Time is a flat circle

Philadelphia-based writer and organizer Ray Coyne reviews three poetry collections: So Tough by Jared Stanley, Go Figure by Rae Armantrout, and Upstage by Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers.

So Tough, Jared Stanley (Saturnalia, 2024)

In So Tough, Jared Stanley is sitting in a hammock at the end of the world and watching it all go by. Time is a foil for the speaker throughout the book, with days of the week becoming something to bounce off of: “Since it’s Monday, stay loose about the goddamn facts;” “Since Thursdays don’t exist, I suffer little/… I find another hour, swab and tweeze with classical patience;” “…if I keep my droplets to myself maybe/Wednesday will be a consolation.” Stanley moves through time to draw parallels between the past and the future, with frequent references to the Roman Empire. He’s pulling an apt comparison — empires rise and fall, but there are always children playing in the street, always so many shades of green, always someone you love with lipstick on their teeth. Even as these poems daydream about what life might be like after climate change has eaten us alive, the speaker can’t help but find a little bit of humor in everything: “The cranky assholes of the intellect/become the cheerful dipshits of the will/the end of the world was just last year!” So Tough explores intimacy and the tension of holding people close and simultaneously at a distance as the world feels like it’s crumbling all around us.

Go Figure, Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan University, 2024)

Rae Armantrout deftly moves through the personal and the existential in Go Figure. Through the lenses of motherhood and the passing of time, she explores questions about the changing world we live in, and whether the changes are for better or for worse. She identifies and teases out the tensions in humanity, of wanting peace but moving towards conflict, of wanting space but moving towards more and more connectivity through the internet: “Our earliest ancestors/were accelerants./They ate change./Where does that leave us?” Even through her uncertainty at the world, Armantrout can find something to laugh at: “‘Be more recognizable!’/tweets Surveillance Inc.,/like we are all/slightly out of focus.” Armantrout takes a writerly point of view throughout, asking question about writing, poems, and structure in a way that creates conversation with the reader: “In fiction, time/runs both ways/and the past is legible/harmless.” She leaves it up to us to decide if we agree.

Upstage, Bruce Andrews and Sally Silvers (Ugly Duckling, 2024)

Upstage combines found poetry by Bruce Andrews and photography by Sally Silvers to illustrate the disjointed and sometimes surreal reality of lockdown during the COVID-19 pandemic. The poems’ titles use the letters a,b, and c to indicate their focuses, which range from the past, present, or future, to verbs and nouns, to different types of the “sublime.” While sometimes hard to follow, the poems closely mirror the confusing and strange experience of living through a global pandemic. The opening poem sets the stage, urging the reader to “let it flow:” “mighty/mouth, please walk your wheels, my lonely heart, grateful/heart – craving ice cream?” Andrews leaves much of the interpretation up to the reader, allowing us to pull our own meaning out of the text as we try to remember what life was like before and to dream up what life would be like after the lockdown ends: “un-waste team teach all i know is goon county corrections/cause down the shore everything’s all right neat dude.” Almost like a funhouse mirror, everyone will see something different in Upstage.