xterminal's review
3.0
Alison Stine, Lot of My Sister (Kent State University Press, 2001)
I am an idiot and returned this to the library before pulling quotes from it, so I won't be able to offer up evidence of anything I'm going to say here. You have my apologies. And I should probably also apologize for expecting this book to be some sort of mishmash of, say, Ira Sadoff and Debra Allbery (whom I consider two of the best poets currently working). You see, I've been trying to get my paws on a copy of Lot of My Sister for almost four years, and various library systems have failed me time and again. When you find yourself in a situation like that, especially with a book from an imprint that rarely fails to put out fantastic material, you run the risk of building the book up in your head to mythical proportions. In the case of Lot of My Sister, this risk was exacerbated by Stine's second book, Ohio Violence, released in 2008 and the subsequent winner of much praise and a pretty big award. (And with that title, the link to Sadoff was cemented in my head, I should note.) So when one out-of-the-way library finally scored me a copy, hopefully I can be forgiven for thinking this was going to be the second coming of Robert Lowell.
It's not. I'm not going to say anything against Stine's words, for as with many of the Wick poets, she is more than capable of putting them together in a way that conveys what she's trying to get across in a very effective manner. And while I don't normally apply this metric when reading poetry (I grew up on the surrealists, after all), back when I was a poetry student myself, knee-high to a grasshopper or thereabouts, Dave Smith introduced my class to what he called the “So What?” test when he was guest-lecturing one day. (He did so while critiquing another student's work, thankfully, not mine.) And it's always been in the back of my head, even though much of the time I consciously reject it. But it kept rearing its ugly head when I was reading some of the poems in this volume. A few of them just don't pass the test; it's not that I don't know what they're about, or that Stine doesn't do a bang-up job of showing me what they're about, I just wondered why she was taking the effort to illuminate them.
This is not true of the entire book, or even the majority of the book; it's two poems, three at most. In a book of twenty-five pages, that resounds a little louder than it normally would, but still, this is worth picking up. ***
I am an idiot and returned this to the library before pulling quotes from it, so I won't be able to offer up evidence of anything I'm going to say here. You have my apologies. And I should probably also apologize for expecting this book to be some sort of mishmash of, say, Ira Sadoff and Debra Allbery (whom I consider two of the best poets currently working). You see, I've been trying to get my paws on a copy of Lot of My Sister for almost four years, and various library systems have failed me time and again. When you find yourself in a situation like that, especially with a book from an imprint that rarely fails to put out fantastic material, you run the risk of building the book up in your head to mythical proportions. In the case of Lot of My Sister, this risk was exacerbated by Stine's second book, Ohio Violence, released in 2008 and the subsequent winner of much praise and a pretty big award. (And with that title, the link to Sadoff was cemented in my head, I should note.) So when one out-of-the-way library finally scored me a copy, hopefully I can be forgiven for thinking this was going to be the second coming of Robert Lowell.
It's not. I'm not going to say anything against Stine's words, for as with many of the Wick poets, she is more than capable of putting them together in a way that conveys what she's trying to get across in a very effective manner. And while I don't normally apply this metric when reading poetry (I grew up on the surrealists, after all), back when I was a poetry student myself, knee-high to a grasshopper or thereabouts, Dave Smith introduced my class to what he called the “So What?” test when he was guest-lecturing one day. (He did so while critiquing another student's work, thankfully, not mine.) And it's always been in the back of my head, even though much of the time I consciously reject it. But it kept rearing its ugly head when I was reading some of the poems in this volume. A few of them just don't pass the test; it's not that I don't know what they're about, or that Stine doesn't do a bang-up job of showing me what they're about, I just wondered why she was taking the effort to illuminate them.
This is not true of the entire book, or even the majority of the book; it's two poems, three at most. In a book of twenty-five pages, that resounds a little louder than it normally would, but still, this is worth picking up. ***
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