Simone White's Breathless Of Being Dispersed

The Volta presents a fine read: Peter Myers reviews Simone White's "relentless and exhilarating" Of Being Dispersed (Futurepoem), which is, writes Myers, "both documentation and enactment of identity’s fragmentation, its tendency to split into pockets that resist any easy reconciliation with each other or the self that houses them." More:

Given the array of selves White inhabits, the great variety of forms and voices present in her poems is fitting. Formally, Of Being Dispersed ranges from lengthy, essayistic prose (“Lotion”) to sonically-driven impressionist bursts (“Windrim,” “Kettle to Pot”). Between and within poems, White code-switches seamlessly, mixing low and high idioms and flitting in and out of the colloquial—and does so without affectation, a refreshing departure from the anxious displays of cultural omnivorism which often accompany such mixing of high and low. Just within “so as not to embarrass my comrades,” we encounter the “vestigial tail of Queens,” “barf-bag wisdoms,” and the “the white van of our progressive imagination,” phrases as evocative as they are sonically striking, alongside references to Robert Moses and “the scrotum of Jeff Daniels.” White’s language is surprising in a way that never feels inorganic, or like anything less than a deliberate expression of thought. In everything from prose to fractured verse, White’s poems are a dive into the interior workings of someone trying to work something out.

These pieces of a self, and their accompanying orientations toward world, do not always align with how White’s speakers perceive or desire themselves to be; identity’s impositions are often fought against, without success. In “Comment”: “In my marriage and with my mother, there was truly no celebration of my imaginary self, still caterwauling in the way-behind.” And, in “They Say They Can Fill Me Up with a Baby”: “Teaching Reznikoff I cry and make myself / the spectacle I say most certainly I am not.” Wife, daughter, spectacle-prone professor; these are roles that constrain White’s speakers’ attempts at self-definition. In “Preliminary Notes on Street Attacks,” the speaker commands herself (another?) to “swear on this stack of doodoo / on sight I am a unified person”—a startling mixture of oath and mild vulgarity that shatters the unity the speaker begs us to behold.

At times the sweep and precision of White’s sentences and lines function as a whirlpool, encircling an object or phenomenon about which the poem aims to think, nearly swallowing it, but, due to its own centripetal force, keeping a certain distance from it—a metacognitive process which the book dramatizes and comments upon...

Read the full review at The Volta. And for more discussion of this book, check out this recent PoemTalk, where Rachel Zolf, Eileen Myles, and erica kaufman joined Al Filreis to wade in the poetic reverie.