Braided Interior: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Heisenberg's Salon by Susan Lewis

Heisenberg’s Salon
Susan Lewis
BlazeVox Books, 2017

Susan Lewis’s new collection of prose poems engages the complex routines and the constantly shifting contours of daily life in the twenty-first century with great humor, terror, anger, and insight. Like Kafka, like Borges, Lewis explores the uncertainties that underwrite a life, and that linger in the margins of the page; from such uncertainties, and from the chaos embroidered into the antimacassars of the quotidian, Lewis’s prose poems present themselves as an endless gallery of rooms wherein one might dwell on the raging absurdities and the gentle profundities of existence. In these poems, Lewis introduces a man overwhelmed by the complexity of most things, refugees from the native urban clatter, a god of guilt trying to sharpen the curvatures of space-time, a girl who knows her waking life is an illusion, figures sidling into their lives like shy crabs, motivations stunted, discourses un-tongued, the logic of the stutter-step and the sucker punch, the language of bureaucracy colliding with medusa-headed vernaculars and scientific lexicons. Lewis’s ultimate subject, however, is the protean, indeterminate, baffling conundrum of the self, the mystery and multiplicity of our own individual discrete interior worlds.

For Susan Lewis, the prose poem provides a frame within which passionate inwardness and exteriority might overlap, exchange places, negate each other, and continue their distinct pinprick shinings. These poems take form in the interstices of desire, “caught between reciprocity & the cutting edge,” providing glimpses of a “braided interior, veiled though it remained by a haze of evasion.” At their best, the poems startle and skitter, nimbly shifting stances between sentences, darting between parable and parabola—acidic, exquisite, and surreal in the way that only the waking world can be surreal. The poem, “A Variable Equation,” is characteristic in its method; the poem reads, in full:

"This one had a weeping cat. In fact, he was a cat himself, when the notion struck him. He could leap from pool to pool like raindrops. When the pair of them cried, the earth beneath them shuddered, from pleasure or impatience. One day the cat’s tears dried up. It lay still becoming something else. Its man never found out who had ordered the new body, but he knew then & there he must get one like it. You could say he lorded it over his pet, but it was the cat become moonbeam which nurtured him before he had a self to speak of."

Like a cat become moonbeam it is impermanence that nurtures these poems and moves them rapidly outward. Heisenberg’s Salon offers poems that are by turns cosmopolitan and sage, wry and idiosyncratic, eccentric and expertly executed. Each poem here creates a home for another—newer, stranger, older, atomized—way of life. Susan Lewis exposes the flux within the habitual, the unruliness of the very molecules within the customary; these outlandish internal geometries vanish and reappear as the ever-shifting furniture of the self.

Dante Di Stefano is the author of Love is a Stone Endlessly in Flight (Brighthorse Books, 2016). His poetry, essays, and reviews have appeared in Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Shenandoah, Prairie Schooner, and elsewhere. He is a poetry editor for DIALOGIST and the poetry book review editor for Arcadia.

Comments

[The Best American Poetry]

Beautiful review. Eloquent last paragraph. -- DL

[Must see Alaska Salmon Fishing Guide website]

Ms. Lewis has written a collection that is far better than her previous work, How to be Another, and I didn’t think at the time that that was possible.