Or, the Ambiguities

In this collection of erudite long poems, Weiser (To Light Out) engages in conversation with and through the text of Herman Melville's novel Pierre, or the Ambiguities. The work is bookended by sections of heavily visual poems; the erasures that make up the opening section form stalactites and stalagmites from the top and bottom of each page. Prose lines stutter and drip into a reduction: "fell upon Pierre's heart, and her long hair ran over him, and arbored him in ebon" becomes, over the course of six rounds of cuts, simply "labor." In this way, the book's opening section feels very much like sounds gradually decaying as they reverberate around a room. The book's middle section is more traditionally poem-shaped, yet is just as preoccupied with undoing and rejoining, in the senses of family and physical being: the book's "masses," its physical entities, constantly "re-substantiate again" from fog, steam, and vapor, moving in and out of the voices of the cast of Pierre. The final section contains poems in the shape of shackles, open at one wrist to "ease these too tight forms." As Weiser toys with text, context, and potential form, she revels in the constant flux between solidity and dissipation: "Some inexhaustible disruption/ Passing from one state/ To another." (Dec.)