Public Abstract

Winner of (among other awards) the 2023 APR/Honickman First Book Prize, Jane Huffman’s Public Abstract has all the hallmarks of early artistic success. But Huffman, a poet animated by accident and imperfection, builds her debut collection on the shaky foundation of failure. Almost half of Public Abstract’s poems are untitled fragments; the poems with titles—“Failed Sestina,” “Revisions,” “Sestina with Six Titles”—flaunt incompletion and indecision. “I’ve failed already / Unbegun,” one poem opens, crooning a bluesy lament for inertia, incrementally metered out in one-to-three-word lines:

The sun already
Going down

Above
My house

And I have
Nothing done.

A poem promisingly titled “Surety” starts with the confidence of thermodynamic law: “I’m sure as wetness / follows steam.” Unwilling to leave those words be, Huffman extends and upends her simile until surety sounds impossible to ever get right:

I’m sure as blood
that follows
meat. I’m sure
as meat.
I’m in the heat
of surety. The bleat
and seethe of surety.
The mist
that follows certainty.

Public Abstract offers musical proof of the heady theory that (as Ben Lerner articulates it) “The poem is always a record of failure,” falling short of whatever “transcendent impulse” inspired it. Huffman is a special case of that general claim: she makes failure her book-length object of study, both in her precise choice of subjects—unacknowledged pain, misdiagnosed illness, addictive temperaments, unbreakable familial patterns—and in her imperfect yet high-functioning forms. After experimenting and dispensing with sonnets, refrains, odes and palinodes, and—in Jericho Brown’s recent invention—the duplex, Public Abstract closes with the hybrid Japanese form of the haibun, following Basho’s example: a compressed canister of rhyme-rich prose that crystallizes finally into a haiku, which Huffman prints all in one line. The final haiku of a haibun “On poetry” splits the difference between quarreling with AI and Emily Dickinson’s letters (“When I state myself, as the Representative of the Verse—it does not mean—me—but a supposed person”). It’s a syllable-perfect account of Huffman’s poetics of dysfunction:

Ars poetica: / Yelling “representative” / into a dead line.