[University of Arkansas Press; 2023]
The Coriolis Effect, which A.D. Lauren-Abunassar defines in the epigraph to her debut collection Coriolis, is when “an inertial force acts on an object in motion and deflects it off course.” The reader anticipates a kinetic collection about impact and disorder. Indeed, ADL (as she refers to herself on her website) delivers this, but what’s striking in this book is the precision with which disorder is made legible. ADL blends forensic attention to the natural world with playful but never glib references to pop culture, current affairs, and literature. The endnotes are well worth a read to appreciate the full range of ADL’s references, including a CNN article about a lioness eating her newborn to writing prompts from Ted Hughes accessed via rare manuscript archive.
“Something I wrote down” opens the collection, a title which attempts to un-poem the work, so to speak. ADL employs the pronoun “something” strategically—time and time again we find it blurring the end of sentences, drawing the reader away from specificity and towards opacity: “what if my eyes were enough to witness something?” or “there is no one I am pretending to be. This means something” or “there was blood. That was something.” She closes “Something I wrote down” with the line “It’s been years . . . since I did some small something with snow.” Vagueness is intentional, and lends these poems their informal, conversational register that balances ADL’s plentiful lyricism. The abundance of undefined “somethings” become placeholders standing in for further thought. I’ll come back to this, they seem to say, signifying a desire to progress towards an end point (a home, a conclusion, a person, an answer) but the impossibility of arriving at these things cleanly.
Formally speaking, these are poems wearing one another as cloaks. They are not fixed in place, but instead carry their histories and seem to remain in process. In “Something I wrote down,” ADL writes, “would you believe this began as a love note?” granting the poem an origin story, rendering it palimpsestic. A glance at the collection’s contents shows titles recurring. We have “Field Notes,” then “Field Guide as Sonnet.” There are two “Abandoned Sestinas,” and several poems with dual titles:
- Ekphrastic poem of hurricane hue paint swatch, or things that are wanting
- Ekphrastic poem of Scandinavia-hue paint swatch, or: (things that are naked)
Later, ADL performs an erasure on her own poem, “Disintegration Loop,” breeding a new poem, “Disintegration Loop 2,” whose stripped back form creates a literal echo in the collection. Later, the poem “Soliloquy” reads more like an elegy. All this is to say that ADL wishes to prevent her readers from becoming stationary. In some ways, the shifting titles lend the collection energy and cohesion, but they also create a kind of porousness, alerting the reader to the threat of loss, revealing the instability of the ground beneath our feet.
“Post-Immigration Pastoral” situates ADL, who is Palestinian-Irish-American, in conversation with other contemporary poets who are challenging the pastoral form’s traditionally harmonious conception of people’s place in landscape, instead attaching a diasporic or racial justice lens (notably Ariana Benson, whose Black Pastoral was also published last year). In ADL’s monochromatic pastoral, the field is swept with “coarse gray ash,” and human and landscape become proximate not through harmony but through violence:
Remember the two gray trees?
Where the neighbor hung himselfin bundles of wire. And our father
was there to untether him
The poem circles a homeland inflected with violence. The idea of “untethering” continues symbolically as the speaker struggles to disentangle memories of the landscape from the reality of the father, who serves as a kind of portal or access point for the landscape. ADL captures an experience familiar to immigrants: encountering home, or place, second hand:
If you could take away
the real things—the pollen sticking to our shirts,
the poplar too pretty to fitthe lemons wanting
nothing growing—I wonder if our father would turn
to a dream. I wonderwho he loved and left for.
ADL highlights the instability of “real things,” particularly in a poem that hinges on slippage and subtraction. We ask: if things are “taken away,” do they become less or more real? The pollen and the poplar threaten to displace the father. The hanged man becomes barely distinguishable from the trees, described as a “coarse / dead body on a coarse live / body.” Further slippage is seen in the enjambed line “the lemons wanting / nothing growing,” which can be read as either the lemons are growing or nothing is growing. Questions ensue: “I wonder / who he loved for and left for.” “Do you remember asking why he didn’t cry then? Do you remember his steady hands?” Then the speaker undercuts herself: “These days I ask questions badly. These days I dream of moving away.” Here’s a paradox: to move away is to gain distance from these questions whilst simultaneously becoming aligned with the experience of the father and extinguishing distance gained.
Throughout the collection we adjust to an onslaught of liminal, indistinct, or dreamlike spaces. ADL is more concerned with leaving than arriving anywhere, as seen in “Supplies for a quick migration.” The poem opens with concrete advice for journeying: “water walking shoes. Rope.” Then the poem shifts to the conceptual; “Leavable histories” is added; a phrase which seems almost oxymoronic, “history”—something defined by continuity—is compromised when deemed “leavable” and therefore ruptured. This is paired with “a honed ear to places where home-sounds sneak through.” The only emergent destination is the distorted version of home. As with “Post-Immigration Pastoral,” place and person become inextricably linked. At the end of the poem, the body becomes the final, inescapable destination: “The thing is your body becomes you. The thing is, there is no such place / as the end of you.”
The poem “Aphantasia” derives its name from a type of thinking where one does not have a visual imagination or a “mind’s eye.” The condition, which is viewed not as an impairment but rather a variation on how the imagination works, speaks to ADL’s unique image building. Frequently, I found myself close to an image, but not quite able to see its edges: “I see a colour that was once unbled / and call it you”; “today: the sky is not allowed. Rain can happen. The sky cannot happen.” ADL offers images and then retracts or undercuts them. The result is an intensely vivid impression of something created primarily through feeling or sensory crossovers, as in: “I am knocking at sound / the way one knocks at low-hanging fruit- / lessness.” This is not to say that Coriolis lacks image. The visual arts are integral to the collection, with poems riffing on works by Andy Warhol and Etel Adnan—poet, painter, and sculptor, and a cited influence of ADL. Adnan is quoted as saying “color is an affirmation of presence so strong that it’s almost alive, almost human,” and there is a similar energy, a vivid aliveness, in the way that ADLs images move, appear, retract.
Leila Chatti, author of the poetry collection Deluge, observes in her introduction that Coriolis is a “book of wanting.” However, this collection’s specific type of “wanting” does not seem to emerge from a place of dissatisfaction. It is, rather, a pursuit of self-definition. ADL’s speaker is intent on going somewhere, and bringing the reader with her, although that somewhere remains, for now, obscured. There is something inescapably likable to this indiscriminate, optimistic shade of want; “I wish there was an end of the earth I could drive to. Just to see what an edge looks like. Just to climb back from,”—and despite the preoccupation with loss, with displacement, and with death, ADL often deposits her reader somewhere close to hope.
Imogen Osborne is a writer living in Ithaca, NY. She recently earned an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she teaches creative and expository writing.
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