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June 20, 2007

The Beginning of Beauty

Ryan Walker

ooh oooohh, Mel Nichols' The Beginning of Beauty (Edge Books) is a very good book.

Meets meets meets. Then they go their separate ways, and stay that ways in at least several ways.

It is rich, containing more than you are likely to expect from poems, so it kind of tumbles out like a popcorn sofa.

Such titles as "easy living with the sectional", "wild and foamy jaws", "limen", "'I fucked a dense torte' on your birthday", and “stretching like thumbless design”. One can't not read things so titled.

A little bit of the quick Raworth line, at times, but hmmm it's different, the lines seem more inhabited. There's perhaps slightly more of a sense of story or scene living through or around the lines. Nothing pushy or too complete, tho.

From “stretching like thumbless design”:

I met Rothko at Le Tour Eiffel red
against all the worn antiseptic Great
Books in Haiku very
curvy and smooth
with random Eiffel-orange giraffe effect

Those lines aren’t especially representative of the volume as a whole, but neither is anything else it contains. It’s a bit unruly in that respect. You like it that way.

Features and specs: 31 pages of solid state froth-free poetry with not a mot unjuste to be found, plus some additional pages for covers and things; edition of 150 copies; a wax sleeve with an enclosed physical thing and a detachable cover credit; translucent lining; color photo of a thing that resembles the physical thing in the wax bag; black construction paper.

The volume is in fact “Part 1” of The Beginning of Beauty. There is a subtitle: hottest new ringtones, mnichol6. The “mnichol6” is her email handle from her days at gmu.edu.
 
 
 
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[ed note: this title hasn’t made it to the Edge Books site yet, but you are resourceful and can figure how to get your own copy.]
 
 

Posted by Rock Heals at June 20, 2007 07:00 AM