You’ll notice there are poems in nn4 by Jessica Fjeld. These poems are from a chapbook called THE TIDE which came out this month from Pilot Books, a fantastic little operation run by Betsy Wheeler and Meghan Dewar. THE TIDE made its debut at AWP a couple weeks ago, so there’s basically no excuse for not owning it at this point.notnostrums had the good fortune of sharing its table with Pilot (along with Factory Hollow Press) in Denver, so THE TIDE had been staring at me all week. It was brutal having it that close and not having the time to read it. It taunted me, kind of in playful way, almost harmlessly in a way, but also sort of destroying me as I knew what lay within arms reach but wasn’t able to have until after the din of AWP receded.
I never had any doubts about buying this book. I’ve been an admirer of Fjeld’s poetry for several years, ever since I read her first chapbook On Animate Life: Its Profligacy, Organ Meats, etc. which won a Poetry Society of America award in 2006. I was anxious about THE TIDE selling out, and therefore anxious about THE TIDE. And why shouldn’t I be anxious about THE TIDE? It’s a dangerous thing.
If you see the title and think of a vacation you took, a beach you once sat on for a week, a sandbar, flat stones, little crabs, the moon or gravity, you are not thinking what you will think after you’ve read this book. You will think much more interesting things.
There’s been a surge of poetry collections that put forward a centralized aspect, whether it be a character or a geological phenomenon, or both (i.e. Christian Hawkey’s Ulf): CAConrad’s The Book of Frank, Matvei Yankelevich’s Boris by the Sea, Emily Kendal Frey’s Frances (and others; those are just the ones I’ve read in the last couple months). Fjeld’s collection functions similarly inasmuch as the “center” of the collection, the thread that’s indicated by the title, is actually and merely the exterior membrane of a vast array of images, ideas and propulsions.
Lacking page numbers, and with pages that fold out revealing hidden poems, THE TIDE is as complete as it is unafraid to be disorderly. It is a perfectly manufactured tide. At first I was a good boy and read the book from left to right, but then I found myself jumping around, unfolding pages at random. In this way I saw the amorphousness of THE TIDE, its delicate and effusive shiftiness.
The tide in THE TIDE is a transitive character. At times it claims the active voice of the poet, inviting first-person observations made strange by its unique perspective, that of a tide, then made doubly strange by the poet reclaiming her own voice, leaping away in the next moment from what we expect of a tide’s report: “Little porpoises come up alongside me. Porpoise!/I would like to show you the copper wire/I’ve been catching on a magnet.”
The act of doling out and taking back occurs throughout these poems, and it’s exciting to watch Fjeld poise herself between impetus and impulse. I would call it struggle, for indeed this is poetry, but a soft struggle, one entered into willfully, joyously, mischievously, as eager to depart as to remain:
SLEEP
I remember what it feels like. The sound is so
loud I can’t hear. The rain is so hard I can’t
see. What I have in my hand is a chipped
tortoise shell.
Read THE TIDE!
