Not Resistance Literature: Karthik Purushothaman Reviews Philip Metres's Shrapnel Maps

In a new review for The Baffler, Karthik Purushothaman considers Philip Metres's most recent collection, Shrapnel Maps (Copper Canyon, 2020). Even though the "Lebanese American poet and academic has been writing about U.S. folly abroad since the Gulf War and even theorized about 'war resistance' verse" in a critical work in 2007, says Purushothaman, Metres "has little time for pat poems that turn on simple conflicts like 'Us vs Them,'" and isn't interested in "resistance literature." More:

For much of his career, Metres has focused on American wars in the Arab world. In Shrapnel Maps, his new collection of poems from Copper Canyon Press, he shifts his terrain to Palestine-Israel. Drawing on disparate sources, including 1948 memorabilia, maps and texts from centuries earlier, and testimonies of refugees, activists, and suicide bombers, Metres orchestrates a grand conversation of voices and perspectives across three nations. The book is broken into ten sections, resembling a binder containing a war correspondent’s notes. At a climactic moment, Metres turns “shrapnel” into a verb, referring to a “shrapneled map.” The phrase evokes the image of metal invading the body politic, calling to mind these lines from the Iraq veteran writer Kevin Powers: as if “war is just us / making little pieces of metal / pass through each other.”

Metal piercing flesh is a recurring theme in Shrapnel Maps. Opening in the West Bank, the long poem “A Concordance of Leaves” is an account of Metres attending his sister’s wedding amid the Second Intifada. Danger is ever present in the travelogue, as the narrator describes an ecstatic piss he takes while “half in terror / a sniper’s bullet would chauffeur me / from this place—pants undone, penis in hand.” In time, we learn that the groom had once taken a bullet to his side from Israeli forces (“& though the bullet in the groom will begin / to hatch in his side, & the stitches in his skull / will singe another verse in the book of dreams”). Metres reflects on his fate at the book’s tail end, in the remarkable prose poem, “The Bullet Dream”…

Find the poem, and the full review, at The Baffler.