Friday, March 3, 2023

rob mclennan : Crisis Inquiry, by Tony Iantosca

Crisis Inquiry, Tony Iantosca
Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023

 

 

 

 

After having seen the work of Brooklyn-based writer, poet and educator Tony Iantosca in a variety of journals over the past decade (first encountering his work in 2016 via an issue of Ugly Duckling Presse’s late, lamented poetry journal 6x6), it is good to finally catch a collection, his third full-length, Crisis Inquiry (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2023). This latest title from Iantosca follows on the heels of a handful of his chapbook and full-length collections, including Naked Forest Spaces (Third Floor Apartment Press), Shut up, Leaves (United Artists Books), Team Burnout (Overpass Books) and To the Attic (Spuyten Duyvil). Crisis Inquiry exists as a book-length triptych, offering parts one, two and three, each of which are composed as accumulations of otherwise-untitled (most of the pieces, anyway) and extended poem-stretches that run down the lengths of each page. “My hands,” he writes, to open the poem “On Hands” in the second section, “worry about / me. The moment / hands fill / with inquiry / is not a moment / my hands had / the luxury / of being interested / in.” Structurally, one might see echoes of the work of Brooklyn poet Anselm Berrigan, or even comparisons to that of Canadian poets ryan fitzpatrick or Stephen Collis, for a kind of ongoingness that also articulates, through a fractured language, a particular kind of urgency, and even an anxiety. “Spark on the edge / of hoping,” he writes, in part of the opening section, “can it / be a poem or the / polished sky / the cyborg delivered / with apologies / for starving you. / No, out there / they won’t help / you today, they’re / talking here inside / bedrooms, tending / to the watching / and watching the wind / tear a feeling out / of the tree.”

Hope’s new drought            
is the development
whose story
we breathe well
over coffee someone
made right for us
holding open
the window’s
determinate pageant
of air stereo
and nutcracker. It was
raining on the poetic
barstool where
people sat breaking in
a century’s fracture
to see how it feels
as a joke adorning
social graces. Next time
try cycling through
every thread’s first
fray to know which cloud
finds us as information
we can’t even hide.

As the press page for the collection offers: “Crisis Inquiry is a collection of poems in three parts that unsettles the lyric poem from within its constraints in ways that are both sardonic and searching. These poems probe the corners of a crisis of inquiry both intimate and general, inquiring into the registers, rhetorics, and scales of the various ongoing crises we live through daily. Iantosca’s third full-length collection of poetry, Crisis Inquiry stages satire and candor as alternating strides of the same figure, walking to and fro between you and me.” Throughout his lyric, the details are intricate, intimate and detailed, working across a space so close that occasionally it blurs, offering threads propelled and fueled by social, political and environmental concerns. As well, he offers details of the personal and domestic that occasionally veer into the mundane. Throughout Crisis Inquiry, the language of Iantosca’s ongoingness seeks and questions, as words offer what words might, blending moments and queries, commentary and revelation, all in a lyric that reaches across (even into its own limitations) uncomfortable knowing into that endless possibility of what lay beyond.

The places to write
are not places.
The writing that aspires
to placement stops
speaking as the tree
made the place
a subdivision
of larger divisions
which have nothing
to do with mathematics
but with the tenancy
of words becoming
a place by crowding
its air. I can’t
guarantee a mailbox
and no one is certain
there will be
language for the more
difficult patterns
of worry or of brick,
this one goes on top
of that one, and so on
but the leaves betray
geometric appraisal
and the writing
commensurate with
the light’s internal
divisions and the
violence people think
I can do with this
fail to reach an agreement
with anyone’s idea
of a language. It isn’t like
I can try to find
a place for any of this without
making the potential
for something else to appear
less possible. Or maybe
that’s just a poor excuse
for why writing has made
sky’s edges less visible
though I’m suppose
to just trust that the whole
time it’s over there. This
is a dim lamp, a filthy
desk and its wires,
but that’s as far as I’ve gotten.

 

 

 

 

 

Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa, where he is home full-time with the two wee girls he shares with Christine McNair. The author of more than thirty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, he won the John Newlove Poetry Award in 2010, the Council for the Arts in Ottawa Mid-Career Award in 2014, and was longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize in 2012 and 2017. In March, 2016, he was inducted into the VERSe Ottawa Hall of Honour. His most recent titles include the poetry collections the book of smaller (University of Calgary Press, 2022) and World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), and a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics and Touch the Donkey. He is editor of my (small press) writing day, and an editor/managing editor of many gendered mothers. In spring 2020, he won ‘best pandemic beard’ from Coach House Books via Twitter, of which he is extremely proud (and mentions constantly). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com