reflection on Eliot Cardinaux’s ‘Letters to Apple-town’, and Nadia Arioli’s ‘Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage’

LETTERS TO APPLE-TOWN
Poems- Eliot Cardinaux
Bodily Press 2023

BE STILL: POEMS FOR KAY SAGE
Poems – Nadia Arioli
Kelsay Books, 2023

The poverty of presence. The precise unknown. Eliot Cardinaux is a poet of dual trinities asking to be made whole. In Letters To Apple-town, jazz makes nostalgia from a future it’s never been from. Whether it’s ‘the world against the world’ or ‘more memory than memory’, there is a finality to these restarted verses that makes the offhand feel instilled. 

In reading this book, I have also been moving through Nadia Arioli’s Be Still: Poems for Kay Sage and am taken, and very replaced, by the elegantly accurate mysteries herein that make now a poor substitute for the recent. Somehow past, somehow addressing a future that comes from the future, the poems here respond to what ransoms the eye with a vision that erases hindsight. I lost my place not because it was a dream, but because I was stopped in my tracks before I could hide my sleep. This is a deeply awake work about work undone and reworked. Use your best hands.

The crossover isn't theirs, of course, and only partially mine, but I like to think I drink and strangers carry me home or at least point me to the same car that knows only for a moment where it is I live. I am broken in all places in a way I worship too quickly and birds open their eyes with their eyes. Where Cardinaux says ‘psychosis of signage’, Arioli says ‘gory miracle’, and I suddenly know which angel is an angel and which angel stands for god, and which angel is the third and only. If that makes sense, both these books are for you. And then, for me. And then, again, for you. Seek them out. Their findings matter.

~

reflection by Barton Smock