Yeah, No, Jordan Davis
MadHat Press, 2023
This is a book that ages well. I mean, reading this collection repeatedly becomes like coming home to a familiar arrangement of rooms in a familiar landscape, albeit a landscape crafted from a relentless imagination which permits little immediate ease. Instead, it invites you in to a unique space where unexpected juxtapositions require a quality of alertness. "Don't get too comfortable," say these poems while also saying "come in, come in, sit down, have some tea" and the tea turns out to be some exotic blend from elsewhere, possibly off-planet.
Within this realm there is also a recurrent tenderness, and surprising expressions of vulnerability. Why surprising? They are set off, these moments of vulnerability, displayed as they are in a context of nearly acrobatic inventiveness. A whole mind is revealed. Or is it? There is also a mystery here.
Mid-Atlantic
To feel as you
swim through it
that your summer
is with its shoulder
Blackbird hovering
into a cold ocean
wind turns aside
and goes back
some songs
some parts of
songs
The gentleness of those last two lines oddly and perfectly completes the weathery ("cold ocean wind") and sort of laboring ("swim through it") first two couplets, and lands the poem in a quiet breath. Nothing more need be said.
Water, as a conveyer of vulnerability shows up again here:
Poem
I heard a bee
and I walked into
the ocean
The roses had all
been cleared
The purple body of
a jellyfish went by
and as the sun set
to my right
I climbed out of the water awkwardly like a dog
and here:
The water alone is
comforting
My face on my hand
(from "A Little Gold, A Second Song".)
In this age of the instant, where speed is a value unto itself, we're losing the awareness that poems are meant to be returned to, read more than once, experienced over slow time. Even poems that show up on the page as brief, or as hot takes, must have the kind of layering that opens inner doors, or they might as well be ad copy for the emotions. Yeah, No rewards the reader who returns.
Eleven Forgiven
A pirate in a
repeat environment
plays tag in the
ironing.
Entangle the
raiments.
Peeved, tap clogs
the livery of
pillory talk
evangel living as
foreign
as the driver of
the Rangers' van.
Drying, grieve,
vend the dove in
hand
to a liar ring for
an Ellery Queen.
England is
davening.
One thing that happens in this poem is a rhythmic beauty. The flow of the first three lines is punctuated by the drum beats of "[p]eeved, tap clogs"; then again three lines trip along to be brought up short by "[d]rying, grieve," before returning to the flowing quality. The poem having begun in broadly drawn wordplay ends with prayer, contrasting a profoundly traditional verb with the previous unconventional cleverness. Have some tea, but don't get too comfortable.
A similar contrast also appears connotationally: "Drying" wants to be read as "dying" when paired with "grieve", (dry your tears) and "vend the dove in hand /to a liar ring for an Ellery Queen" displays the human reaching for peace ("dove in hand") embedded in a market ("vend") of lies ("liar ring") and spy tales ("Ellery Queen")
And so, England would well be davening -- praying, returning to a fundamental depth.
Yeah, No is also happily leavened with humor, as here:
Bad Poem
Put that rock down
Three cute trochees, but don't you wonder now about poems that carry rocks? Would that always be a bad thing? Is the rock a threat to be thrown at a target? Or a heaviness that keeps a poem from properly taking flight? Who cares? Just enjoy the joke.
Kyla Houbolt
has been writing poems all her life, and began publishing in 2019. Her first
chapbook, Dawn’s Fool, was published by Ice Floe press and is sold out; her
second, Tuned, was published by Sedition Editions/CCCP Chapbooks + Subpress.
Surviving Death, from Broken Spine, is her third. But Then I Thought, from
above/ground press, is her fourth. Her work has appeared in numerous
publications including Sublunary Review, Barren, Janus, Juke Joint, Moist,
Neologism, Ghost City Review, and Stone Circle Review. Most of her online work
can be found on her Linktree: @luaz_poet | Linktree Her current social media
presence is on BlueSky Social (still in beta as of this writing), here:
@luaz.bsky.social, and on Instagram @kyla_luaz. She currently lives and writes
on the San Juan Ridge in California, USA.
