I am such a sucker for poems that translate the vast expansive potential that seems to just be sitting everywhere and then fits it into a poem. It's one of the reasons I think so fondly of Tony Tost's Invisible Bride. It feels a little gamy at points, ranging a little past the realm of sense for me. But it's that pure imaginative power that he pushes into the poems that I enjoy. I read through the book and I think I could write anything, and include anything, and there never were such things as limits only my fear that what I said was going to be too much for the reader.
MacKenzie's poems in the Spring/Summer 2009 issue of FENCE manage to put me there. They have this potent imagination, where a couple's joy sounds like choking, or some bearded guy is shrieking (why shouldn't he be shrieking? It's Sunday!), or the speaker has a John Wayne body. I just love these things, and I love the confidence in the speaker's voice while she says them. They make sense, partly because what is happening in the poem suits the image, and partly because the poet has the will to make it work, and so it does.
But these poems are more than just imagery. They're sex. They're this shade of the imperative that gets laced into different parts. Only a shade, because it's not always clear who the speaker is ordering around. In "You Are Not a Bird" (my favorite of the three poems), the speaker says, "Become an object, come on!--each one has / its lacy train." I don't know if she's speaking in the voice of the officer from stanza 1, if she's got a suggestion for me, if this is her trying to suggest something to the officer. I don't know what it is, but I just find the whole thing so endearing. (Come on! Just play along!)
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