rob mclennan : SO TOUGH, by Jared Stanley

SO TOUGH, Jared Stanley
Saturnalia Books, 2024

 

 

 

 

The fourth full-length poetry title by Reno, Nevada poet Jared Stanley, following Book Made of Forest (Salt, 2009), The Weeds (Salt, 2012), and EARS (Nightboat Books, 2017), as well as the first I’ve gone through, is SO TOUGH (2024), winner of the Saturnalia Books Poetry Prize. Organized as a book-length suite, each page offers a further untitled poem in a sequence of eight line accumulations (but for a singular, one-line poem, mid-collection) that provide a rhythm of meditative slowness. “The green catch of light your eyeglasses get,” the opening poem offers, “basic enthusiasms where the flowering frasses nod in the wind // another cruel ongoingness // fell asleep with a cock-shaped bookmark on my eyes // the sea is off somewhere by itself // previously unimagined inhabitants of spume // blood in your mouth did you taste it [.]” The pacing of this meditation is impressive, holding a steady line through simultaneous layering and pause, a clear breath exhaled in a thoughtful sequence of phrases. “Some half-remembered folk melody cries out,” Stanley writes in the second poem, “for gallon jugs of green river wine : // tastes like grass, fucks you up, cold on the tongue [.]” Through seventy-eight poems and seventy-eight pages, Stanley works across the small details of the natural landscape, articulating the arbitrariness of man-made boundaries between human activity and nature, managing to slow down time enough to hold a sequence of moments, turning each one over before the next one lands. Through SO TOUGH, Stanley offers moments across thinking, geography and landscape, providing them shape and tenor, both attention and as warning against what might irrevocably be lost.

So alone, so tough

so weird at home, so weird in public

on the street a whiff of body spray

blows in off a stranger’s shoulder

the look is human, nameless to nameless

the texture of a luxuriant shoe

if I keep my droplets to myself maybe

Wednesday will be a consolation

 

 

 

 

 

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. His most recent titles include the poetry collection World’s End, (ARP Books, 2023), a suite of pandemic essays, essays in the face of uncertainties (Mansfield Press, 2022) and the anthology groundworks: the best of the third decade of above/ground press 2013-2023 (Invisible Publishing, 2023). His collection of short stories, On Beauty (University of Alberta Press) will appear in fall 2024. He is currently pushing a fundraising campaign as part of the rebuilding year for Ottawa’s VERSeFest poetry festival.