I have to admit, I am always crazy for Mary Szybist's poems. Crazy meaning interested, impressed, indulged, any way that you would want to say you experienced a poem, and feeling as though you have found that place because the poet has led you to it with kindness and insight. What I mean by that is that Szybist's poems tend to a transparency and accessibility because they are so graceful with their intelligence.
For instance, in the poem from the 2009 issue of Witness, "Conversion Figure," the speaker is falling into a woman. Who is it? I don't know. I've read through the poems a few times, and I switch between the speaker as Satan, or the Holy Spirit, or Christ (could this be a poem about the Annunciation?), but I really can't be certain which of these it is. "Out of God's mouth I fell," says the speaker, which is provocative enough to make me think of the extreme character types, but still not enough to make me certain which character it is.
Add to this the ambiguous feminine figure being fallen into, and the poem takes even greater pleasures. Should a line like "Stop licking cake from your fingers" make me look at her in a sarcastic light? an overly wholesome one? I just read Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, and I would say these multiple possibilities are exactly what make this poem so strong. Of course, I think what else makes this ambiguity so strong is the sharpened description of the figures populating the poem--Szybist gives a lot, inviting the reader to imagine their own ideas about how the spaces could be filled.
