Field Study

In physics a field theory explains how the dynamics of any given field might change with respect to time or its dependent variables. In Chet’la Sebree’s Field Study the frank subject of investigation is the poet herself, mapped through startling holes of “memory [that] makes nets from twines never / meant to be knotted.” The book-length poem, an “auto-ethnography in poetry,” is playfully aware of its own genre-bending fluidity, a casual narrative formed by its many notes, retractions, and revisions, marking out the scathing impossibility for any single objective reading to open up the past.

Addressed to a white man Sebree once dated, Field Study uses this scrutinized timeline to form the wounded attachment as a means to explore Black sexuality and desire, interracial relationships and misogynoir, vulnerability and joy. As Sebree walks us through a history of psychoanalytical “harmful intimacies,” we encounter a fieldwork that is inflected—or invaded—by its unstinting array of references and quotations, ranging from Mean Girls to Audre Lorde. Unravelling “between love and decimation,” Sebree’s open field carries us from psychic site to site, from a bed to a bar to a school, asking us what it means to unapologetically survey, to revisit.

Although Field Study is presented as a sequence of fragmented journal-like notes, the book’s collage of “small talk” is more like a mosaic. There are gaps but a picture, nevertheless, is formed. This episodic interrogation of the self is smart and current, but the book also feels like it is missing some further unknown variable, perhaps a wildness at the level of the poetic line. As a study toward illegibility Field Study succeeds in embracing the inconclusive histories, flaws, and dreams of subjecthood; in doing so, Sebree becomes aware of two simultaneous states of existence in the field, whereby always “Somewhere, someone’s breaking” and “Somewhere, someone is persisting.”