Macular Hole

If much of so-called experimental poetry seems like a lie, try Catherine Wagner. She speaks truths. Rather than abandoning meaning, she squeezes all the juices she can out of simple English words. "Pie," for instance, becomes a verb. "I was trying to pie myself," Wagner writes. Why is Wagner trying to pie? Pie suggests comfort, care-giving, apples, abundance. It also suggests housework, apron-wearing, self-denial, shells. Not that there's anything wrong with pieing, but perhaps the woman is trying to be less than she is. There is darkness here as well as lightness. A child's thigh bruise is made up to look pink. What is going on there? In another instance, a pregnant Wagner is suspended in a hammock looking at her toes. She has a painter's or an architect's eye for lines, spaces, shadows, reflections. Her phrases can be musical and memorizable, as in: "A day like a thing on a fork it arrives." I liked Wagner's earlier book Miss America as well, but Macular Hole has more dimension, perhaps as a result of childbirth and motherhood. The writing in this book is less social commentary, more experience. Here is the baby: "Tyrant. Asleep and saying huu, fantastic waxen kicking figurine, like a kick in the head, little fat bag, a good drug I see more of the him in." Lordy. She speaks to me. Judging from Wagner's online prose, she is steeped in the feminist and power politics paradigm of the academic left. Even if you're not interested in that, you can enjoy and learn from these turns of phrase. Here's my favorite. One poem ends: "Give the woman a pedestal bouncy pedestal bingbong my ring rang on" Ring rang. Have two words ever been more perfectly placed? My heart pounds. I'd give this five stars except for the reliance on bad words, which seems more shocking than useful. I can't wait to get my hands on the anthology on motherhood that Wagner is co-editing.