A Review of Emmalea Russo's Multiple G

Emmalea Russo's new book, G (Futurepoem, 2018), has been reviewed by Katharine Coldiron for Medium. "The book forms an extended series of small mirrors, obscuring and exposing meaning. It’s Barthes’s 'Death of the Author' in action," writes Coldiron. More:

...[Any] meaning the reader makes is her own. There are objective qualities to the book: it writes of gardening in both detail and abstraction; it keeps returning to the letters of the English alphabet and the phenomenon of time; it circles around the relationship between geographical landscapes and the industry of human hands. But aside from more apparent themes (“The house no doubt overtaken by weeds”), the meaning of lines like “Forget we are gridded and passing” feel more open to interpretation than in an average book of poetry.

The same goes for the book’s single-letter title. The Publishers Weekly review of G took a position of certainty about what the G of the title refers to. I cannot. The more deeply I read G, the more sure I am that “G” has a meaning that is not singular or collective, not fixed or deliberate. Perhaps it’s something Russo is using the book to solve for, as one solves for X, but perhaps not. G could be garden, it could be God, it could be a human being named Gary or Geoff, it could be a nameless entity living inside Russo’s mind. It could be none of those things, or all of them...

Find the full review of G right here.