Lauren CampTook House
2020; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 94; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2020.0226
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Short Stories in Global Literature
Resumocellar door in a plastic bag. You belong in the nuthouse, you know!” The woman shuts the door and her entire family behind her and hurries down the steps. The wicked neighbor trots behind her. Having reached the bottom of the stairs, they clear away the dreadful plastic bag like it’s a barrel of nitroglycerine and wrap the scythe blade with thick layers of newspaper and tie them together crisscross with string. But the neighbor has to do the last part. Tears flow out of our mother’s eyes like a stream, so that she cannot see or do anything. The wicked neighbor closes the cellar door and takes Mama by the hand. She brings her into her own kitchen and brews her a cup of coffee. Mama says, “And then they always say: ‘Poor Papa!’ Has one of my children ever said: ‘Poor Mama?’ Never! It’s always poor Papa.” The neighbor fetches the coffee cake out of the fridge, brews herself a cup of coffee, and sits herself down. Translation from the German By Nita Tyndall Christa Reinig was born in Germany and began her career in East Berlin, although she published in West Berlin. Reinig wrote fiction, nonfiction, short stories, and poetry, her work often marked by humor and black irony as well as her lesbian identity. After winning the Bremen Literature Prize in 1964, Reinig settled in Munich, where she lived until her death in 2008. Nita Tyndall is a queer author and translator from North Carolina. While they’ve been writing for a while, they only recently discovered their love of translating. Their first novel, Who I Was with Her, will be published by HarperTeen in fall 2020. Editorial note: From Nobody and Other Stories, © 1989 by Christa Reinig. Lauren Camp Took House Tupelo Press I will speak of this wind . . . of the seams of desire. —Lauren Camp, “Remember It Was” THE GREEK mythological term omophagia refers to the eating of raw flesh in the context of Dionysian cult worship. It’s difficult not to think of the god of wine, fertility, and religious ecstasy when reading Took House, the fifth verse collection by Santa Fe poet Lauren Camp. The birds of prey—hawks, eagles, owls—that weave their way through (and onto the cover) of the book are synecdoches for the voracity and multiplicity of appetites that suffuse its pages—again, think of Dionysus being dismembered by the Titans. As Camp mentioned in a recent interview, “the predator-prey relationship ” haunts many of these poems about human intimacy, in which the speaker might be hunter one moment, hunted the next. The mind at play in Took House is also a raptor of sorts, alternating between alert observation and swift plunges into the depths of nature, art, embodiment, and memory. From Sappho to Rumi to Tracy K. Smith, poets have been writing about sex—and sex as a metaphor for poetry—since time immemorial. Here, the “sinew and lava” of both desire and loss pulse right beneath the surface of the poems, a “sublingual darkness” on and under the ravenous tongue. The same tongue transmutes flesh into song. Poems about art, one of Camp’s longtime themes, also abound in Took House (see WLT, March 2011, Nov. 2015). “Because of all the jazz I’ve immersed [myself] in,” she notes in the same recent interview, “I’m used to hearing improvised and complicated rhythms. I like a little friction in my poems (and artwork).” Beyond art as theme, a Mingus-like stop-time rhythm punctuates several of the poems, as do visual breaks like the multiple in the poem inspired by Donald Judd’s aluminum box installation in Marfa, Texas (“Empirical Theories of a Box-Maker”) and the intralineal spaces in the poem about Piet Mondrian’s Composition No. II, 1920 (“Inward, Downward”). Here, the eye lingers in the blanks, while the ear learns to attune itself to the interstices and interplay between sound and echo. “Bounty, bounty, bounty,” we read at the end of “Sharp-shinned Hawk.” Taken as bounty, the songbirds’ echo yet remains. Flesh transmuted into song. Daniel Simon Editor in Chief EDITOR’S PICK WORLDLIT.ORG 35 ...
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