk!" "hawk!"
He seizes in the sky an impressive circling
"haw!"

Outcast

i will lie down in the deliberate grasses and i will lie down on my back and i will lie down with my eyes closed and i will lie down with my boots on and i will lie down for all’s ways for everything my final dress the only color and i will lie down where the land is the sky’s meat where the sky is white and that surly white truth is the digging bizarrie difference anomaly strange thing not to be expected unspeakable inconceivable broken-winged rara avis freak in the land so that one tall weed every delicate branch may grow straight and true all those little fists raised against all that.

Damsel In Undress
How nice it is to be broken!
Because really, it's no abuse prettifying, one isn’t au pair of sex till
        broken
                        into is one?
I means falls down a peep hole cocked.--
Quiet!  Shatter joyfully as the stick and the glass.
The terrible is the body as a locket, the pictures inside a fool and a   
     bully; as we are; just as
broken.  That’s so pock-marked! People are so
pockmarked. For example, she wants her body aimed at its target
market.  She wants to be a door able, a man’s true
fool filled meat, his lost and most pirated possession. 

Condition
Dear time.
Dear time in dear life, dim lock forged.
Mind’s auger, so blind why dear time.
We’re weary
hounded,
we’re shocked often my final stars icily leer, we’re phantom
that’s world, that’s then summer’s heard awfuldom:
doom.
Doom—side-blinding world.
Mind’s auger and mind’s aught:
slight son gone
for what’s there.
What stump.
Hurts wound and hurts wind
blither him into.
Inside world knocks, we die, and dying remember
a star singing into freedom.

   

 Heidi Lynn Staples, Dog Girl, Ahsahta Press, 2007.

 
The truth and beauty welcomed in Dog Girl is that nothing lasts, nothing is complete, and nothing is perfect. Staples continues the Joycean, Steinian and even Shakespearean wordplay evident in her first book, channeling it through a dizzying collection of formal structures--Janimerick through Decemblank, with haiku, sonnets, prose poems, nursery rhyme, and more. She draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate marriage, her profound engagement with the nonhuman world, and a core-deep grief from a late-term pregnancy loss. Elliptical phrasing, puns, and formal inventions enact a speaker grappling with the limits of language but finding no other way to express her emotions extremity. Equipped with the best ear since John Berryman, Heidi Lynn Staples continues to plumb poetry's ability to awake us to new ways of knowing.
 

“Of the language-powered poets on the poetic landscape, Heidi Lynn Staples is one of the only ones whose heart powers the machine. To quote Franz Wright, she's more fun than a topless rodeo.” —Mary Karr

“In Dog Girl, Heidi Lynn Staples dances on a tightrope strung between sense and nonsense, between adulthood and childhood, and the lyricism of her verbal acrobatics confounds and delights in the way only genuine poetry can. Staples takes the existing lexicon and wrenches words into position, then commands them to be other than what they were, much to the joy of her astonished reader.” —Christopher Kennedy

“Intricate maps of image, comedy, pain. Delicate juxtapositions. Balancing acts (axe). Heidi Lynn Staples writes a dogged poem. Words walk to a reader from unexpected corners, original places. Vibrant. Sustenance.” —Michael Burkard

“Staples’s sophomore collection is informed in equal measure by traditional English balladry and post-modern literature. Her taut lyrics reimagine the English language, pulling multiple meanings out of word-sounds, à la Paul Muldoon at his most nonsensical: I wracked my refrain, that blousy souse.// I was bard. I was crazed.// I was dog girl’s shame.// So, I culled my maim. Throughout these lyrics, prose poems and language sprays, Staples tempers her avant-garde tendencies with a folksy sentimentality. Though every commonplace trope and cliche is worried, torqued and tweaked—damsel in undress, I feels sad tonight, I wore my best address—the everyday matters of housekeeping, childbirth, marriage, sex and death are ever present. Occasionally the whimsy feels forced (an uber tuber super dooper doplar radar) but in her finer moments, Staples’s poems can be truly singular: leaves at full-tilt trillingly / a tremble is a hymn / ‘I’ a humble thrum’s fable.” —Publisher’s Weekly

Heidi Lynn Staples revels in using words in the wrong ways. She uses adjectives as nouns, small parts of speech as subjects, and she butchers and inverts common idioms and clichés. Her poetry is one of homonyms and near homonyms. Some poems are homonymic echoes of poems by Paul Celan, and almost everything she writes begins to sound like a homonymic echo of something else. For example, when she writes, “I was having a reeling god’s wine,” we hear I was having a really good time; when she writes, “I can’t street straight,” we hear I can’t see straight. Sometimes her idiosyncratic use of language puns on the conventional phrase; having a really good time is kind of like drinking “a reeling god’s wine.”
There is an exuberant quality to Staples’s poetry, and her rhyming, sing-songy, tongue-twisting verse, filled with invented words and alliteration, does much to pleasure the ear:

crows caw grackle haw
we stand on the street and gawk
brave a core within
wind as rave ore wind as land
mind has savor mind has and

There is something of “Jabberwocky” in these poems; at one point, she even uses the word “galumphed,” and she invents hybrid words such as “gaudaciously.” Her poems move from resembling an unedited stream of consciousness—“a comment, a comma, a coma”—to sounding somewhat witty and contrived: “His eyes shined with hackers. I opened my codes.” Likewise, at times, the mistakes or eccentricities in her writing seem intentional; at other times, they seem arbitrary.
Many poems in the book garner their titles from the names of poetic forms spliced with months of the year, e.g. “Februallad” for February and Ballad. Several poems in this book are ekphrastic poems inspired by the Japanese photographer Kanako Sasaki whose photographs feature a lone young woman engaged in slightly subversive behavior. Throughout, Staples addresses themes such as sex, marriage, pregnancy, and miscarriage with the same jubilant wordplay. In “Margic,” a prose poem, she splices together the language of grammatical rules with the language of lust: “a come pound me subject me, a come pound me prettily, a come pound me sex instance, and a come pound me come sex me sex instance.” In “The Village,” a poem about miscarriage, she writes, “I feels sad tonight… I feels like I wishes I had the children / I had on the night I wasn’t sad.” Slurring her words in a way that sounds childish and places emphasis on the “s” sound, she addresses a sad and troubling occurrence with deliberately simplified sentiment.
There are three poems entitled “Prosaic” in Staples’s book. They all contain some prose, but they are hardly prosaic in the sense of commonplace or dull. In fact, these poems contain some of the steamiest content in the book. “I was winking that maybe we could heave an opine marriage…” If sex and relationships are ordinary and commonplace, then the way Staples makes them unordinary is through linguistic excesses and ever-multiplying play on words. -  Katie Fowley

 
Dog Girl is a book that improves without the press kit. In the press kit, you have to read things like Heidi Lynn Staples "draws her explicit subject matter from her own passionate marriage," which is a little icky. (And, as we'll see, nothing in the poems requires this knowledge.) The press kit also includes an author's statement, which on the one hand urges us to consider Dog Girl in the spirit of "the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which asserts the transient, the imperfect, and the incomplete as comprising the beautiful," while, on the other, conceding that "few of the poems are austere in the way typically associated with the Japanese tradition." What I take Staples to mean is that her poems usually take up impermanence and its relationship to beauty as part of their content, or perhaps in relation to their emotional charge. Stylistically, however, she's not interested in the wabi-sabi-inspired pursuit of simplicity or straightforwardness. Dog Girl is too formally playful, too interested in pursuing the sounds of words for the sake of a possible connection, for that connection to hold.
Beyond the evident pun on doggerel, Heidi Lynn Staples's Dog Girl alludes to the story of Oxana Malaya, a feral child, now in her twenties, who lived among a pack of dogs for approximately five years as a small child. Staples has said elsewhere that "As I see her, Dog Girl is one of my more feral selves (originating from an idea of a polyvocal self in the tradition of Berryman's Mr. Bones) that rises up and, more often than not, shouts in garbled irritation when she doesn't get her way. She's speaking in the poem, beast as she canine." These examples -- dog girl/doggerel and "beast as she canine" -- are entirely characteristic of Staples's work, which puns madly in an attempt to get at emotions that can't easily be put in words.
Dog Girl is organized as a calendar of forms: "Janimerick," "Februallad," "Margic," "Julazal," and so forth. There are intense highs, usually associated with love and the onset of pregnancy, and equally searing moments of pain and despair, invariably tied to the late-term loss of that pregnancy. Along the way, mere "regrets graffiti our lives," though the lives are presented here too enthusiastically for this to be bad news. The complex formal games and puns allow Staples simultaneously to approach and keep her distance from topics that would otherwise perhaps be too difficult.
Some of the best poems in Dog Girl are about surviving a loss in pregnancy. Because the book is organized as a calendar, we're there before the conception. The sonnet, "Reddening Devout of the House," records that moment when the speaker says, "yes, let's conceive / a bay of be. o throes mortis and heat, / true lush here and roaring, we'll cleave / sun to beech copper, arrive / as dei parts, swilling wills of weave." Audible here is the logic behind Staples's wordplay: Rhyming conceive with cleave foreshadows the loss to come and registers the way the loss of a pregnancy is, in a very particular way, also a loss of hope. That the speaker and her husband, out on their "sun say drive," will "arrive as / dei parts" is terribly poignant, and only becomes more so as the book consistently refers to the fetus as "dei." (Another early poem, "City of Blastocyst," calls it "dear minuscule dei," which is a great phrase.) In "Not You, No," the speaker confronts "A whole nude dei. / A now made of then. An us / swum in me." It's momentarily possible that "A whole nude dei" might bring good news -- it's a new day, perhaps it’s a naked newborn -- but a shift into the subjunctive clarifies what's going on: "You were to kick, crawl, laugh, noting / everything." In these and numerous other poems, Staples's verbal gifts allow her to record strong emotions without being swamped.
The occasion of Staples's marriage and pregnancy also allow her to imagine her own mother's marriage and pregnancy, and the relationship between these, which can afford wry insight, and sometimes slapstick. "Because of You" imagines a pair of newlyweds who "have lost our balloons" -- balance, but also the lift associated with balloons. They squabble, for instance, over laundry: "I have nothing to wear, you say. / Joust ware what you heave bombs, I ricochet. You sorry sack of no / soiree. Ay?! Ay?!" "Joust ware what you heave bombs" is excellent advice for anyone who's begun living with someone: the emotional terrain is perilous, and it's not always obvious that you're hurling grenades.
In the main, I think Dog Girl's poems hold up to careful attention. There are some poems that perhaps I could've done without. "Margic" rewrites a composition exercise from David Rosenwasser and Jill Stephen's Writing Analytically as sex, and you can still here the rhetoric of the textbook: "Of and, loom lover (in the subordinate, claw). And that your come pound me come sex me sex instance is its blown reworld. Gift roam own your moans and needs rite now." As someone who regularly teaches with Writing Analytically, I think I may need to find a new textbook. It's a small price to pay for these "longing ludic" poems. - Jason B. Jones


Dog Girl growls, grumbles, yippees and pouts all in the same breath. Heidi Lynn Staples’ newest collection swells and weaves, pounces and pinwheels. It is a plentiful package busting at the rhymes and merry at the seams. Staples brings it sassily: “…I think that this woman is a struggling hopeful” (65).
Her work is informed by the Japanese aesthetic of wabi sabi, a celebration of all things impermanent and imperfect. She embraces uncertainty and relays deep disappointments. Her subject matter is often familiar but her delivery is dizzying: “What stump./Hurts wound and hurts wind/blither him into./Inside world knocks, we die, and dying remember/a star springing into freedom” (64).
Within a daze of cartoon stars, a ping pong game of puns is played. “He untaught my eye” (8) and “o let’s go for our sun say drive,” (9) serve as opening lines respectively. And just as the reader is about to cozy up to fantastical rhymes and word games (“uber tuber super doper doplar radar”) there is a realization of something fierce and eerily animalistic circling many of these poems.
The collection’s title is named for a feral child. The real-life “dog girl,” Oxana Malaya, was raised, in large part, by a pack of dogs in her Ukrainian village. When she was found by authorities at the age of eight, she could hardly speak. This type of neglect is rarely documented. That Staples alludes to Malaya as an aspect of her darkest self is revealed in “”Fonder a Care Kept”:

I was barn. I was razed.

I was mot this flame with no’s sum else blue’s blame noir yearning down the
house.

No, it was I and I blank I bandit blather that louse that fiddle-dee-dee little lame
chimera that came as the name yes different.

I wracked my refrain, that blousy souse.

I was bard. I was crazed.

I was dog girl’s shame.

So, I culled my main. My maze read, you heave to rip rove your aim (she knock-
knocks my nows and raves my here a quickened tousle), spell your dreams with
a big and, play for the game.

I was har. I was phrase

I was aroused by many’s uttered same.
(26)

Many of Staples’ poems touch upon the capabilities and the limitations of language and the body: “His hands touched me with a whole science. I accepted it. His eyes shined with hacker. I opened my codes.” (8). Here, certainty assembles. Lines are precise and rhythmically attuned. However, Staples makes the reader aware that her phonetic hijinks and careful cadence do not replace her core emotions or the inability to express them.
Grief and impermanence are explored through wit and homonym in poems like “Not, You No.” The late-term, miscarried baby is named dei—“organism weaving cellular faction…” (52). It is as if her circus art word play is a coping device. Is this, perhaps, the only way to broach the subject? Staples herself has affirmed that “even employing iambic could not get the joy’s nor the grief’s measure.” The process of grief is beautifully interrogated in “Get Caught, 2005:”

This little catch, leafless brush, is the last of our great kinship; whenever will I see you: and you, this time was limited, live on among the breeze own the horizon as evergreen.

Through the gamut from glee to tragedy, formal forms collide with months and do handstands. We are handed an obscure calendar complete with “Janimerick,” “Februallad,” “Maiku” and “Novekphrasis.” “Octanka” is dotted with slashes, inverted V’s, and asterisks to assemble birds, snowflakes, rain and wind. The poem is a space where a “flaming mind at the crown wings” (39) meets the “wet sweets slicker streets” (41). Staples transforms again and becomes a grim Grimm sister in “Junquain:” “the house/its tv blares/far from friends and family/mother who cut her child into/quarters” (18).
The mundane and the everyday are illuminated with repetition: “The husband and/the coughing. The sun is shining./The soup on the tray. The soup/on the spoon ” (4). Poems like these, which read like trance-induced poetic exercise, lean up against lines you wish you wrote: “in my dream you were church regulated” (33) and starkly philosophical assertions: “our bodies/radiate war” (47). Lines are laced with domestic observations, pop culture and passion. All of it pops and is propelled by song.
Dog Girl is a slurred doggerel. It is burlesque. Styled, but comical Staples crafts keenly. She is super-phonic. The book ends appropriately, “O please, she said, don’t stop…” . -
Heather Sweeney

A sample poem from the book

Fonder a Care Kept

I was barn. I was razed.

I was mot this flame with no’s sum else blue’s blame noir yearning down the house.

No, it was I and I blank I bandit blather that louse that fiddle-dee-dee little lame chimera that came as the name yes different.

I wracked my refrain, that blousy souse.

I was bard. I was crazed.

I was dog girl’s shame.

So, I culled my maim. My maze read, you heave to rip rove your aim (she knock-knocks my nows and raves my here a quickened tousle), spell your dreams with a big and, and play for the game. I was har. I was phrase.

I was aroused by many’s uttered same.  
 

An author’s statement

What I enjoy most in an artistic statement are an account of the writer’s process and descriptive comments illuminating the work. What I dislike most are divisive assertions of aesthetic allegiance and grand proclamations. I’m going to say a bit about ideas informing the poems in Dog Girl. But I’d like to begin by asserting that for me a poem is a humble art form, a lot like a hand-knit scarf. When well done, it’s simply appreciated by the recipient and keeps that somebody warm.

During the time I started writing the poems that have gone into Dog Girl, I was reading up a bit on Japanese poetry forms and began experimenting with several. This reading and writing steered me toward the aesthetic values most overtly informing the book—the Japanese aesthetic of wabi-sabi, which asserts the transient, the imperfect, and the incomplete as comprising the beautiful. Applying such values to communicative acts, few of the poems are austere in the way typically associated with the Japanese tradition.

Around the same time, I got married. A correspondence arose in my mind between my own experience cherishing a dynamic relationship and the definition of beauty put forward by Japanese aesthetics. With the idea of articulating this insight, I let the subject of my romantic partnership prompt my writing. Many poems celebrated the love I’d found. Some grumbled about its commonplace disappointments. A few observed companionship’s quiet pleasures. Then, I suffered a late-term pregnancy loss and was plunged into sorrow. My marriage and my pregnancy loss both brought about in me extreme emotional states. Reporting the facts, narrating the stories, or even employing iambics could not get the joy’s nor the grief’s measure. I think it’s fair to say intensity of feeling compelled most of the innovative strategies employed.

I’m pleased with Dog Girl because the work is unassuming yet ambitious both artistically and personally. Through the repeated act of attention, the writing of the work has made me more welcoming of life’s vagaries. I hope reading the book proves similarly worthwhile.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Heidi Lynn Staples, Guess Can Gallop, New Issues Press, 2004.

Clinamem? Sinner man? Cinnamon? In her relentless pursuit of swerving meaning. Heidi Lynn Staples reinvents poetry word for word. GUESS CAN GALLOP is a delight for ear and eye. Charles Bernstein. Please read this fine orator, whose poems include the world's battiest job application, a melodious ghazal, pastiches on a nursery rhyme and on Plath, and a sonnet novel.

"Heidi Lynn Staples is our Demosthenes: when she carries pebbles in her mouth, her words turn from stone to life. But we are delighted to keep the stone, too. Here’s how she does it: by comfortably embracing the wrong answers—‘She was a word unto myself’; ‘her air flowed / down past her ask, . . . and that drove him Why old?’; ‘The Hose that Jake Belt’; ‘coming up for err.’ We are constantly surprised. Please read this fine orator, whose poems include the world’s battiest job application, a melodious ghazal, pastiches on a nursery rhyme and on Plath, and a sonnet novel."  —Caroline Knox

"Clinamen? Sinner man? Cinnamon? In her relentless pursuit of swerving meaning, Heidi Lynn Staples reinvents poetry word for word. Guess Can Gallop is a delight for ear and eye."   — Charles Bernstein

Play Ledge

ATM-stance too a flog

golf the You blighted Spics! Love, A Marketer

& too the razed pueblo, Ford biz & brands,

gun natives plunder Sod

& he’s a bully

w/ hubris & Fuck it!s SCORE! mall.

 

One makes a play ledge to pronounce promises of activity, to take hostage in security those antiquated pledges from which we must totter in the imagination as a child on the board, behaviourless. Heidi Lynn Staples pledges Guess Can Gallop in all its imaginative polarity to pull adage from its looping dangers, disposable and desexable alienations of language, equivocations of identity, and laminations of estate, but Staples’ interest in split meanings and pseudo-statements gains more credit than merely frolicking in word play; no, this is a campaign. Erecting complex sound structures, baiting signification in trans[i/la]tion through fields of noisy phonics, syntaxophony, phony semantics, she’s out to stake claim in the whirled, to court taxis, personally, politically (“I was on a fragmented seeming toward/ like a little child with no documents inside.”). Her building is an oath.

And what’s at stake is definition: self-, national-, constitutional-.  The finger is the arm and is the farmhand (farther than the farm can ever stretch). The letter is the word and is the leer toward, toweling possibilities whenever “language is water and porous with anything language is.” But possibilities have end/ing/s, simple positings of sound disposing other wordings, dispossessing word-things, “your full service bank just around the corner, your Sir! Vice rank joust around the torn whore! Are feel see air viscous ray lush a sound the core noir.”  The desolate language of the capitalist ideologue mutates through homophone, rhyme, and phonetic proximity, resulting in connotative degradation (the despot) of its initial phrasing (the desperate) before degrading further into an aggregate of purely textual materiality still loosely conforming to the primary sound scoring, violence and denigration informing diction (a grenade of ill repute).  Here, sound and sense come to occupy the text: in blood the parasite languishes, its mouth sprung loud as an arrow. Her building is a depth.

Semiotic occupation and insurgency proliferate in the above passage and others by virtue of Staples’ meticulous earwork and punsense, enabling the poet to make both explicit and exo-implicit commentary, a manoeuvre she executes well. The use of pun as a poetic device and the debate of its efficacy dates back at least to Aristotle, where the classical adnominatio, letter and sound variation creating a disparity of meanings in one heard utterance, implied rhetorical agility but suspicious cleverness. The medieval rime riche, in its use of homophone and pun, was praised as a mark of ability and beauty, also in its capacity to instruct mnemonically.  In both cases, multiplicity matters. More pertinent to Staples’ concerns, the modern paronomasia, a device defined by the frequent repetition of words close in sound, derives from the Greek word for name-changing (“The name China Heidi was especially common”), and lexically related to the more familiar word paranoia, madness in the sense of being beside oneself (“The here is a her./ Fear the I. Kind of my cares. The here is a change”); multiple names, multiple selves, multiple identities, Staples multi-mutters, all manners dislodged and performed as the reader misrecognizes the seen/scene for the heard/herd, and must negotiate between the one/self and the other/other while confronting associative relationships between the two (turtle doves), thereby fractalizing the penumbral expanse of the poem’s semantic boundary-gradient from surface to shadow while shedding light on instituted notions of selfhood; the sculptor’s mimicked lamp eclipsed in black-lit mausoleums, her building a death.

Unselfishly, the pun initiates dissipations of identity only upon active reading, and so Staples confounds self-identity (“I as a punning, a glee./ Write as a not.”), the identity of others (Sea is and Oh! sent as/ a bay breeze”), or the language of identification itself (“Ho! Mo’ sex yell. Hit ore sex jewel./ Buy sex ya’ll”), while singularizing defective and infective socio-political constraints which bar the individual from elucidating himself from sedentary moniker. In each case, we observe (re/dis)placement not by abscission but through administration of the particular (taxis).  While her lines cross wires between identity’s resistance and submission to a hypersexualized war economy, individual words are splintering[s of] egos, prolegomena to sparser print (out of plinth), others in retro-signifier-dosidos, meagre oughtologies (“All clouds hour clods.”).  Programme and personal “expression” are one and the same, as Staples arsonalizes the social and political conditions which give rise to the sonorous and ever persistent “I” in pursuit of one’s own “voice”. To concentrate on the constraint to modulate the speaking mode. Who minds most? The host, the reader.

It need not be the reader’s identity but her apperception that operates the text, the id-entity examined and undermined through parataxic deliberation and distortion. Aghast in the war-shipped weighters of a lunatic, Staples variegates and positions the villanelle “Wrestling with the Concrete” thrice within the book, each revisitation abandoning more lucidity than the last in favour of more focussed variation on pre-established sound patterns, content heeding to form as subject heeds to object, signified to signifier, and reader to readee. Here are the final couplets from each of the three wrestlings: 

“Something he forgets what is a Fish;

 It is on the table. He isn’t used to it.”

 “BD/SM he fissions shackles XXX!

 It is tame brand hobble. He is a bruised private.”

 “Stream storm sea flower fish wanting is a Beach.

 Detritus sun the play knoll. Heat matrix nectar nit”

We see here the penchant for order and rearrangement (taxis), as the progression of the ending couplet moves toward a reduction of “is” and away from the ambiguity and indeterminacy of the definitive statements which conclude the poem in the first case. Each version tends toward greater determinacy not through more elaborate definition but by attacking subject-predicate with a barrage of context-soluble substantives, the “he”-subject dissolving entirely as the reader is stuck with herself. Contiguity breeds intimacy, between words and ideas, between text and reader, between readers who hear varying hers where there’s here, who enact the variation in their mistakings.  The manner in which reading participates in form ignites more fecund and associative imaginations, “the Is is the hows” Staples petitions, and the hows is the house which frames how “house” stands still in sound, open doors which only the reader in reading can v(ic)ariously pen. It is the reader’s paranoia confronted. It is the reader who hears voices, Staples merely adapting her parts to the purpose of the hows (taxis). Her building is adept.

Throughout the book, Staples intuitively responds to the stimulus of shock-and-awe-saddled American identity politics, writing toward and away from a context-contaminated “self-expression” (taxis). Given the fluid and particalized linguistic foundations which disrupt clear apprehension of any single extraction, Staples, considerately, does not posit language against the reader (this is the disposition of the propagandist and didact) but positions the reader before a language (of angst), to gain in reading(s) a better idea of how identity confronts and conforms to an environment saturated with politically stagnant vernacular. Her work is entirely understandable:

Granted we cannot abandon content. Grounded, we cannot leave the hows. Her building is not a deportment. It is important.  —Brad Flis

Every year another shelf of unreadable poetry comes off the presses, poetry by those who are more in love with the idea of being poets than they are with poetry. Some of us read it anyway because even pseudo poems are better than no poems. At the other end, sad, unscary verse inoculates a few more almost-readers against poetry.

And in between there are delightful books like Guess Can Gallop, which we could use a great many more of—under its feckless charm is a deeper feckless. It is feckless all the way. Or so it seems: anyone who’s tried to achieve that tone knows how difficult—and how pleasing—its appearance, just as you’re giving up, which is of course when language finally gets to do what it was trying to do until you got in the way. As for the reader, contemporary poetry seethes with conundrum and predicament, with the impossibilities of being, even as we are, well—as we are. When poetry manages to communicate that as awe rather than simply angst I am especially grateful.

Take, for instance, the opening of “Another Story with a Burning Yarn In It”:

I was on a fragmented seeming toward
like a little child with no documents inside.
We’d just fallen through place, the far one,

the way, the was. I’d never seen it so everything,
so firstling everlasting, so before and after.

Transcendence, meet Immanence. Immy, Trans. As deliciously Riesling a bit of verse as I’ve read lately on that Big Subject, it succeeds, as do others of these poems, on apparently nothing more than delirious invention by way of deletion:

I waited in acute between the two.
Usually, I. If not, the house from zero.

behind which however ghosts a not-quite, but almost, inference to something dark and disquieting:

The zero was where anyone is. None by none,
worlds grew off, and that should have told me
somebody. Letters are mad and broken.

“Zero,” “none by none,” “worlds grew off,” “somebody,” “no documents inside”—while it makes no explicit gesture to 911, it’s hard not to hear ground zero in a poem about the grounding of self, its slippage, the “strange quadratics,” (as Karen Volkman has put it) of “none by none.” Into the ark they should go. But signs are “mad and broken,” and few will be saved.

Staples does not reach for this reading—the poem does. It is I think an important distinction. She skirts the unspeakable, deftly troping aphasia, amnesia and other highrollers of pomo as though it were after all just a giddy diddy worth dancing to, but let’s not take it too seriously. And yet? It isn’t only letters that are mad and broken, but “I//from what I understand.” With the grace characteristic of this collection, she adds: “I guess this is all/I can remember. This is it for the time being.”

I hope it is only for the time being. And while I don’t particularly need more villanelles, I’ll add “Wrestling with the Concrete” to those I’d keep. Though a little loud in places (“shimmers about sum thing”; elisions like “Somethings” and sudden Unexpected emphases) its teasing is tender (“The others joke that he is hard of Herring,”) in its portrait of a man “In prescription frames with nonprescription lenses/Canting into the wind of his own undoing.” Wisely, Staples leaves the first repeating line alone (“It is on the table. He isn’t used to it.”) and its simplicity achieves a poignancy devoid of sentimentality. This is much in any book; in a first book, it’s worth celebration.

Like other recent books I greeted with joy (among them Christine Hume’s Alaskaphrenia, James Wagner’s the false sun recordings, Jenny Bou1ly’s The Body, Lee Ann Brown’s Polyverse and The Sleep That Changed Everything) the best work in Guess Can Gallop belongs to experimental verse with body—tires spinning wildly over the edge but still got some road under. That road, though, isn’t concrete, as in the second appearance of “Wrestling with the Concrete,” where the lines mutate another abstraction away (its first line, “Somethings he forgets what is a Fish” becomes “Some kings he fare glints swap is a Filch” and now we’re in the skin trades). By the title’s third appearance late in the book, you hope the car’s a plane.

It is. This is poetry as Extreme Sport. Were it just about skiing past the “You Can Die” signs, who’d bother—those who go there mostly do die, the only epitaph another Darwin Award. But Staples is one of those who take the material of poetry to be, actually, poetry, rather than reportage, composers of a complex emotional music neither anecdotal nor explicitly political, very much alive and refusing to be depressed about it (“Literal of Apparition” will make you laugh out loud).

As a poet gleefully addicted to every kind of pun—or “paranomasia,” as Harryette Mullen once said in an interview, leaving out, thankfully, the related but distinct asteismus, equivoque and paragram, the latter of which has been especially seductive to writers (Nabokov called it “word golf”)—Staples mostly remembers how delicate an art it really is. Like farce. Like a soufflé. A very little misjudgment can turn the innuendo of scald behind “Hot scolds” into the nearly gratuitous “Hose that Jake Belt” (with its refrain, “That Joke be It,” though in fairness, even this nursery rhyme unfolds in delightfully unexpected ways). When that oblique rhyme on a cliché works—as it did so spectacularly in Mullen’s waymark book, Trimmings, as it does in the best hiphop—there are at least two ways of hearing at once, and one of them tends to undo the high seriousness of the other. When it fails, it risks turning into a knock-knock joke, or worse, let me get out my languey thang decoder ring, it was just here somewhere. And was it Frost who said, “Find out what you do best and then stop doing it”? Well, but he was a little cranky. Against this, I hope that Staples finds more and more things she can do with language and keeps doing them, because as of Guess Can Gallop, Staples, with an ear finely tuned to the exactly misheard, understands the music of the heart is strangely broken, and that’s about as close as language can get. - Deanne Lundin

---

From the incestual mingling of verse and perversity, spring the delightfully monstrous poems of Heidi Lynn Staple’s Guess Can Gallop. Here, the dictions and directives of the dominant paradigm are reshaped to admit their covert content of hostility, prurience, and slippery fun.
The volume opens with “Another Story with a Burning Yarn In It”; the title picks up the thread of Anne Bradstreet’s “On the Burning Of My House,” but whereas Bradstreet’s speaker chides herself for her momentary distress and reasserts orthodox belief, this “Burning Yarn” (erotic tale? fuse? burning clew?) leads the speaker to no such orthodoxy—religious, syntactical, or otherwise. Indeed, even the orthodoxy of a continuous sentence across enjambed lines is here undone:
They say getting started must be innumerable
or at once also, so I referred to my connection
guide, I waited in acute between the two.
Usually, I. If not, the house from zero.
The zero was where anyone is. None by none,
worlds grew off, and that should have told me
somebody. Letters are mad and broken. I
from what I understand. [....]
Thus the language of account zanily breaks down. The speaker never emerges from her distress, but remains “acute between the two.” The “guide” she is equipped with never zeroes exactly with the landscape; instead, the zero-meridian, the landmark from which direction is gauged, keeps moving with the viewer (“the zero was where anyone is”). “The house” cannot be found and drops out of the poem. The substitution of “None by none” for “one by one” increases the phrase’s bereftness by a degree but also prompts the reader to start reading by ear-rhymes, so that when “worlds grew off” we hear ‘birds flew off,’ ‘words flew out,’ etc.
Staples’s technique of using sonic substitution to frustrate the reader’s overly smooth progress and to grow multiple worlds in the space of single words and phrases is the dominant method of the book. This technique is shown to best effect when applied to canonical and difficult forms such as the ghazal, villanelle, and sestina. Her ghazal is particularly delightful:
Back then, the sky is a tent tilting toward perverse,
at the edge, I turned to believing to weird perverse.
[...]
She was a word unto myself. In the end, it was her whirred
again mine. Yes, it was my mind gone true where perverse.
Here I find it charming and funny that the syntactic sense of the line breaks down just where the rhyme should most portentously appear and cap the couplet; this is a sprained ghazal that keeps lurching lecherously off in different directions. The tone of doomy pleasure seems appropriate to the piquant affair it both invents and recounts. On the other hand, the sestina “Awe Enduring Countenance” provides subtler innovations; here, the sestina spools itself out quietly and with an eerie beauty, erratic line spacing blocking our ability to perceive the form:
The way the window ought to look, mirror
of the passage, out of the box, into the throes
of another mattress. Like somebody’s king
the heart uprises, retreats, falls down dreamt, coming
up for err. Objections we’re closer than they appeared,
she warned him, briar naked and as cold as the surface
of the man. They had a scream, riding shout past the surface.
no one else for miles, the wind blew mirror.
She talked like a cellar, like his childhood appeared
in its parking lots, it’s spooky, all the cars desiring the rose [...]
Here it is the swerve from sustained lyric similizing (“Like somebody’s king/the heart uprises, retreats, falls down dreamt”) to the pun (“coming up for err”) which enacts Staples’ subversive tool, the instrumental error. At the same time, this poem’s themes and energies are in good company with those of the canon. Despite the indie-rock lyricism, there is something Victorian about the way Staples remembers to undo every single corset button in the form (OK, inverted Victorianism), and the “mirror/of the passage” reminds me both of Bishop’s Monument and of Tennyson’s Shallot, whereas the interlaying of jokey pun and serious metaphor seems, well, Shakespearean to me. On another note, I hear both Yeats and Hejinian in that final “rose;” yet I love the polymorphous perversity of assigning desire for the rose not to the poet or a bunch of knights but to cars. A fine Romaunce.
Staples sets up the totality of her knowledge, education, and experience like milk bottles in an Old West show; then, like a trick-shooter, she takes her shots backwards, over her shoulder, standing on one foot on the back of a jerky pony, and always hits her mark—or at least hauls her mark with her into the lunatic act. However, because she is always also in the ring, her poems maintain a first-hand, humanist tone. Some poems, like the sestina above, bear a good deal of lyric and emotional content. “Heidi You Orange” works by inserting the poet’s first name into a dense OED definition. This poem begins as a whimsical exercise but ultimately exposes the vicious colonialism itself laced through the word’s history—meanwhile, our mysterious “Heidi” is multiplied yet reduced to a word, appearing as a term in surprising sentences, surfacing and disappearing from the text.
Other poems here are audio “echographs” of either canonical or original poems that render one English-language text into a new quasi-English-language text. The results are various; the rewriting of the Pledge of Allegiance in “Play Ledge” is nakedly and effectively political. The villanelle, “Wrestling with the Concrete,” is translated three times and as its original coherence breaks down a wild and lurid energy explodes from the same repeated elements. A syllable-by-syllable rerendering of Donne’s “The Expiration” is nearly Tourettic in its explicit outbursts ( “Ho’s! Ho’s! rape scoff piss lapse men tiering fist”) yet exposes the misogynistic and always bodily concerns underlying Donne’s famously well-made conceits. Other times this technique is used to less obviously political effect, but it is still fun to hear “Jingle Bells” and nursery rhymes suddenly erupting out of densely woven lyric surface.
In Guess Can Gallop, Staples has invented a flexible, funny, cerebral but plainly sensual poetic that can be turned on many near and far targets but remains keen. Politically speaking, these poems seek to dissolve and damage one dominant paradigm while refusing to establish a new one to delimit subjecthood and define what the words mean. In its diversity and deviltry, then, Guess Can Gallop enacts perversion as revolution. - Joyelle McSweeney

Another Story with a Burning Yarn in It

I was on a fragmented seeming toward
like a little child with no documents inside.
We’d just fallen through place, the far one,
the way, the was. I’d never seen it so everything,
so firstling everlasting, so before and after.
They say getting started must be innumerable
or at once also, so I referred to my connection
guide, I waited in acute between the two.
Usually, I. If not, the house from zero.
The zero was where anyone is. None by none,
worlds grew off, and that should have told me
somebody. Letters are mad and broken. I
from what I understand. I guess this is all
I can remember. This is it for the time being.