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David B. Goldstein Lost Originals. BookThug $18.00
Steven Ross Smith Emanations: Fluttertongue 6. BookThug $18.00
Jennifer Zilm Waiting Room. BookThug $18.00
Early in Emanations, the sixth volume in his Fluttertongue series, Steven Ross Smith implores the reader to "remember, make your mind a museum shop." It's an interesting image. The museum shop, in stark contrast to the museum it serves, is never a presentation of history as it was, but rather a series of representations of the idea of the past reduced to talisman. The plastic dinosaurs that Smith describes in the lines before he makes this request are not dinosaurs as they were- they are playful extrapolations of the idea of dinosaurs and a past that is elusive. Smith's Emanations, Jennifer Zilm's Waiting Room, and David B. Goldstein's Lost Originals all engage in this exploration of hauntological memory, seeking to represent or capture experiences both quotidian and aesthetic despite the distance between the reader and those moments of inspiration. That those moments may themselves be mere instances in an ongoing cycle of inspiration and representation is part of the joy of embracing the mind as museum shop. Each of these poets makes use of different techniques to do this work-Smith seeds his text with an idea and riffs, Zilm makes use of erasure and intertext, Goldstein's text is an example of ekphrasis absent the original-but each of these collections seeks a past that has become more gift shop than museum.
It should be little surprise given his work as a sound poet that the poems in Smith's Emanations are highly musical. Rich with assonance, alliteration, and language play, the lines in these poems beg to be read aloud, to be heard. This musicality carries over into the poems' relationship with their inspiration. Each poem riffs on a seed from a...