Read This: Sooner
Poetry by Margaret Christakos (Coach House Books)
REVIEW BY Trish Salah
With her sixth collection of poetry, Sooner, Margaret Christakos offers up prismatic threads from a perceptual apparatus as delighted by the abstraction, contraction and resemblance of experience within the written word as by a fulsome scent, taste of lovers’ sweat or “popsicles hardened like candy.” Under the strobe of a mobile and desiring intelligence, Sooner’s seven segments yield both narrative and jump-cut poetic sequences languaging the world in gorgeously crisp, clipped and recombinant syntax. Evoking her novel, Charisma, Sooner gay-marries Christakos’ distributive and transformative grammar to a poetics of sexual dislocation.
In “Lucent,” Christakos personates a thirtysomething subway rider, giving up his alternately narcissistic, tender and caustic insights into fellow passengers, the curious process of becoming a man, husband, father and the embodied experience of his aging and desiring gaze. “He’d blinked downward, shy of reciprocal encounters, / embarrassed to be seen without his children, for here he / seemed moorless, jobless, thought-free, indolent. Who was he to be / riding about on the train?”
Elsewhere, in “Retreat Diary,” Christakos moves more formally between sexes, or rather, she fuses their inscription in its pronominal instance, delimiting the libidinous mess of incarnated difference and sameness: “cunt / cock began to swell and pulse and the canal inside/outside her/him began its emergent shape-shift toward a certain density of presence shared by the body’s other vital organs, an embedded auto-erectile insistence of the interior self straining.”
The book dwells on and digs into problems of representation, translation between media, the nature of contracts, politically committed art, war and numerous other concerns. Sooner is lush and lucid in inscribing the ways being sexed, however variously, orients and inscribes knowing and writing. Truly, “Sooner is loot for later.”
