Poetry Night with V. Joshua Adams and Chelsea B. DesAutels

In Past Lives, each line leaps to the next in glorious unpredictability, forming a latticework of surprise. In the world of V. Joshua Adams, we have competitive knitting, beer commercials, cabriolets, and mandolin players breaking ukulele players’ fingers. To employ a Pavement title, Adams’s poems are “slanted and enchanted” their surrealist strangeness is sometimes meditative and sometimes mercurial with acrobatic associative jumps. These are poems of wit, inquiry, and sonic vigor that examine issues of being, textuality, and the imaginative act. Past Lives is “swift-winged and sharp” and “darkly bright” as its sentences spin with wryness: “Even the language of ruin gets run-down,” “The question filled me with dread, / which was better than nothing,” and the following excerpt, from which the title Past Lives arises: “A lot of people have past lives they are covering up. / For example, I was once an Episcopalian.” Though Adams’s poems aren’t overtly emotional, he extends his antennae into a range of consciousness including desire and darkness; or, to use a phrase from Mark Doty, they are a “logarithm of decay and rekindling.” -Simone Muench

V. Joshua Adams is a poet, critic, translator, and scholar. He teaches at the University of Louisville. Past Lives is his first full-length book of poems; a critical book, Skepticism and Impersonality in Modern Poetry: Literary Experiments with Philosophical Problems, is forthcoming from Bloomsbury.

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Early in her powerful, affecting debut, Desautels writes: I always mention gratitude because/people like that ending. Unflinching in its candor, this is the story of a woman with two swellings in her belly: a nascent baby, and a cancerous tumor. The poet could focus on the particulars of the medical case, using language from a traditional illness narrative. Instead she gives us the basics, then gathers up surprising and expansive material from various landscapes–the Black Hills, the prairies of Texas, the mountains, switchgrass, and, especially, the neighboring buffalo, to which she feels a profound connection. Desautels’ metaphors strike home; they are counterpoints, balm to the uncertainty and grief that make us uncomfortable. The book moves elegantly from its dark beginnings to a transcendent thankfulness. With healing lyricism, she writes: And I imagine the white sheets as heron wings./And the whirring machines are white eggs./And the worried voices are sunlight on water.

Chelsea B. DesAutels is the author of A Dangerous Place (Sarabande Books), which was named a New York Times Editors’ Choice. Her work has been supported recently by Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference and Yaddo. Chelsea lives in Minneapolis and is the founder of Freshwater Writing.