DAYS

In the closing lines of the first page of Simone Kearney’s debut collection, Days, we read: “thread of life passes through me vertically and I feel it in me, pulling in opposite directions, growing repeatedly, elongating pause of missed”―a sensation that is mirrored in the experience of this abrupt pause, which marks the end of the page. The book’s form harnesses an exquisite tension between discrete composition and unfettered maximalism, with each page comprised of just seven fully justified lines, which give the impression of daily entries, though these pages are in fact segmented from a single, book-length sentence, as if cut at regular intervals from an extruder. Page two continues: “corn or agapanthus, plastic, crop, rubber buttons, what I am doing, I only know how to construct small images I climb out of.”

In a stream-of-consciousness punctuated only by commas, Kearney conjures highly surreal, though strikingly accurate depictions of sense perceptions of objects, voices, flavors, textures, and especially her own face and body. Her apperception is often uncomfortable or abject: “self is fork through mousse, coagulated porch, about to flare, inedible, cognition parts like tributaries of fat, no longer ascending like a life.”

Resonating with the book’s form, Kearney’s primary theme is identity and its porousness, its construction and then transgression. Throughout, the poet confronts and questions bodily and cognitive boundaries with the aim of pushing through, muscling deeper and deeper into a subject until a new association allows a discursive pivot. Slowly, she uncovers the protruding limbs of a buried autobiography: friends, an interlocuter, possibly a lover. But what’s most impressive is how physical it all feels, the embodiment of her experiences in both a self and a bulk of text. As she writes: “we are making the body, we are all its parts fallen out like a waterfall, we collect it and scatter like a view of language.”