Alexandra Mattraw

Razor feminine

A review of 'Small Siren'

Photo of Alexandra Mattraw (left) by Adam Thorman.

If Alexandra Mattraw’s first full-length collection Small Siren is a book of the feminine, we have been misunderstanding the feminine all along, misunderstanding its capacity and complexity. This is the feminine as slant of mind, position of articulation, embodied cerebral. In its linguistic inventions and its distinctive grammars, Small Siren rewrites the intimate registers in which mind encounters world.

In hollows

Kenna O'Rourke

Capsule reviews

Kenna O’Rourke reviews three poetry titles featuring dysfunctional relationships: Red Mother by Laurel Radzieski, small siren by Alexandra Mattraw, and Without Protection by Gala Mukomolova.

Runes in the noise menagerie

A review of Claire Marie Stancek's 'Oil Spell'

Alexandra Mattraw

“… to find logical narrative in the ‘masscrash’ mindset … would be to yield to the grammatical hierarchy that engenders dehumanizing social structures — structures that objectify human subjects and contaminate land with oil.” Above: NASA Satellite photo of an oil spill on the Mississippi Delta, via <a href= https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill_-_May_24,_2010.jpg>Wikimedia Commons</a>. — “… to find logical narrative in the ‘masscrash’ mindset … would be to yield to the grammatical hierarchy that engenders dehumanizing social structures — structures that objectify human subjects and contaminate land with oil.” Above: NASA Satellite photo of an oil spill on the Mississippi Delta, via Wikimedia Commons.

For Stancek, “conformism” refers to the linear patterning of English grammar as well as today’s most popular experimental poetics: she subverts all trends with poems that feel entirely new. Other topics include industrial and media pollution, covert drone wars, heterosexist oppression, and police brutality. Stancek montages visceral imagery related to each of these subjects throughout, implying that all such problems stem from the hierarchical social ordering inherent to the oil that fuels our industrialized minds and the greed that borders them.

“[N]ight escape[s] from the menagerie / song fragment”[1] of Claire Marie Stancek’s searing second book, Oil Spell. With occultist “opening noise” and irritated lyric, Stancek warns that “darkness spreads fucks up borders between things” (8).

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