The Daily Glance
Jennifer Kronovet's Awayward is not in the "experimental" tradition of most books in these glances**. It primarily consists of brief lyrics that tell little stories or explore aspects of daily life from a personal perspective. She uses many techniques, but she's great at taking a word and spinning it so as to enrich it in a poem.
We guessed: It's you or I.
It's I or it's food or it's forbearance.
It's the kind of word that flip-flops.
It's food and we and
we are riding our bicycles.
Kronovet does this process of spinning a word--I like to think of it as spiraling one--in quite a few poems. The words seem to become the focus of such poems rather than any forced meaning.
Once could build a ship.
We think. We think
you said ship. You
know I said drive.
You know what I say.
Kronovet is also knowledgeable about contemporary linguistics, but she does not force what she knows on us through theory-oriented poems. She puts words in context and lets them slip or straighten in front of us. For example, the lines above about a ship play on failures in communication and how language functions. They also play with the position of the speaker in relation to other speakers and in relation to the reader. Who is the I, we, and you of this piece?
**When I went to find the picture below, I found a review that reads this book as far avant-garde literature. To me, it's one of the more straight forward books of poetry I've read lately.
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