Granny Cloud

What is immediately striking about Farnoosh Fathi’s Granny Cloud is the electrifying syntax in poems like “Luxe Chariot w/ Bidet (Meals on Wheels)”:

the quivering silicone balances of lyricism,
transferred one word to the next, this weight agreed 
   upon the lover
and the beloved both in me, agreeing for the world that
   music is,
that a child has punctuated my letter—that I bring the 
   harmed,
deranged and foreign things close, and closer.

This book is driven by a kind of entrancement: Fathi is so acutely attuned to everything she encounters—things and animals as much as abstract nouns, and particles of language—that she dresses each thing in a surfeit of attention. Her line of sight is both inquisitive and completely open to the possibilities brought on to the page by each word, including startling sonic explosions and improbable images, as in these lines from “Lunchtime Prayer”:

A snail sank—grand in pus and rime, on three coils ( 
equals one tea-wheel) white.
The wheel brings the bill, the bill—bald.

Fathi’s rapture elicits an equally enraptured reading. From “Barber of the Pea”:

“Good Barber of the Pea!” I exhumed, 
high into the vag
where the barber keeps his
pea—

“Good Sprout!” His mouth, his gray
and hunted tongue
always in the distance—

The formal conceit in this book reaches its apotheosis in “Anyone’s Don’tanelle,” in which the poet revisits and revises the same set of lines (and ideas) over and over for a stretch of nearly 30 pages. Here, again, attention is the game. The book ends, appropriately, with a poem in which sustained, relentless focus, gives way to magnificent expansiveness:

I must return to the fontanelle
This photo of the top of his head—occurs.
It is courtesy of him bantering in the house next to which I live

and, later:

To the fontanelle—an exact matter off the top        of the    head—occurs. 
It is courtesy of him bantering in the schoolhouse next to    which I live that he dies