The Disordered
Anhvu Buchanan. Sunnyoutside Press, $13.00 trade paper (62
pp) ISBN 978-1-934513-41-5
Cause and
effect are estranged and misconstrued in Anhvu Buchanan’s first book of poems, The
Disordered: “anytime I’m around squirrels I twist my ankle anytime I speak
in public my skin gets itchy when I sit on hardwood floors reading the Sunday
paper gives me the hiccups …” One thing leads to another; we look back and see
the dizzying distance we’ve covered, which may only be from one side of the
kitchen to the other. We look at ourselves with concern: what’s wrong? We may
have an answer, but it cannot be spoken.
That’s what
characterizes the poems in The Disordered: deep isolation, often even
from the self. Each poem is written as a dispatch from a disordered state of
mind. It can be tempting to “diagnose” the speaker—“Oh, that’s
trichotillomania.” And that’s not the point of this work, which is written from
what an imbalance or disproportion of mind feels like from inside, not
what it looks like from outside. Or maybe it is the point, in that it shows us
that this temptation, too, is a compulsion; that the disorder may be in the
naming. It’s no coincidence that the title makes a noun of the adjective;
disorder here, as often in public discussion, occupies and fills up the
disordered mind/body. There are hints of life existing around and before, many
having to do with family—“follow your daughter’s voice,” “I didn’t want to lose
my father,” “My mother smiles and says I’m the best superhero she’s ever raised.”
No relationship goes untouched, no ordinary errand uninterrupted.
Each poem
has a formal as well as a topical preoccupation—line after line beginning with
“This is” or “Remember to”—and often a fierce, continuous, pauseless shape.
They’re exhausting to read, not just because of the experience we enter but
because of the effort the speaker calls on to keep the experience hidden.
Sometimes the effort is explicit:
I am afraid. Scared I will urinate in public. That
everyone will see it. I’ve been frightened for months and stay home as often as
I can because of this. I take precautions. My desk at work was moved closer to
the bathroom … I stay away from pools, waterfalls, puddles, fountains,
watercoolers, lakes, and the rain.
Sometimes it’s quiet:
And when they brought you sleeping birds you could only
think sky, sky.
Sometimes it’s burning:
… and went home and passed the time away and kept the
blinds shut and hid and got angry quickly and often and stayed awake and stayed
awake and nightmares and doorframes and nightmares and could only state and
drift away and rub my fingers and peeling carrots and crying over the kitchen
sink and again and again and nothing left to say about what I saw and what I
continue to see.
The speaker in the last excerpt has witnessed an execution,
and glimpses of precipitating factors and sickened worlds are visible in other
poems: war, a stalker’s self-justifications, the effort a cross-dressing man
makes to hide what gives him pleasure. The latter stood out particularly because
it’s the secrecy the world wants, not the compulsion the mind feels, that
causes the damage. Sometimes the isolation is so profound, the silence and the
secrecy so deep, that the mind can’t even reach itself. The poem that brought
this home to me was one of the handful that uses footnotes: its body text is
tensely lyrical about the muscular requirements of silence and restraint, and
the footnote text reads like this:
… Absence makes the wankers grow fonder! Beauty is in the
nutsack of the beholder! All work and no play makes jack a bullshitter! The
eight hundred pound jackass in the room! Good bullshit comes to those who wait!
The tit doesn’t fall far from the tree! And that’s the way the fucker crumbles!
The force
of separation in this poem helped me read the other footnote-using poems in the
collection and feel, as I hadn’t before, their poignancy. This one is also
funny—“Beauty is in the nutsack of the beholder!”—but on the whole The
Disordered didn’t make me laugh; laughter comes most often from standing
aside, and these poems’ strength comes from how consumed and consuming they
are, standing square in the middle of the trap, making a painful virtue of
immersion. (July 2013)
Purchase The
Disordered HERE.
Reviewer bio: Kate Schapira is the author of four books of
poetry, most recently The Soft Place (Horse Less Press). Her eighth chapbook,
The Ground / The Pass / The Wave, is forthcoming this summer from Grey Book Press. She lives
in Providence, where she teaches nonfiction writing at Brown and poetry in a
few other places, and organizes the Publicly Complex Reading Series.
