Handiwork Amaranth Borsuk

Handiwork

Amaranth Borsuk

Winner : 2011 Slope Book Prize

Slope Editions $14.00

ISBN: 978-0-9777698-7-2

“...the way

a reader pores over a text she might

fall into: learning their names...”

The poet trusts the reader to come to their own understanding,

their own images, beyond the implication, the shadows words

leave. The words pass from meaning to experience:

“The hand that had its work cut out for it was cut out

for its work. Knuckling down on the desk, it curled

to a tool not there, scissors that might replace pen

with loop and lever, flexed: machinely precision-

potential at rest...”

Borsuk uses gematria, “a clue to the author's procedure lies

in the mystical Jewish practice of gematria, which assigns

numerical value to a letter, word, or phrase”:

“Salt king, for what did you walk,

for war or dreams,

everyone as

nothing to you?

Lake moon     milk tooth,

semaphore      lockdown.”

We know the poems practice a principle, which we may or may

not be familiar to the reader. The poems stand on their own as

poems, experimental, lyrical, and language::

“if a flower confesses its shame in a little book

if fire burns only windows and doors

if fruit turns to stone in your hands

if food turns to dust in your mouth

if the things of this world are more or less beautiful than

you remembered...”

For me the poems read like an objective abstract painting, revising

the form, being partial in its rendering of the objective, these poems

do the same as a painting. We fill in the images and play with colors::

“Fartherking slew the city

and everything

in it – would not spare

even an ear

of wheat – turning earth

cruel with salt.”

The poems are not obscure, they open and close and we participate

in the action,; in not saying everything, we get to experience our own

poems. The reader either enjoys negotiating the implications

or the reader relates in ways that make sense to them because of

their own exposure to new writing::

“Tenders of salt, shaken,

rendered empty,    still.

Harvest's jealously

guarded privilege: naming

a price

in small hard seeds.”

My criticism is not in the poems but in the reviews or the critique

of poems such as these. Yes the poems are intellectual and in thinking about

the word intellectual I find it dismissive of the actual poems and dismissive

of the content of the poems. For me the word intellectual limits the poems. The

poems are as any poem or almost most any poem, that resonates with certain

thoughts::

“Who / make /s/ life / edible

has / the same / / worry / every day,

it's out of date.

That /fear of / getting late

or letting / go,

liver / heavy / in / wonder

at / all / that / promise.”

In the experience of Borsuk's poems, I find the tint, the fallen

words, the replications, the handiwork. I recommend this book.

Irene Koronas

Reviewer: Ibbetson Street Press

Poetry Editor: Wilderness House Literary Review