Rochester, NY: BOA Editions, 2019. 96 pages. $17.00.
When one is undocumented or previously undocumented, the question of how and what to disclose becomes its own question of craft, and this collection brilliantly navigates the tricky boundaries of disclosure and admission, achieving a multivalent and complex voice.
Documents opens with an epigraph: “horizon—a permanent humiliation on the act of arrival,” which is borrowed from the lyric essay “Exaqua” that appears later in the book. In the essay, the line is revised twice, each time with a different proposition: “on” becomes “through,” then “to.” Note the slippage there. What, or whom, is humiliated? What do the horizon and the “act of arrival” stand in for? This line, no matter its configuration, is abstract. Yet when reading it, I feel it changing my body and sense of perception.
There were many other such moments in Documents when I felt a bit unmoored by Jan-Henry Gray’s writing without feeling lost to the book’s visceral energy, which brings to mind a recent essay by Nuar Alsadir called “The Craft of Writing Empathy.” In it, Alsadir writes about the existential risks in being known, which is one of the risks we must take as writers and performers. She extends W. R. Bion’s theory about infant-mother communications to say that “beta elements”—the kind that requires rumination and metabolization to become “available for thinking”—are passed between people at all times and digested through “alpha functions.” Beta elements, she argues, are what makes us feel “moved” by a work of art. It is this raw emotional energy that allows poetry to “fully kiss.”
It takes a lot of trust for any writer to leave beta elements unmetabolized for readers, especially if that writer’s subject touches on marginalized and politicized identities. One risks leaving the work open to harmful forms of interpretation, but what is gained is the ability to artfully refuse the act of explanation or confession that has come to be expected from those who have been Othered. What if, instead of admission of guilt, we could understand admission as into experience? In this collection, we are admitted into a music, an intimacy, a contact more enduring than information.
The negotiation surrounding information and how it is (sur)rendered is a frequent thread in the book. In “Missing Document”—one of the poems with a form borrowed from official immigration paperwork—Gray writes, breaking up the phrases with slashes, “can’t say / for certain / my mother’s name is rebecca // focus // tell us about her hand // what do you see // ground us // in the work // the details / go there / really take us somewhere.” Here, as elsewhere, we hear more than one voice: one who is the speaker, and one who is a questioner speaking on behalf of an “us,” interrogating the speaker and pressing him for details he may not remember. What is notable about this moment, however, is the merging of the language of government officials and that of the creative writing industry. In poetry, as in immigration processing, detailing intimate information is often the price of entry.
One of the many pleasures of this book is Gray’s agility with form. In the interview that accompanies my review copy, Gray talks about the variety of forms in the books as “unstable, migratory” and “wobbly and porous.” One such porous moment is found in the poem “In the Fields, I Learned a Hymn,” made up of three sections. The first section has long lines with regular and italicized words: “He bends my body: Boy, cool my knuckles in the new soil— / where it’s soft. Soft & black with life.” In the second section, only the italicized words are used: “cool my knuckles boy / bury me in the new soil.” In the final, only the unitalicized ones remain: “Bend my body where it’s soft and black.” The effect, as the words and images repeat, is hypnotic. The poem is its own reordering, its own erasure, and its own found poem.
A few pages later we find “River Capture,” a poem for three voices. Here, the three parts are staggered so that even reading it on the page, one experiences it as a round. This poem calls back to the charged eroticism of “In the Fields” with lines like “to bend,” “to mouth,” “to rock,” and pulls us forward to “Love Poem with a Hole in It” with its celebration of non-monogamy. Like other pieces of this kind—performance scores by Jackson Mac Low, for instance—“River Capture” is not fully realized until it is embodied, and it enacts the understanding of poetry as a joining of voices.
Which brings me back to “Exaqua,” the long prose lyric in the middle of the book with sections taken from an email exchange with Jennifer S. Cheng, a title from M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, passages from “Poem After September 11, 2001” by Juliana Spahr, and a physical geography textbook by Darrel Hess. The essay opens in media res with a “~” and the words, “feels like it allows for greater breadth/depth. . . .” On each page, the words cover only the bottom half, leaving the top part blank to create a horizon through absence. Which is fitting, given that in this meditation on craft and genre, Gray writes:
I’m thinking of this essay I want to write as . . . Essay as Ocean. Not necessarily in a geographic, landscapey way but weirder, queer, dense, full of strange currents with different temperatures, something immersive, at times panicky, the feeling of losing oxygen but delighted by the sight of strange objects that litter the ocean floor. An oasis of sight.
While Gray writes that “Exaqua” functions as a “break, a reprieve” from poems, it is here that traditional readers may be most challenged. Where am I? I wondered, wading through the pages. “Inside the ocean,” is Gray’s response.
There was a part of me that opened this book hoping to find some part of myself or own experiences in it—the frisson of recognition is so compelling. But the actual intimate presence of another consciousness is an even more urgent encounter and one that I rarely find outside the realm of art. That is this book’s offering, and it is thrilling to receive it in all its elusivity and rawness, from one porous being to another.