cover image Wabac Machine

Wabac Machine

Martine Bellen. Furniture Press (SPD, dist.), $14 trade paper (88p) ISBN 978-0-9826299-5-6

Bellen (The Vulnerability of Order) is always a challenge: this ninth collection deploys her usual tactics of collage, quick change, metapoetic self-reflection, voracious reading, and embedded song in the service of projects huge and small, cute (almost cutesy) and sublime. One multi-page poem promises to “take my book and go for a boat ride/ In an ever-expanding, multidirectional body of water,” albeit water that occupies “non-Euclidean space”; another remembers “some birds that appear/ As accountants of lost objects. They/ call numbers through karmic arteries.” At once cerebral and in thrall to a good story, Bellen responds by cutting her stories apart, seeking the birds, the music (she has also co-written operas) within each: on the page, the results suggest a puzzling, and at best a compelling hybrid of Emily Dickinson and Donald Barthelme, with a few fairy tales thrown in. The New York–based Bellen presents much to fascinate (if also much to confuse) throughout the three sequences here, but saves the finest work for the last set, which addresses anime and manga, especially those by Osama Tezuka and Hayao Miyazaki, the masters of those Japanese forms. Readers alert to anime—even those not already conversant with Bellen’s brand of experiment—should take a look. (Sept.)