9.21.2007

Exhibit 3.6

Citizen Of by Christian Hawkey

In this book there are skies, skies with clouds. In this book there are mouths, mouths with lips. For a book of great abstraction, there is a pervasive entanglement with the things of the world, an entanglement which keeps the work from the muddle and lets it engage the contemporary world in ways that I found surprising. From the morality of nation building to the lamentation of a confusing and disappointing election, Hawkey makes his surreal, fragmented imagination surprisingly topical. It's still an abstract book, but it's not ethereal.

That is not to say that this is a political or even particularly culturally engaged work. Many of the poems here read to me as more notable for their language than for their meaning, but Hawkey has enough of the politically engaged poems to force a second look at what can initially seem shallow (which is probably a reading unique to the poems being collected). I can imagine coming across the poems in journals and thinking they were funny. Or interesting. Or fantastic. But as a book, especially one with the word 'citizen' in the title, I kept looking for more of the world in the poems. Sometimes it's there, sometime it isn't.

What is there, is a certain magic. These poems are like Rube Goldberg machines that through some carefully designed and sequenced conflagration of nouns, adjectives, birds, and colors a little happiness is produced. These tenuous machines work more often than not, and I'm entirely willing to admit that when they didn't, it was because I was the one pulling the lever.

2 comments:

Mathias Svalina said...

I'm defending it as political via scope & engagement rather than political via dialectic. No matter how you twist it a book called Citizen Of is political, it seems to me.

A. Peterson said...

I had forgotten you reviewed this book in the fantastic Octopus Nine. Your review is, of course, much more enlightening and anyone looking for a more meaningful discussion should check it out.

I especially like the writing on how its an ethical engagement. For me, that's much more enlightening than to simply say 'political' which conjures banner waving.

Your review does not have funny pictures, however. How can you review something without funny pictures? If David Denby and I agree on anything, it's funny pictures.