Book Review: In No One's Land by Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Upon Arrival by Paula Cisewski

I love reading poetry, but I never feel like I get it. Trained in school to presume I was always missing something, I eventually gave myself over completely to self-doubt and now believe I'm not up to teasing out the subtleties of a Mattie Stepanek poem. Even when I do get it, I'm still not sure I get it, which is pretty much the same as not getting it.

Imagine what a hopeless lameass I feel like, then, reading books of poetry by my brilliant friends. I went to grad school with both Paige Ackerson-Kiely and Paula Cisewski, and I made the grave mistake of liking them before finding out they were poets. This oversight committed me to buying and reading and trying to say something intelligent about the poetry books they would eventually publish, a long-term goal the precocious beeyotches both got around to about 15 minutes after graduation.

Paige's In No One's Land came out just a couple of months ago, and I read it immediately in one sitting, then kept going back to it, trying to see what I'd missed and figure out how to describe the book here. Unfortunately, the word that springs most readily to mind is: Paige.

Let me see if I can explain. Here are a few Paige lines I adore, from her poem "Greenland":

Dying is your boss chewing on a pen & counting with his fingers, then smiling with one side of his mouth, then counting with his fingers, & chewing on a pen. Dying is a woman so alone in a city that she does not think we see her adjusting her undergarments as she walks, head bent so that her hair falls across her face like the relief of driving snow just when you needed a reason to turn in for the night.

And here are a few more Paige lines I adore, from the last e-mail she sent me:

If I had grown up in an age before transportation I would have invented time travel, and all of our lives would be different. I can promise this from my little spot in the sun on the floor, the log in the woodstove, yes, it would all be different but not necessarily better, as I do require a little torture and thus we would all be slightly unattractive and sad, but we could go anywhere. Anywhere at all.

Do you see what I'm saying? Paige is a fabulous poet, but she's also sort of always like that. Witty and complicated and startlingly observant and awesomely twisted and unimpeded by punctuation. Leaving aside whether I get her poetry — which I don't (unless I do) — I read a line like, "My name is twenty-four letters long plus seventy-two words for snow," from "Love Letter," and I smile, because that is just so friggin' Paige. I can't even separate that from the potentially quite dark interpretations of the line. (Especially now, after I just typed that "My name is twenty-four letters long, plus seventy-two words for snot.")

Article Author: KateHarding

KateHarding became a blogcritic the same week as another Kate (C.) Harding. Weird.

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