Space Struck
poems, Paige Lewis
Sarabande Books, 2019
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If, instead of a far creature, I imagine here an empty cage, then perhaps I’ve been blessed by revelation as originally intended, and tended to, in and by the baptismal poems of Paige Lewis as visible from their Space Struck, a work of thisness and anti-thatness. In a verse so propulsive that the forms therein dance in the before and after of being re-shadowed, Lewis makes of the beyond a proximity where privacy enters the pocket as a rescued oyster and emerges secretly as a smallness freed from size. In places such as these, urgency need not be restless, awe need not outgrow its display, and we need not slow ourselves to be overtaken by beauty.
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reflection by Barton Smock
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book is here:
http://www.sarabandebooks.org/titles-20192039/space-struck-paige-lewis
I think of my mother in her block of ice summoning a curling iron and of my father sending a robot to prison. Of a leafblower named mercy hugged by my brother for outing my sister’s electric chair. Of nakedness, poor nakedness, always playing itself in the story of had we not been invented we would’ve had to exist. Of how daughter she highlights an entry on hair loss in the cannibal’s diary. Of how one holds the owl and one pours the paint and how both, knowing how to dream, choose this
and how they are both a boy in a bottomless mirror asking if death is still known for its one mistake.
Ohio introductions:
A god finds its mother in a joke about the food chain and is no longer sad that human babies don’t walk right away
Hunger remains your painting of the angel’s predicted appetite
The wind gets that way by looking for its twin
I am allowed one imaginary friend as long as it’s a boy when I share it with my brother. This story has no bones. Its seesaw turns to salt. You can’t watch porn and say you believe in ghosts.
In most of her dreams, someone else is falling. Sound is the child of two footprints that lose an earring. If there, see my wrist signal yours.
Jesus was the world’s worst ghost. I hold my son but can’t say what I hold him like. Dad paints with ache. Mom with grief. Our empty babies rate the void.
In the mouth of one who opens a sentence with the word verbatim, there is a sorrow searching for the breast of a shadow. Overheard is not the name of an Ohio street. The baby is no cook but is the only knower of what my eyes will eat in the dark. No one in Ohio laughs when you say bornography to your sister who says orbituary. One can be pregnant and study the wrong children.
kingsoftrain 