Satellite ConvulsionsTin House Books2008
In Satellite Convulsions: Poems from Tin House, Portland’s Tin House Books has released an enticing anthology of contemporary poetry: It’s got one of those nice paperback covers with page-marking flaps, proclaiming contents by hip young poets like Matthea Harvey and hip old poets like James Tate. A flip through the TOC reveals many more of the former (the Dickmans, Alex Lemon) and latter (Rae Armantrout, Lorca).It’s a “diverse” mix of contributors, across age, gender, and country of origin — but are the poems themselves wide-ranging, in style and tone? Not exactly. I love many of the poems included here, but if I have a complaint about the book — and this of course is to be expected from a collection of poems chosen by an editorial staff with a unified vision — it’s that most of the poets have very similar sensibilities. They write first-person lyrics that make emotional appeals and tonally exhibit a kind of exuberance which is often pleasing but, after too many poems in a row, a little annoying. If I have two complaints, my other is that Satellite Convulsions feels a bit overproduced, almost smug in its slickness — much like Tin House itself. As in, where do they get off with their huge budgets?But surely this second is a complaint only an editor of a less well-endowed journal would make, and as a reviewer, I tend to search for potential faults. Approaching the anthology as a reader I find it highly likable. I’m happy to have in my possession Olena Kalytiak Davis’s wonderful, sex-drenched sonnets that first appeared in Tin House in 2006 (this from “Francesca Can Too Stop Thinking about Sex, Reflect upon Her Position in Poetry, Write a Real Sonnet.”):
i apologize, i offer no excuse:but, poet, though you have right to scoldit was high-souled you who made my mouth holdwhat it held and tell what it told: a truce …
Another inclusion that mixes high and low language to delightful effect is Darcie Dennigan’s “City of Gods,” which opens with the line “Thistly Augustine, disser of the shy world, I cannot consider your city” and ends thusly:
Hey god in the window, god of loneliness, god of smelly spacesstacked with newspapers, god of walks home from the L before the light ends,if I ask you to please turn my sooty camisole into wingsand me into an industrial moth, I am asking to be man-made—I don’t want to be this girl anymore.
Other highlights in the collection include Carol Ann Duffy’s “The Long Queen” and Bruce Smith’s “Devotion: Medea.”If a few of Tin House’s selections bore or irritate (like Sharon Olds’ line “I feel as if I’m like / a teenage boy in love” — seriously?) most are well worth reading and reading again.____Elisa Gabbert is the poetry editor of Absent and the author of The French Exit (Birds LLC) and Thanks for Sending the Engine (Kitchen Press, 2007). Her latest chapbook co-written with Kathleen Rooney isDon’t ever stay the same; keep changing (Spooky Girlfriend Press). Recent poems can be found inColorado Review, The Laurel Review, Puerto del Sol, and Salt Hill.
