cover image Unsound

Unsound

Jennifer Martenson, . . Burning Deck, $14 (64pp) ISBN 978-1-936194-01-8

Concise, extraordinarily thoughtful, often challenging, and sometimes sexy, Martenson's debut could find admirers far beyond the East Coast avant-garde that seems its natural home. She's certainly a thinker, and her strongest sentences ask how thoughts—her own, but also society's stereotypes—at once create and interfere with apparently natural, visceral pleasure and pain: even “the unraveled edge of the immediate” may not survive “the way formality/ relieves one of the strenuous/ details of self.” Honesty and desire (especially lesbian desire) are hard to consider apart from received ideas, but impossible to portray accurately within them: often abstract, sometimes typographically odd, the couplets and prose poems strain against the dilemma they portray, while never failing (once you look hard) to make sense. “Was I/ holding your hand or merely an opinion?” she asks, and alert readers will answer “both.” Some of her best effects build through several pages, slowly, as her philosophical language sinks in; there are easy-to-reprint short pieces, too—”Intimate Conversations” begins as the poet skips stones across a pond, and ends “The contours too complex, the structure/ tenuous, like inner feelings,/ or the sway of tones enveloping a mood.” (Feb.)