What Truth They Speak: A Review of A. D. Lauren-Abunassar’s CORIOLIS
Reviewed by Lily lauver
Go through enough outside of your control and it is easy to feel unlike yourself, without self, or to put the locus of truth outside of yourself. A victim of bodily harm, a measure of grief, the eye of the storm—during and after hurt, it is easy to mistake losing our footing in the world for losing our selves.
In Coriolis, A. D. Lauren-Abunassar pools her resources. Her speakers stabilize truth in dreams, in weather, in poetic form—in a breadth of influences such as alien abductee Betty Hill, Courage the Cowardly Dog, Connie Converse, Midas, Ted Hughes, on and on. In “Supplies for a Quick Migration,” the speaker consoles, “Thing is, there is no such place/as the end of you.”
This is Lauren-Abunassar’s debut collection, winner of the University of Arkansas Press’s Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, awarding publication each year to the debut manuscript of an Arab-American poet. If there are qualities consistent with debut poetry collections, Coriolis might have them. But Lauren-Abunassar’s grasp on form does not reflect that of an immature poet—rather, a poet as eager to adopt a stable angle on the world as we are.
The container of the poem becomes its own way of looking in, seeing what comes from the viewfinder. The book is full of scattered formal series: “Cryptid Poems,” “Victim Impact Statements,” the “Abandoned Sestinas,” etc. Lauren-Abunassar writes, in “Post-Immigration Pastoral,” that “As a matter of fact fact//has no matter. Or truth.” The book’s formal exuberance becomes a new way of understanding the matter of fact: if the poem is what we use to arrive at truth, and the shape of the poem is subject to radical changes, is truth likewise subject? In “Soliloquy,” the speaker says, “I loved you so I tried to build you.” Lauren-Abunassar’s boldly built forms mimic this ethic. The flotsam of our lives is not there to reveal itself to us: it is up to us to organize the parts we are dealt into wholes.
Where other forms arise out of devotion or spiritual necessity, the sestina was made initially by French bards to one-up one another with their sustained capacity to spin an idea—a form made for form’s sake. It is through the “Abandoned Sestinas” that Lauren-Abunassar’s speaker writes about her relationship to God. The mulling, sometimes elliptical quality of the sestina is preserved, but in the breakdown of the form it is expanded upon. The poem repeats according to obsession, not prescription. God, like the sestina, is so often prescribed, meant to be taken just as He is given. The “Abandoned Sestina” deepens and questions the practical application of God to a life. That there are three scattered throughout the three sections of the collection, each with a radically different appearance, again advocate the importance of the container of an idea to our ability to understand.
Lauren-Abunassar holds the poem to account. In “Courage the Cowardly Dog goes off on a Tangent,” she writes, “I am against the sky. Enough has been said about it. The ground has uses also. And smallness too, I am learning.” These poems are very aware of saying what they need to: often, of being unable to help themselves. They are not the usual poems of recovery after grief, assault, migration: we are not bearing witness to a victorious journey toward resolution between the self and the world. The poems do not announce themselves, by which we are involved in the poem’s tenuous constructions of truth merely by following along, by dutifully picking up the threads. These are poems to be indebted to. What truth they speak.
Coriolis by a. D. Lauren-abunassar —
The university of arkansas press, 2023
poetry / 106 pages / $18
Lily Lauver was last in Galesburg, Illinois. Lately, she writes about grief. She graduated with degrees in English literature and creative writing from Knox College, where she helped found the letterpress studio Prairie Moon Press. Most recently she managed the studio, waitressed and bartended at Budde’s Pizza & Spirits, and manned the Reference Desk at the Galesburg Public Library. Among things, she crochets in miniature.