Ordinary Entanglement
(By Melissa Dickey)
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| Author | Melissa Dickey |
“To read ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT is to be driven forward by lines both measured and wild. The hero of these poems—mother, teenage daughter, lover—is ‘holding a rope,’ an umbilical cord of sorts, tethering her to the world. But in Dickey’s long, rapturous poems, all is woven together to form a different sort of rope, one tied to a bucket and lowered down into a well. Sustaining waters, it turns out, are found in the ordinary and the extraordinary, in entanglement and differentiation. In the spirit of Bernadette Mayer’s Midwinter Day, Dickey attends to both what is happening on in the periphery and what is happening internally. This book knows that ‘everything possible stretched on the rim / [is] about to become whatever there is.’” —Sasha Steensen
“Melissa Dickey’s poems sing in defiance—and perhaps celebration—of a slowly burning, ever spinning world. ‘A gauge,’ the poet suggests, and indeed they offer not a fixed point so much as the lights in the aisle that will lead you in the event of an emergency to the nearest exit. Dickey does not deny the violence we inherit but offers a song to gird us against what else might come. Simply put, these lines shine.” —Abigail Chabitnoy
ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT is an inquiry into the perimeters of the self. This is a book of proximity: to violence, desire, oppression, messes, resilience, and restlessness. With candor, quiet philosophy, and a lyric disorientation that enacts the porousness of selfhood, these poems weigh the responsibilities and possibilities of being the main character in one’s own story. And they exist inside an essential human question—can interiority withstand the necessity/fact of being permeated, of permeating? —SARA WAINSCOTT
In their restless appetite to love what is difficult, these searching poems refuse false binaries of chronicle versus critique, witness versus actor, the life of the body versus the life of the mind. With empathy and discernment, Dickey invites everything in, “awe to ember tether to slack,” as she explores what it means to be “a citizen of the world and also / this room.” Reading ORDINARY ENTANGLEMENT feels like coming upon a river coursing just at the upper limits of its banks: swift, swirling, and carrying so much with it as it furiously kisses the edge between chaos and control. —LISA OLSTEIN”
