Hold It Down
Gina Myers. Coconut Books, $15.00 paperback (101p) ISBN 978-1938055072
Gina Myers. Coconut Books, $15.00 paperback (101p) ISBN 978-1938055072
In one
sense, Hold It Down, with its
tangible lists and specifics, feels
like an attempt to capture, to grasp: today’s news (which will be replaced by
something else tomorrow), a vision of a city that will have changed by morning,
the memory of people who’ve gone away, those fragments of an American Dream
that still persist, like the promise of starting over, the concept of
home. In this sense, it’s a chronicle.
But Hold It Down is also about
keeping it together. It’s about maintaining when there are gunshots sounding
and “buds suspiciously missing” outside the window. It’s about attending to the immediate—the
daily mantra, the single, simple drink—when you don’t know what will happen
next week. The personal becomes
relatable in Myers skillful hands, and she cracks our hearts when she confirms
that one must hold it down in order to go on.
In the first
poem of Hold It Down, Myers
intimates, “I said it’s easy to write / a poem about something / other than
yourself / but still I turn to this.” It’s more confession than promise, one for
which this book is all the richer, smarter, damaging. Myers shows us how those things “other than
oneself”—the political, the public, the drugstores playing Christmas music, the
version of a greedy, faltering America that remains unchanged in a new year—are,
indeed, very personal. There’s pleasure
in this tension as Myers pushes out beyond the intimate only to return to
it. These poems prick the hairs on your
neck because Myers returns to the
“I”, not in spite of it.
Sparkling
and devastating, casual and disarming, this book teeters on edges, blurs borders
(language, beliefs, geographies), and juxtaposes the surprising with the
plainspoken. It’s a book where a “sick gray fog clouding / the radio this
morning” brushes up against smudged bus windows. The poem “Static” opens with the declaration,
“I am tired of this accidental ghost”, and this book is, indeed, haunted and
haunting, with a longing for a missing other that feels at once achingly actual
and ethereal. Many lines meditate on the
mundane, yet these, too, echo elegiac. When, in “Morning Poem” the speaker
claims that she’s not optimistic ”but content here with this cup / of coffee
& the enormity of the future”, we believe her, but also sense that tomorrow
could be different, that this might suddenly change forever.
Myers' poems evoke not only personal grief and longing (for people, for a sliver of surety in teetering times) but also mourning connected to place. These pieces attempt to make sense of an estrangement from American ideals, to decipher what making a life today even looks like. This is an America that doesn’t know what to do with itself, let alone a single, solitary “I” “stretching things thin” between paychecks, with “friends displaced”, and living in a state the news has declared as “dead”. Shopping for a wedding present at Bed Bath & Beyond, the speaker glimpses household items she knows would be the “first to go” when she leaves. The open road holds promise, but it also feels wild in its loneliness—and inevitable.
At the
center of the book is the sprawling “False Spring”, a poem that, over the
course of twenty-seven pages, catalogs surprising and intuitively connected
observations and images. Myers generates an escalating friction between
contradictions: spring is a sham while the speaker is “April’s fool”, the
stories of her particular world could take place anywhere, and the “you” from
whom the speaker is separated by miles has more of a presence than absence. Here
Myers' language is especially unadorned and urgent, interrogating complexities
without flinching or falling sentimental. The speaker tells the truth about grief in
elegant, startling ways: “There’s nothing that says this has to end, / but
everything ends…”. Yet, “true spring” is
on the horizon.
For all the
dark tenuousness that characterizes the season, hope isn’t absent. After all, this is a speaker who, in “Behind
the R”, writes, “I once told you I didn’t look forward / to anything. That’s not quite / true.” Like daffodils
covered in snow, hope’s there, even when it’s hard to see. And Myers makes even the heaviest snow
beautiful. (April 2013)
Purchase
Hold It Down HERE.
Reviewer
bio: Ashley Farmer is the author of the chapbook Farm Town (Rust
Belt Bindery, 2012) and her first story collection is forthcoming from Tiny Hardcore
Press in 2013. An editor for Juked, she writes and teaches in
Southern California. Please say hello at www.ashleymfarmer.com.