A REVIEW OF JOAN NAVIYUK KANE’S EX MACHINA

Ex Machina, Joan Naviyuk Kane. Staircase Books, 2023. $16

by Michael McCarthy

real and white as snow
                                           have you forgotten
                                                                                     starting over, & over

These spare lines from the poem “Don’t Run Out” begin Joan Naviyuk Kane’s stunning microcollection Ex Machina, available from Staircase Books. They introduce the slippery, ineluctable style that will continue to mystify the reader. Though not esoteric, the poems are certainly not easy either. They are by turns abstract and concrete, tender and brutal, glib and sincere. They don’t orbit a theme so much as they draw in a variety of themes by their own gravity. This gravity, their indelible weight, is the key strength to this impressively short yet epic book. Each poem is a dent in spacetime, and everything that crosses their event horizons is sucked in. This includes the reader’s interest. 

Like the chrome title on this book’s pitch-black cover, these poems shimmer. Like a fish’s scales, or moonlight on the sea. Currents of poetic thought are often brought to a close midway through a line of inquiry, cut off like a limb or a life. In “Marrow,” the speaker shifts abruptly—yet so naturally—from a profound concern for an anonymous person’s well-being (they are identified only by the letter “x”) to a series of earthy particulars: “wild potato, black bearberry, red phalarope, / blueberries, fish roe, coltsfoot, / bitter sourdock, sourgrass, woolly lousewort […]” The poem melds thought and the senses, a most impressive balancing act apparent throughout the collection.

The collection also melds languages. Two poems in Ex Machina are English translations of the original Iñupiat. “Saakia” is perhaps less of a poem and more of an inventory of sensations. It is a meditation on the material and a grocery list. “kamiłuk / taigun / mukkagun […]” it reads. “loafer / barrel / flour-sack […]“ Above all, it is a playground of consonance and assonance, at least in the Iñupiat. The English can’t compete with the rich sonorousness of the original, but it succeeds in capturing the sweep and specificity of its subject matter. 

The sea specifically captures the expanse of Kane’s ambition for this collection of only twenty-three pages. The acerbic yet tender poem “On No Longer Being a Carbon-Offset Girlfriend” probes the intimate ramifications of climate crisis while maintaining a jaunty lilt, a snide dismissal of luxury, and a melodic focus on the stanza. The last sentence goes like this:

What parsimony yet smothers 
and bakes me as I erase         
cities, submerge countries, drowning            
the engines and braying machines

of empire, my gristle nothing            
but abundance, my inner       
rind familiar and serviceable 

as you skin my throat and make        
me bleed, as I funnel gas       
into a skiff as if—as if at sea.

Other poems play at mischief and leaven the book’s bitterness, smooth over its bite. The poem “In Which the Poet Agrees That Being Alive Is a Whole Bunch of Being Wrong” baits the reader into the maws of “everlasting banishment” with a first stanza so witty as to merit full quotation:

&—yes—I confessed
to a certain professionalism  
when it came to pissing off men,

In the span of three pages, this poem straddles a tightrope wire over an abyss of literate despair. Her pointed jibes extend to the very group that one would likely think are her readers: “the dissolute literati!” Listening to Kane find an equilibrium between such varied registers is an edifying gift to the ear. Her access to those tones is the spine of this collection. She has found a voice, or rather, a chorus of distinct but harmonizing voices. This collection is symphonic. 

Harmonizing registers appear not just across poems but within them. A poem about a long-lost friend will veer into bushes of berries as quickly as an elegy for a mother-daughter bond will find its way into the kitchen. “Turning Back” documents and accounts for a strained love between daughter and mother, beginning, “I wished to be closer to my mother / to think of displacement in a different way.” It is strained not by emotional injury or emptiness, but by distance. “We never imagined so many years apart,” the speaker muses, and anyone who’s endured such a remove feels the ache. And the reader can recognize the hope in the last line, that they may yet journey back “to together.”

Hope appears in this collection sparingly. By the time the titular poems rounds off the collection, the “cultural distress” that seems to dominate these poems shows signs of falling, a foundation crumbling slightly, slowly. The reader feels that the austere darkness that is the palette of Ex Machina may yield to light, that its speakers’ meaning-shaped hole may be filled and sealed, that the hopeful verse may smack of truth. This may be the collection’s most sublime offering—its truth. 

Michael McCarthy’s work has appeared in Prairie Schooner, The Adroit Journal, and The Rappahannokck Review, among others. His debut poetry chapbook Steve: A Gift is available from the Moonstone Arts Center.