Book Review
In three prior collections published by Hanging Loose Press, Joanna Fuhrman demonstrated her flare for surprising word combinations and fresh insights. In Pageant, Fuhrman’s characteristic playfulness adopts a cynical edge. In the poem “Testimony,” the speaker confesses, “More than anything, I wanted to understand how/ it might feel to be inside and outside at the exact/ same moment.” The tension inherent in this position is manifested in many of the poems, as the speaker critiques consumerism, pop culture, language, and love, simultaneously occupying the roles of observer and participant.
In the poem “Plain Sight,” essentially an anaphoric list beginning “I hid the 20th century/ in my Marcel Duchamp lunchbox,” the truth is constantly obscured by various commodities—Tofurky, panty hose, Formica—by clichés, and even by language itself, as when the speaker confesses, “I hid love, hate, happiness and fear/ in the words love, hate, happiness/ and fear.” Later, in the pantoum “Nostalgia,” Fuhrman revisits this concept, invoking “love itself freed from language.”
The idea of love slips in and out of this collection in various unsavory forms. In the blatantly sarcastic “Ode to Television,” the second poem in the book, the speaker beseeches the television:
Love me
like a fog.
Love me
like the inside
of a bat’s
wing—
closed.
Love here is restricted, either by the disorienting effects of fog or the physical confinement of the inside of a bat’s wing. Later, in “This is What I Meant when I Said My Memories Are Not Exactly True,” love appears as a marketable commodity—“it’s like love she said,/ packaged to sell,” and in the following poem, ‘How to be Happy,” Fuhrman writes“[l]ove, like any other time of day,/ expanded and doubled over.” “Love” here, a mere temporal designation, seems to be crumpling from sudden cardiac arrest.
Fuhrman’s critique of consumerism is most cutting in poems like “The Summer We Were All Seventeen,” in which 1960’s mythology is marketed with twenty-first century technology in lines scattered almost whimsically across the page.
It was 1968 for a whole century.It was 1968
when we made love beneath
the rainbow canopy of candy GI Joes
and gave birth to a Janis Joplin Cabbage patch Doll.
Jimi Hendrix swallowed
The ashes and dove headfirst into the My Little Pony blow-up pool.
I was twenty years old
or I was six years old.I devoured every radio,
eating the wires.
I hooked my veins to the electrical current
and wrote emails to Gilgamesh twenty-four hours a day.
I illegally downloaded Steal This Book.
Earlier in the poem, the speaker declares, “The Vietnam War was trapped in the television/ like a moptop Rocky Road ice cream cone.” The connection between war and seemingly innocuous consumer products is reiterated in the poem “Oh Specious Skies, Our Exit Where?,” where Fuhrman writes, “There are guns bopping in glitter tutus./ There are tanks cobbled together/ from deconstructed Barbie Dream Houses.” Corporations, we are reminded, drive wars as much as they drive toy production.
The speaker’s personal identity shifts from poem to poem, with an attitude alternating between condemnation, acceptance, and collusion. In “Stagflation,” the speakers, a collective “we,” allow themselves to be reinvented in response to a rent increase and changing fashions:
When the rent doubled, we drew smiles
around our real smiles, curtsied our way
into the arms of identical semiotics experts
who changed our names to fit the texture
of the times
This cooperation is far from the self-righteous indignation of “And yes, I would Like Another Ghost-shaped Truffle!,” where the speaker is flatly disdainful of party guests who talk “about their journeys: their trips in zero gravity/ immersion tanks, their swallowing of microscopic/ biological crystals, their lifelong study into/ the subtleties of aromatherapy.”
The last of the book’s four sections most resonates with me. Here Fuhrman adopts a muted tone without relinquishing her cynicism. The final poem, “For Newlyweds,” is a series of bizarre and sinister statements, arranged in couplets. “Your new life starts by unraveling the light./ Your new life starts you when you bash your/ shadow with a kite.” It harkens back to an instruction in the book’s opening poem, “The New Realism,” “Erase the idea/ of what you thought of as a self.”
Even at her most critical, Fuhrman never slips into shrill didacticism. She avoids it, I think, by admitting a slipperiness of self, as the speaker moves from observer to participant, victim to colluder. Essentially, these poems mourn the loss of personal identity in a culture in which anything can be commodified—war, spirituality, love. Even poetry is not exempt, as it competes with genital piercing and pet ESP for followers in “And Yes, I would Like Another Ghost-Shaped Chocolate Truffle!” and is sold as an abstraction in “The Summer We Were All Seventeen,” where the speaker remarks, “I was nostalgic for the idea of poetry/ more than poetry itself.” Yet these poems are firmly on the side of poetry itself. “Poetry” may be acting in the 21st century pageant, but the poems in this collection refuse to perform.
Lauren Russell is the author of the chapbook The Empty-Handed Messenger (Goodbye Better, 2009). Her poems have appeared in Boog City, The Recluse, and Van Gogh’s Ear, among others.