diatomhero: religious poems
Lisa A. Flowers
Vulgar Marsala Press, 2012
ISBN 978-0982007761
$15.00
Reviewed by Zack Kopp
As Djuna Barnes knows, we have the world on backwards, and our joy must begin with disgust. There are roach motels between us and any heaven we aspire to, adds Lisa A. Flowers, and our feet might get sticky no matter how surely we step. With canny observations on life’s two-sided selfhood — the incidental, understated power embedded in people as killers and makers, delivered in lines like, “The hairdresser in my DNA/ simply sat there/ in a darkening studio” — running all through diatomhero: religious poems, Flowers candidly photographs both these dimensions with the same joyous distrust employed by Picasso in Cubism to show multiple images available to vision at once. Her lines are shiny, strong, sharp, and effective on multiple levels.
Flowers uses engaging conversational rhythm to conduct tours of the human psychic and spiritual mausoleum, but she also uses lines that make readers’ attention pivot after reaching phantasmagoric heights. Imagining different ages as suits of clothes too baggy or too tight or fitting just right; imagining heaven and hell as a filtration system — “Not everything that comes to us can be put back into the cosmos” — depicting hot souls getting pressed into form by waffle irons, and a whole mess of Divine plumbing and drains and methods of liquid disposal for time, memory, and language far too vast to be mere solids, or confined by any certain shape. Just the beautiful mess it all is, after you factor in zillions of years of belief on the part of humans about what God is after all anyway, the architecture of it.
Once, when they went to hose down the screens
They’d put down to stop the damned from rising
They were appalled to find
Millions upon millions of ascending prayers
That would have been answered, decades or centuries ago,
Had they not been intercepted
A plea to survive the Spanish American War,
Desiccated in the screen & drifting down in an exoskeletal snow
The word “diatom” refers, literally, to a microscopic, usually single-celled, fresh water algae being, so the word “diatom hero” implies a sort of microcosmic grandeur, more usually a burden than a blessing, more conviction than acclaim, as all you are is just another sucker compared to the greater process. Even so, Earth’s energy glows in these poems.
The arctic, that region of desperadoes
Where water hides as ice
And stays very still
Fearing
The awful coursing of spring that will unloose it and Arethusa’s
Refuge in the Nordic myths
Down Mnemosyne’s cheekbones that sloped in ways
That made skiing down into them irresistible;
Their high planes curving
Into rolling hills of glass, like Grimm
when you threw your magic comb behind them
Mountain after mountain
Eddying into a long downslope of Rockies, alps, and neck
In spite of dams
Stopped at the highest point of vigilance,
The voices of celestial choirs sinking like elevators of tongues to a
certain floor
A low dropping of blues
where the violins opened their storm cellars in the rain
Lovers discovered, soon enough, that memories were flushed
out faster with body fluids
As they succumbed to their passion
Their memories began to collapse and crumble into one
another
One’s eyes flooding with tears
The other skidded for miles into the dark on
To the end of a tunnel
Blinking with wires and DNA.
After drawing readers to the vision of possible eternities spent as a migrant worker in the Elysian fields, Flowers brings her readers back to rebirth and warm earth again with snapshots from the “petting zoo in the garden of reincarnation” where, “If you’re very still/ Your next life will come up/ And eat out of your hand.” Flowers presents an utter symphony of reincarnation here, transformation from era to era, through murder, disappearance and socioeconomic role reversal, depicting perfectly the tactile plasticity of human emotion and experience with style and skill.
Gods and myths and works of art. And through it all a slack jawed, salivating artful rearrangement of half-unconscious social and mythological tropes, reflecting characters like Houdini, or Pinocchio, or Rorschach, in ancient Greece, or Los Angeles, or Egypt, offset by the smell of sex on johnnycakes. Characters like Jenny Greenteeth, the river hag of English nursery rhymes said to drag errant children to watery death, or Abyzou, birth-killing female demon and partner of Lilith, are briefly historied in the appendix provided by Ms. Flowers at the back of the book. Poems like the “Pioneers” series, “Local Girl’s Body Found” or “Emere’s Tobacconist” are disarmingly brilliant. It’s theological bullshit, one poem explains, while “Christ in blond drag sat in the dark/With His disciple” or a
Prelude to the moment when a soldier,
Dying on the battlefield in ancient Greece
Flows into his reincarnation as a
Girl, blonde and Norwegian, in the high country
His life wrenched out of him like a discus
That goes flailing off to the Lord
Trailing roots, black against the sky
As reincarnation only on the
Rebound, like love
The solar eclipse picking up our images like a Xerox
Albeit in a delayed assembly;
In “millions of tiny pieces,” like Mike Teavee
But that’s not all it is, with the hairdressers lost in your cells. With the crimes of the times.
I put down my copy of diatomhero humming mentally. Even books are mummies of what thoughts brought them into being, in a sense. Flowers’s writing inspires me to a more interactive relationship with the language in my life, causing me to question the things I once thought of as objects. For now, they’re mummies, but what next? These words have soul, as does this exploding book.
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Zack Kopp has recently published a novel called Sorehead and a collection of poems and shorts called Fire Diner with Magic Trash Press. He is founding editor of a webzine called Doggerel (formerly MightyMercury) specializing in short fiction, verse, art, photography and commentary from the anti-famous (from V. Vale to Rennie Sparks to Paul Krassner to Jenny Abel and beyond), before which he spent years co-editing an irregular journal of quantum thought called The Gut with Preismatics discoverer Andrew Wible. Kopp has been a creative artist or one kind or another from ever since. His vision is a vital blend of social and political themes with raw, wild soul from the bottom of the can. He received an MFA in Writing (fiction) from Vermont College of Fine Arts.