If you like bottled sunshine for the next grim day
Milkweed Smithereens by Bernadette Mayer
VIOLETS’ PICKS 020
Where I found it
At my very favourite bookstore in Vancouver, the Paper Hound in Gastown. I keep going to others in obscure parts of town trying to replicate the same feeling as I get here but none has captured my heart or my wallet quite as fondly as this gem. On this same occasion, I also picked up a poetry book from a South Korean feminist poet, an old book of vintage advertisements featuring cats, and a book from 1964 all about poetic lyrics in rock.
First impressions
One of my favourite colour combos is pastel blush pink and neon yellow. I saw it once a long time ago in another book and almost bought it based on the colour combo alone. I didn’t because I wasn’t interested in the book itself, but I still think about that colour combo often. The cover art by is by New York based book cover designer Tyler Comrie who has gone dark on social after his partner was involved in a viral scandal last month. Not that this has anything to do with this book at all, just another internet rabbithole in a dystopian world. Well, if you look at the cover, maybe it does have something to do with it after all.
They said it
A career-spanning bouquet of poems by the peerless and inimitable Bernadette Mayer Milkweed Smithereens gathers lively, wickedly smart, intimate, and indelible Bernadette Mayer the volume ranges from brand-new nature poems, pastiches, sequences, epigrams, and excerpts from her Covid Diary and Second World of Nature to early poems and sonnets found in the attic or rooted out in the UC San Diego archive. The world of nature and the pandemic loom large.
—From the publisher
Lines to remember
There are signs saying don’t cut the trees down but you can fish here but don’t cut the fish down you can make ribose but don’t cut down on poems —From “Disruption of Distance”
Coat an interstellar dust grain in water, methanol & ammonia ices bake under ultraviolet light —From “Shadow Biosphere”
with a camera on her hip in a full blast of sun, dressed in white like the universe spiced with entropy, your imagined lightning & my reflected sound —From “these rich areas of thought & time”
You might like this if…
You have a taste for the avant-garde. You’re an advanced poetry reader, or a beginner willing to suspend your knowledge of poetry for a brief moment. The pandemic feels so far behind you now that you’re willing to revisit it in the form of poetic musings—a.k.a. streams of consciousness.
This was the colour of…
The blinding ache of bright, hot white, somehow everything blurred together and nothing at once. Lilac or bruise purples, sunshine or lightning yellows, and chlorophyll or poison gas greens.
Details
Year: 2022
Author: Bernadette Mayer, who recently passed on November 22, 2022, which makes this her final poetry collection (the final poem, fittingly, is titled “Conclusion”)
Location: Brooklyn → New York City → East Nassau
Publisher: New Directions Books
This week’s find-the-poem game
How to play: Unscramble the excerpt from one of Bernadette Mayer’s poems below and see if you can find the full poem somewhere on the www. We’ll reveal the poem next Sunday.
A nma dna a oamnw tendpre ot be wheti cei Treeh men ta het ednreval rood era desolc ni yb eht mrots Htiw gonrts ejicudserp dna yenom ot yub eht neerg senip Eno dnekeew namrehSif dna ebul srniatep wathc Eht diviv tolevi sdniw wolb ilityvisib morf eht niatsnoum Dnoyeb eht kcalb ylleav.
Did you guess it? Last week’s featured poem was “Walking Together at the End of the World” by David Ly, published at The /tEmz/ Review. Click to read the full poem.
You’re reading Violets’ Picks, where every Sunday I take you through an adventure brought to you by a poetry collection. Here’s some other Violets’ Picks this month you may have missed:
I will have to check out this bookstore when I’m in Vancouver later this year!! Are you based there?