Jason Heroux : Thumb-Wrestling With Noah Berlatsky’s Gnarly Sonnets

Gnarly Thumbs, Noah Berlatsky
Anxiety Press, 2025

 

 

 

1

Human thumbs. According to EarthDate episode 387, “our opposable thumbs may have made early human technology and sophisticated cultural practices possible.”  And yet, according to Oxford Languages, the term “all thumbs” means to “be clumsy or awkward in one’s actions.” So true. Many of the modern world’s most sophisticated cultural practices often feel clumsy and awkward in spirit.

 

2

The title of Noah Berlatsky’s poetry collection Gnarly Thumbs is lifted from the final line in the poem “You’ve Got To Stand For Something,” the penultimate poem in the book. “Ditch those rigid traits, and let the / gnarly thumbs / beat down the investors in the Danger Room of your / soul.” I asked a Magic 8 ball what the title signifies and it responded: “Ask again later.”

 

3

I asked Noah Berlatsky why he chose that title. “The book's to some extent an exercise in magpie collage and losing the connections between inundating gibberish, so it's maybe appropriate that those two words have flailed into twisted and stunted stumbling. Which is to say I can't remember!”

 

4

A sonnet is “a fixed poetic form with a structure traditionally consisting of fourteen lines adhering to a set rhyming scheme.” It traditionally has a volta, or “turn,” which signifies a shift or change in direction. Berlatsky’s sonnets are full of hairpin turns, the reader spun in circles. Rollercoaster poetry. Before going on this high-speed ride, please secure all loose items. You may also want something in your stomach to keep it settled.

 

5

My first impression of this book was one of confusion and wonder and, even now, with every re-reading my confusion and wonder continues to grow. I composed the following book blurb to celebrate the experience: “Have you ever entered a dark room and turned on the light and saw dozens of things scurry around in every direction? Our world is that room, this book is that light, and these poems are those things. Noah Berlatsky’s sonnets are quick, hungry, obscene, frightening, and alive. “Paint prosperity. Photograph the opposite. This is Art / Garfunkel on the bridge over heaven’s stentorian schmaltz.” You may feel shaken or disturbed along the way, but rest assured: you’re in good hands with Gnarly Thumbs.”

 

6

When thinking of Gnarly Thumbs I’m reminded of a section from Mark Yakich’s A Guide for the Perplexed. “A poem can feel like a locked safe in which the combination is hidden inside. In other words, it’s okay if you don’t understand a poem. Sometimes it takes dozens of readings to come to the slightest understanding. And sometimes understanding never comes. It’s the same with being alive: Wonder and confusion mostly prevail.”

 

7 

In the book’s acknowledgments Berlatsky thanked Clark Coolidge for giving him the “general idea.” I asked the Magic 8 ball if it could illuminate this general idea, and it stated: “My sources say no.” I asked Berlatsky the same question and he responded, “It's really just the idea of writing nonsense sonnets; I read his book 88 Sonnets and thought, "I could do that!" There are also a couple of direct lifts (I think he mentions borax for example, and I stole that for one title.)”

 

8

Then I asked Berlatsky what was the hardest part about writing Gnarly Thumbs? “The hardest part was actually after it was done and a press (not Anxiety) expressed interest. I was super excited since I hadn't thought anyone would print it, and the editor seemed enthusiastic. Then I got the proofs, and they had taken out words and lines without checking with me. Apparently he felt that the lines were too long (?!) and that readers would be confused (?!) so he basically rewrote them. In some cases, they weren't even sonnets anymore I objected and we went back and forth and eventually he killed the project because I wanted the poems the way I wanted them. It was very distressing and upsetting. But then Cody at Anxiety said he loved it just the way it was, and now it is in the world, and I am glad I refused to settle!”

 

9

Finally, I asked Magic 8 Ball what does Berlatsky hope readers will take away from this book? It responded, “Better not tell you now…”

  

10

 …. but then Berlatsky himself replied, “I hope people laugh? The book is about how I feel sometimes overwhelmed with jargon and earnest effusions and the way that we're all constantly bombarded with marketing copy and demands and word slurry. I find that alienating and enraging and also amusing and exhilarating and weird. So I hope people will share my experience of being bashed about by language and bashing back.”

 

 

 

 

Jason Heroux lives in Kingston, Ontario, and was the Poet Laureate for the City of Kingston from 2019 to 2022. His most recent publications include Like a Trophy from the Sun (Guernica Editions, 2024) and My Life as a Notebook (above/ground press, 2025).

 

Noah Berlatsky : The Absolutely True Origin Story of Spamtoum!

 

 

 

 

The inspiration for this chapbook was an email message from God advertising exciting inspirational ideas for chapbooks. “Do you have a minute to chat(book!) about the Divine Afflatus? God loves creators because creators are like little Gods, but without the big white beard and the God Hat, and also you turn into corpses. Cute!”

Then God’s Message pointed out that “spam” and “pantoum” kind of go together. So this was my moment! Panspam? Tansoum?

Or! Spamtoum!

Fuck your dad jokes, God. And your stupid beard and hat. I will not be part of this holy fucking phishing scheme.

 So I deleted Him.

Which explains a lot, if you think about it.

 

 

 

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer. He’s published a bunch of poetry books and chapbooks including the 2023 above/ground titles Send $19.99 for Supplements and Freedom and brand-new Spamtoum. He’s probably not as funny as he thinks he is, God knows.

Kate Cayley, Melanie Marttila, Mahaila Smith, Susan Gevirtz + Noah Berlatsky : virtual reading series #33

a series of video recordings of contemporary poets reading from their work, originally prompted by the Covid-19 pandemic and subsequent cancellations, shut-downs and isolations; a reading series you can enjoy in the safety of your own protected space,

Kate Cayley : “Mary Shelley at the End of her Life, Recalling the Monster”

Kate Cayley has published two short story collections, three collections of poetry, and a young adult novel, and her plays have been performed in Canada, the US and the UK. She has won the Trillium Book Award, the Mitchell Prize for Faith and Poetry, the Geoffrey Bilson Award for Historical Fiction, and an O. Henry Prize, and been a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, among other awards. She is a frequent writing collaborator with immersive company Zuppa Theatre, most recently on The Archive of Missing Things and This Is Nowhere, and her writing has appeared in Best Canadian Poetry, Best Canadian Stories, Brick, Electric Literature, Joyland, The New Quarterly and The North American Review. She lives in Toronto with her wife and their three children.

Melanie Marttila :“Imagined”

Melanie Marttila has been writing since the age of seven, when she made her first submission to CBC’s Pencil Box. She is a graduate of the University of Windsor’s masters program in English Literature and Creative Writing and her poetry has appeared in Polar Borealis, Polar Starlight, and Sulphur. Her short fiction has appeared in Pulp Literature, On Spec, Pirating Pups, and Home for the Howlidays. She lives and writes in Sudbury, Ontario, in the house where three generations of her family have lived, on the street that bears her surname, with her spouse and their dog, Torvi.

Mahaila Smith :“My Lethal Fear of Being Consumed” & “Overhang”

Mahaila Smith (any pronouns) is a young femme writer, living and working on the traditional territory of the Algonquin Anishinabeg in Ottawa, Ontario. They are one of the co-editors for The Sprawl Mag. They like learning theory and writing speculative poetry. Their recent chapbooks include Water-Kin (Metatron Press 2024) and Enter the Hyperreal (above/ground press 2024). Their novelette in verse, Seed Beetle, is newly published with Stelliform Press. You can find more of their poems on their website: mahailasmith.ca.

Susan Gevirtz : reading 3 excerpts from the book AERODROME ORION & Starry Messenger : “so they drove…” ; “Prologue / [to be read in Aviation English]” ; “Brief History of the Sky: A Manual for Air Traffic Controllers”

Susan Gevirtz’s recent books of poetry include Burns (Pamenar), Hotel abc (Nightboat) and Aerodrome Orion & Starry Messenger (Kelsey Street). Her critical books are Narrative’s Journey: The Fiction and Film Writing of Dorothy Richardson (Peter Lang) and Coming Events (Collected Writings) (Nightboat). She is based in San Francisco.

Noah Berlatsky : “One Day Gravity Stopped,” “On Finding the Creature,” “Time Will Fuck You Blues” and “True Love”

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer in Chicago. His full-length collections are Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press, 2024), Gnarly Thumbs (Anxiety Press, 2025), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger, 2025) and Brevity (Nun Prophet, 2025).

Noah Berlatsky : Who is Leading Whom In Robert Creeley’s “Kore”

 

 

 

 

Robert Creeley (1926-2005) is a poet in the tradition of Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams; his poems and his lines are short and his meanings are gnomic. It seems like his work should be easy to comprehend or get your head around since each poem is so small. But the closer you look at it the more it slips away, like some sort of subatomic Schrödinger’s Sphinx.

A typically obscure verse, and one of Creeley’s more famous, is “Kore,” published in his 1962 volume For Love. The title “Kore,” is an alternate name for Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, the Greek god of the Harvest. Kore/Persephone was abducted by Hades, the God of the underworld, she ends up staying in the land of the dead for half of each year.

The myth wa originally an explanation for the passing of the seasons—Demeter lets the earth fall fallow in winter, when Kore is in the underworld) Modern writers have tended to see it as a story about sexual violence, trauma, and mother’s love.  One of Rita Dove’s poems on Persephone, for example, emphasizes how the moment of terror breaks through everyday life, as Hades’ carriage broke from the ground. “This is how easily the pit/opens. This is how one foot sinks into the ground.”

There’s hints of this violence in Creeley’s version too, but his approach is considerably more abstract, distant, and mysterious than Dove’s.

Kore

As I was walking
  I came upon
chance walking
  the same road upon.

As I sat down
  by chance to move
later
  if and as I might,

light the wood was,
  light and green,
and what I saw
  before I had not seen.

It was a lady
  accompanied
by goat men
  leading her.

Her hair held earth.
  Her eyes were dark.
A double flute
  made her move.

"O love,
  where are you
leading
me now?"

Creeley’s short, enjambed lines and compacted, odd syntax makes the poem’s voice seem strange and broken, like it is being generated by some chthonic AI that doesn’t precisely understand how language works. In the first stanzas, the narrator sounds like he (Creeley? Hades?) or she (Kore? Demeter?) is being manipulated by fate and/or by grammar. “I came upon/chance walking/the same road upon”; “As I sat down/by chance to move/later.” Is the narrator doing things—walking, sitting— “by chance”? Or is chance an actual, semi-physical presence, moving the narrator here and there? Or, to put it another way, is the poem carefully formed to create meaning? Or is Creeley letting prepositions and rhyme (“if and as I might/light”) push him around the page?

The third stanza is a transition—a deliberately poetic interlude with trees and full end rhyme (“green…seen”) between the initial interrogation of self and the more openly mythical quatrains that follow. The narrator (who, again, we can’t identify) then sees a lady (probably Kore) led by “goat men.”

The image is uncanny, and suggests both sacrificial rituals and S&M. Kore (if that’s who this is) is debased, but she’s also presented as uncanny herself: “Her hair held earth/Her eyes were dark.” In the context of the original Persephone myth, Creeley’s evoking a range of interpretations—Kore, as Queen of the Underworld, is a symbol of death. She’s also, though, a victim of sexual violence. Or you could say that her victimization has stigmatized her (as victims are often stigmatized); she’s a figure of terror because she’s experienced terror.

The last stanza is in quotation marks, but again it’s not clear who is speaking. The most likely candidate is Kore/the lady. But the speaker could also be the goat-men, or the narrator (whoever the narrator is.)

The confusion here is thematic and almost certainly intentional. The quoted lines “O love/where are you/leading/ me now?” are a statement of lack of agency. The speaker (whoever it is) is not the speaker, in the sense that they are led, they know not where, by someone who is not themselves, just as the narrator in the first lines is led “by chance”. The short lines, broken almost at random, suggest the speaker staggering forward, being jerked along on that leash. Whoever is talking is pulled by someone or something through the poem, out of their selves.

Dove’s poem is about how an unexpected crisis can open onto an abyss of trauma; Hades’ violence derails Persephone’s life forever. Creeley, in contrast, sticks perhaps closer to the Greek’s understanding of the Gods as a kind of unaccountable, unpredictable fate. More he suggests that this fate not only affects what happens to you, but is the essence of who you are. There is no settled self or selves in Creeley’s poem—no narrator, no characters, no speaker. Chance, passion, the gods don’t just put obstacles in your path; they create your path, and the “you” that walks it. The poem’s inconsistent, herky-jerk journey—from allegory of fate to idyll to mythological gothic—replicates the herky-jerk blankness of the self, which is unknowable not because it is opaque, but because it is incoherent, without a core (a pun, perhaps, on the title?)

I do love Creeley’s poem, but it’s worth noting that it is built, at least to some degree, on a reading of the Persephone myth that is deaf to feminist interpretations at best and misogynist at worst. If that is Kore speaking at the end of the poem, she seems to be saying that her life has been pulled off course by “love”. There’s no engagement with the obvious contemporary reading of the Rape of Persephone as an act, not of love, but of horrific sexual violence.

Creeley’s work in general isn’t consistently sexist like, for example, that of Yeats. But Creeley’s poems about the collapse of his first two marriages do sometimes dabble in unfortunate gender stereotypes. “Kore” is a poem that dramatizes the ways in which people are not selves, but impulses and discourses. The discourse of misogyny, like the goat men, may be leading Creeley too.  

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This post is reprinted with permission from Everything Is Horrible.

 

 

 

 

Noah Berlatsky (he/him) is a freelance writer. His poetry collections include Brevity (Nun Prophet Press), Meaning Is Embarrassing (Ranger Press) and Not Akhmatova (Ben Yehuda Press.) His newsletter is Everything Is Horrible. And he has a second chapbook forthcoming from above/ground.