Wings in Time 

A pervasive cynicism churns within the poems of Callie Garnett’s first full-length collection, Wings in Time. The poet is at turns bemused by the superficial culture of the United States, bored in quarantine, and, especially, fatigued by the persistent sexual objectification of women: “To be a woman in her mid-thirties with a pretty cute ass / walking on the road alone at sundown / out of earshot―panic, / shame at the panic.”

Garnett makes few broad social critiques; instead, her frustrations condition a more autobiographical project that is pasted together from borrowed texts, diaristic narratives, and letter-like addresses, comprising four long poetry sequences. Readers are immediately immersed in both the poet’s (digitally mediated) social life and her isolated quarantine fixations. Garnett’s poetry is purposefully DIY, her “seriously scrappy poems” celebrating a “scrapcraft” aesthetic attuned to the spaces and objects these poems invoke: haphazardly arranged video rental and record shops, slapdash notebooks, and the junkyard sculptures of Noah Purifoy, as examples. At the center of these workshop-like environments is the poet’s mother, who worked on the Muppets of Sesame Street. The collection is in many ways a tribute to her. 

Garnett finds retreat in films and TV, but PBS and its role in child development take on special importance. “On the Potential Uses of Television for the Preschool Mind,” ends with this moving description: “Ability to touch / The screen and CHAIR / Lights up // And after a few / Seconds, the host / Says, that’s right.” In contrast to the dangers and inanities of the adult world, the open play available in the nurturing intellectual environment of something like Sesame Street offers Garnett a viable model by which to develop her own poetics. As she ironically confesses: “Love won and it’s horrible / I am surrounded by incomplete art.”