review of Lisa Gordon’s ‘Moving In With the Dalai Lama’ (poems, 2015)

Moving In With the Dalai Lama
Poems, Lisa Gordon
2015

http://bookthug.ca/shop/chapbooks/moving-in-with-the-dalai-lama-by-lisa-gordon/

http://bookthug.ca/in-conversation-lisa-gordon-speaks-to-her-new-chapbook-moving-in-with-the-dalai-lama/

–

review by Barton Smock

–

I’ve fallen asleep with the television remote in my lap. I am dreaming of myself as a boy beside a boy who’s stolen his father’s fossil brush. The two of us are working to get our stories straight for the poet Lisa Gordon whose first poem in her collection Moving In With the Dalai Lama opens with the line I’m going to clot my stories with first comings-. It’s an apt beginning for a book of poems whose author writes first what comes next.

I’m awake now, I’m alone, and the book moves to a rhythm of tentative inquiry. A rhythm that produces search results for surrogates.

Antoine died of cancer this week. Large man with a heart like a broken
boomerang. At the funeral, a baby nursed behind a coffin.

from You Take Your Chances

I develop a unique stutter and use it to respond to a sameness of experience.

We talk in riddles without meaning to- a popular fate.

from Chinese Slippers

All fates are popular, every stutter unique. An answer is a number unaware it’s being followed. As a poet, Gordon gives her symbols the space they need to become shells of a former costume.

I can’t do it- you do the math. Answers. Lack of viable exchange.
Tonight I’m as wizen as any woman entering crow…

from Back Up

To enter is human.

Giraffes have such a soothing lope on the television screen.
I’m going to make a movie where all the animals exchange feet.

from Auspicious

I am trying to remember my dream. I am alone in a room like something alone in a box. I was put here to be heavy. I imagine god gets angry when he realizes he’s come alone to lift what he can’t.

I’m going to swim stark naked, pretend I’m merely obeying…

from Auspicious

A row boat’s bottom so fragile you can step clean through.
I’ve found memory to be almost friendly, if I don’t apply pressure.

from Perishable Emotives

In Moving In With the Dalai Lama, Lisa Gordon commits acts of proximity that don’t hit close to home but instead challenge the gestural foreignness in which they were conceived. Pack your things, it’s a lovely book.