Winner of the Snowbound Series Chapbook Award, selected by Lisa Russ Spaar!
A tense linen closet? A breathing ceiling? Well-behaved chairs?
In The Garden Room, a subtle, witty poet finds beauty and solace in household objects. Such material trappings, rather than being entrances to memory and experience (a la Proust), are experiences in and of themselves. Even as birdsongs—"fail to say, fail to make, fail to say, fail to make"—neatly enacts the inability of language to represent the world, Katz's never-resting mind creates a palpable, vivid universe.
"Joy Katz's surreal, witty lyrics are jaunty and surprising. Cerebral, ironic, these poems seem to be all glancing light, all curiosity, but under their brilliant surfaces, they are haunted."
—Jean Valentine
"The Garden Room proposes hymns in hymnody's despite, projecting creation's argument with creation onto the green tabletop of the world, onto the bruised surfaces of apples and of eyes. Here, phenomenology becomes a tender and true outrage, wondrous to behold."
—Donald Revell
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Linen closet.
The purified fleets of nations have pulled in.
Christianized themes read out behind high, aroused doors.
With gladness I soothed your aristocracy.
I took the furtive towers of our thighs, made them public as ice.
While I go about my day a naked burn goes on, a hiss.
A clean, continuous tone. A hearing test.
A ceiling.
Empty as a sundial.
A square of skin turns outward, a skiff of salt blows neatly
to the corners.
The spears of iris are spoiled, under it, as drunks.
But a ceiling is puncturable as a drumhead. For what could
break through: America, a leg: the lash of swimmers.
A ceiling looks believable. But it breathes-tight as heaven's
political skin: as redoubtable, as aquarian.
The ceiling must keep, must be as papal as Latin.
We two are a live nation under a jar lid,
ordered under the great press, dry as grains.
The unmade bed.
Side of steamship and white smoke, black parts beckoning.
As in jump, as in unquiet. Not wasted, save churning over itself.
A dream in the midst and a rolling pin.
Unmade beds are cantering.
Argument of the pillows: kumquat or inquest.
An unmade bed unrolls a room, but not really anywhere.
Why, says the room. The room cannot bear the bed.
And the bed is bothered. Its waves grow small.
[sound of cereal poured into a bowl]
Junk drawer.
[barking sounds]
Smell of jargon, bad things
you say to your husband,
praise and bombs for the orderly house.
What spins forth will apply.
For instance: brackets,
orange rhyming with courage,
god the kitchen constable.
Nothing here pretends to be not hard wind or macadam.
A window-screen.
Unbroken
skim of night.
Headlights elsewhere
Elsewhere
a field where soldiers marched away.
Light from a kitchen across the street
that now
is gone.
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From the Spring, 2007 issue of American Poet, (vol 32, Spring 2007):
Books Noted: Chapbooks, Joy Katz, The Garden Room
“The world is a skin this is pinned down,” writes Joy Katz in, “The World,” which closes her chapbook. Everything that precedes this poem is resident of Joy Katz’s world: daffodils, sheets, closets, ceilings, beds, bookcases, and windows. The ordinary world, particularly the world of one’s home, with all its familiarity and comfort, is made strange and new through her lyric, descriptive meditations as in “Color of the Sheets”:
Far from the dominant science of white
I found this white
in continual pour.
In the midst of this ordinary place, the bed.
Katz’s poems are short and spare, but tumble with images and detail. Jean Valentine says these poems “seem to be glancing light, all curiosity, but under their brilliant surfaces they are haunted.”
From Publisher's Weekly:
The Garden Room
by Joy Katz
Reviewed 11/20/2006
With titles like "The Made Bed" and "Junk Drawer," the 30
poems that make up Katz's brief and cohesive second
collection (winner of Tupelo's Snowbound
chapbook award) form a sequence that
examines—using
psychologically telling description and imaginative
reportage—the ways the objects in a room do and do
not reveal the lives
of those who live there. Speaking to and for household
objects as well as an assortment of domesticated
flowers, and harking back to Elizabeth Bishop's prose poem
"12 O'clock News" and perhaps Louise Glück's The Wild
Iris, Katz (Fabulae, 2002) makes
the bedroom a
crenellated emotional meeting and battle ground, where self
meets self,
lover meets lover, and self meets other. A bunch of daffodils
is "a hole in
the room I could thread myself through"; the bed "is a
highway between us."
By turns surreal and direct, and sometimes cast in compact
stanzas,
sometimes gently slanted across the page, these poems also
study the lives
of the objects themselves, whether or not we give them that
life: window
sills are the "lips of the house," and a desk chair "gives in to
day." Over
the course of this subtle collection, Katz builds a quietly
moving story
about the complexities of love and domesticity. |
