cover image Fracas

Fracas

Elizabeth Fodaski. Krupskaya, $9 (78pp) ISBN 978-1-928650-02-7

""It's not really a question of a different drummer, it's that I just don't march,"" writes Fodaski in a debut striking in its social-meets-formal radicality. The long poem ""Anatomy of Associative Thought"" ranges from similar self-identifying defiance to the aesthetic (""glass/ in a language of multitudes"") turning to wander through the epistolary (a series of letters to the mysterious dead-or-not-dead ""B.""), the anthemic and the elegiac: ""like so many Lucky Pierres, we had had such a buoyant sense of life in our midst,/ and then our emotions became something discrete from our culture,/ the grief suddenly whelming around us like a bad stench."" Fodaski negotiates with capitalism's ubiquity as if it were something like a love affair with the world, requiring both decorum and the respect of a live-in partner: ""no speech but in space/ ...a cog in the machine says/ we're sorry, your star/ has not yet appeared."" The sequence ""ETYMOLOGIES"" takes on the familiar historicist impulse toward origins, finding instead some of our present quandaries and dispositions. There, the recurrent figure of ""Mary"" performs an oblique, resolutely undidactic feminism: ""Mary fingers a nugget/ of truth/ formerly niggot, see Trench."" Like many poets of her post-Language writing generation, Fodaski is constructivist, but is not enitrely suspicious of the ""grain of the voice,"" and will foreground lyricism. Using the self's repertoire of delusions and assertions, she fashions a discourse dazzling enough ""to summon, quote,/ rouse, excite."" (Aug.)