The Ants
Sawako Nakayasu. Les Figues Press,
$17 paperback (93p) ISBN: 978-1934254547
When faced with a threat that is oh so tiny, we cannot help
but exert our God-given largeness. Now imagine it the other way around and give
account of what happens when we are what’s tiny. When our perspective shifts so
quickly, cognizance and spatial orientation and size matters altogether, all at
once. With the literal, figurative, and fantastical world of ants (and the
occasional other insect) at her disposal, Sawako Nakayasu plays with
perspective throughout The Ants, shrinking
her lens at any moment to narrate (via ant) the ants’ struggle to hitchhike on
passing shoes or widening her lens to narrate (via human) an adult’s lifetime
desire to own an ant farm. As the perspective shape-shifts from piece to piece,
the playfulness lends Nakayasu the ability not only to shake up stylistic
elements of form and tone but to harness imagination further. The Ants is a world where “the clever
ants who can read numbers” perch on light bulbs with the lowest wattage to
avoid death when humans turn on the lights. It is a world where the ant farm a
child always wanted is now circulating in her adult body, leaving her to
explain: “And so it is that I am forced to call up my friend who owns a gun to
come over and shoot me, somewhere harmless like my leg, where it won’t kill me,
just make a big gushing wound large enough so the ants can get out, and he
does, and they do, and now do I miss them.” It is a world where two ants set
out from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China and upon their rendezvous
cause two bickering women to stop fighting in awe of the ants’ “force and intention.”
In this way, the ants in The Ants are
not always ants or even solely stand-ins for humans. Similar to how Richard
Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America
morphs into more than a book title, the air in The Ants is swollen with high “ant density levels,” ants are
manuscripts (“he edited my ant, without even asking”), ants are blankets that
you wear to keep warm. In this way the fancy of the ants becomes even more fantastical,
and we as readers are continuously surprised at the lovely turns such extended
metaphors take.
Yet even with all the delight that comes from entering such
an imaginative and thoughtful world, it is Nakayasu’s strength in language and
short form prose that elevates her collection. Take “Colors,” one of a handful
of especially short pieces, in its entirety:
I leave the house for a couple of months, and upon my return find that a gang of ants and a gang of cockroaches have been having turf wars in my home. I don’t actually see any ants or cockroaches, but I can tell by those tiny colorful bandanas they have left behind.
Much to our enjoyment, the whimsy here is both clever and
evocative. Beyond that, Nakayasu rallies time, point of view, and negation to
create a reflective character in a curious situation—and does so in the span of
two sentences. And more than anything, it’s the sentences in this collection
that beg the question of what exactly we are reading. Are these poems that
unfold as character-driven stories? Or stories that employ a strong sense of
language and repetition and sound and imagery? In many ways it matters less if The Ants is a collection of poetry or
fiction, and more how these pieces function individually and as a whole to
speak to our anxieties of isolation, escape, survival, and unknowing. Nakayasu
writes intentionally on the fence of genres and further blurs the lines among literary
forms, something that—regardless of our tendency to categorize and in spite of
any genre purists left in our blurry, blurry world—enchants us as readers and
excites us craft-wise as writers. Of course it should surprise us little when
some of the most progressive writing comes from the spaces between because it’s
the between that inherently challenges the boxes we try
to work inside or work around or avoid altogether. All that said, it follows
that The Ants is the first title in
Les Figues’s Global Poetics Series, which includes three other promisingly
form-bending collections forthcoming from derek beaulieu, Colin Winnette, and
Sandra Doller. The Ants has indeed
set the bar of innovation high for the series, as well as for whatever
“ant-human relations” or poem-story matrimony comes next from Nakayasu herself.
(July 2014)
Purchase The Ants HERE.
Reviewer bio: Michelle Dove's fiction appears or is
forthcoming in New South, Passages North, Pear Noir!, Barrelhouse and
elsewhere. She lives in Washington, DC.
