Ceive

“Left means what’s staying,” B. K. Fischer writes in Ceive, “and left means who went.” It’s a pithy phrase associated with Val, the grammarian protagonist of this “novella-in-verse” about an apocalyptic flood. Val is mourning her daughter―gone missing in the chaos of evacuation―while coming to terms with a climate-altered earth that is drowning in rain and rising seas. The setting here is a container ship―a modern incarnation of Noah’s ark―headed to the promised land of a now ice-free Greenland.

Fischer enlivens this dystopian drama with sharp details that are often cinematically framed, as in this opening scene from Val’s basement: “Running feet went past the hopper window, gutters overflowed, water sluiced into the well. You watched for sneakers that could be hers. Arms dragged duffels.” Throughout, the poet masterfully employs prosodic tools to great narrative effect. In “Misperceive,” the monotony of the sea, evoked through tautological repetition, induces a (highly alliterative) hallucination that lands on an image of terrestrial hope: 

[…] the sea

is the sea is the sea is the sea until
it’s toile with tortoises or a turnstile

or a roll of raffle tickets or a grid
of exposed rebar sprouting a new

foundation. […]

The book’s title, a root-word that roughly means “to take,” serves as a kind of synecdoche that destabilizes related perceptual terms that title many of the poems, such as “Conceive,” “Apperceive,” and “Imperceptible”―poems in which we observe Val’s sense of reality become increasingly altered in her new environment. “To take” also has material connotations: the container ship, in particular, is an overt symbol of world-destroying consumption. Fischer’s postapocalyptic universe offers a terrifying glimpse into a future in which the world and the words we use to describe it are all in ruins:

Rain on the roof.
Roof in the rain.

On roof the rain.
On rain roof the.