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THE POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER25BOOK REVIEWStilt my head slightly and I see a little differentfragment of the picture.“Kielce Wells” begins:keeping myself fairly busy, getting haircutshoping the barber says something interestingduring the cut; just popped in for a secto wait out the snow. it went on and onThis kind of poem is often steeped in local reference,as here we find ourselves on WielickaStreet or Debnicki Bridge—which is not sobewildering, after all, since anywhere you goyou’re likely to see someone “bent over thestove / eating leftover pasta from the pot.”And no matter where you are it’s good to knowabout “the glue with the Latvian label” that “wasthe only one that worked on Lego.”MLB isn’t always on the run, except from combinationsand processes too well-formed orelse undercooked. As he puts it, “if I stop / ine,ysis, osis and ation will jump on my back / andgobble me up.” He looks back to lament, at theend of another poem, a failure to imagine betterverbs: “great, three sentences, four haves.” Ofhis work, he reflects:I sprinkle rhymeless poems aroundlike a wet dog. rhyme-less poems,plan-less life, sentence-less periods.a problem for printers, a pain for officeprincesses, a bad example for children.out of step, out of step and difficult.even if I am refined and on the sideof simple people. it pains me when they don’tunderstand.I believe him about the last part. But it’s a necessityfor this sometimes difficult poet, however“refined,” to be “out of step.” He may bea “wet dog,” but after all, they usually get wetwhile making mischief and having fun.The volume contains selections from four ofMLB’s books in Polish, along with new work,for a total of sixty-nine (69) poems. Still, the titlemakes it look like you’re reading a sex book onthe train. Or it would, if not for the sweetnessof the author photo. We discover, in translatorFrank L. Vigoda’s satisfying introduction, thatMLB is the nephew of Tomaž Šalamun, thatother great citizen of that vast East Village ofthe soul. Vigoda tells us, too, that MLB hasworked as a geophysical engineer, a fact thatmanifests to great effect in a poem like “On thePreeminence of the Working Class,” in which itis revealed that all those men going down intothe shafts do so not to dig for coal but ratherto trudge westward through special tunnels, inorder to turn the earth itself, as in a giant hamsterwheel. The metaphor MLB gleans from hisother occupation is not one of plumbing thedepths; if anything, going underground onlymakes the strangeness of the lines drawn onthe earth all the more visible. In “A Simple Story,”he remembers:you walked over to Austria on a long bridgeunder the watchful eyes of guards with submachineguns in watchtowersa Czechoslovakian customs officer discovered inmy mining notebooka mine diagram among the poems which thenI regarded much more important than shaftsand rampsCzechoslovakian customs officers were obsessedwith paper, printed or handwrittenand so was this fellowhe started digging deeper and deeper, even I wassurprisedwith what he was bringing to the surfacelife seemed indivisible to meI carried the same bag everywherethings fell to the bottom like diatom shellssedimented, compacted etc.The officer eventually unearths a political leafletand tries to make a fuss, but the times arechanging fast—“in less than three weeks the alliteration/ Havel to the Hrad would become areality”—and the incident is simply dismissed.What you find out, if you go down into theearth, is that it’s a nicely mixed bag: work, art,and politics all smooshed together. I guess thismakes MLB a miner poet. In other words, he’ssent us a book of multilayered pleasures, richwith gems and fuel for thought.Matt Longabucco’s poems have appeared inWith+Stand, Conduit, Pleiades, and WashingtonSquare.Study in Pavilions and Safe RoomsPaul Foster Johnson(Portable Press@Yo-Yo Labs, 2011)review by jamie townsendIn a fugue of well-tuned claustrophobia and historicalvertigo, Paul Foster Johnson’s new bookStudy in Pavilions and Safe Rooms capturestraces of feeling, projects specters onto barewalls, and maps connections between politicizedspaces and larger cultural conditions thatcreate them. Looking at both the “pavilion” andthe “safe room” as congruent models for uncheckedpolitical power and limitless paranoia,Johnson’s sonically rich, mutating syntax drawsout various potentialities from within differentarchitectures. Here, rooms become emotionalplaceholders where forms and characters beginto condense, decorative and deadly, shapeshiftingmedusozoa. In the midst of thesehybrid physical/conceptual sites, Johnson’spoetry teases out senses of scope, plottingeach room of each page and their correspondinglimits: “I would rather make my own ether/ than have to explain again / that I don’t workwith images” (“Study in Pavilions”).This creation of a space to work with(in)—adelineated universe of associations, echoes notimages—allows the reader to enter the text in amore receptive, instinctual way. Inquiries concerningidentity, position, and meaning abound:“If I bear resemblance / to a succession ofdrones / or the mysterious black boxes / replacingtrashcans on subway platforms” (“Study inPavilions”). Throughout these discrete but thematicallyinterwoven pieces, Johnson exploresterrains similar to those of contemporary avantgardecomposers by focusing close attentionto tonal elements and spatialization, notingthe varied correspondence between sound,source, and environment.One such auditory companion for Study inPavilions and Safe Rooms is Alvin Lucier’srecording “I Am Sitting in a Room.” Lucier’srepetition of a spoken text, combined withthe specific “natural resonant frequencies”of the room where the recording was made,incrementally alters each word beyond recognition.By the end of the recording, the listeneris left with a purely tonal impression of thestudio space itself. Like Lucier, Johnson’s narratorsbecome explorers of the unseen but feltelements of our surroundings—casting auditorylines out into sensitized space to draw acharge of social resonance.In translating these tonal impressions to thepage, Johnson also specifically addresses theplastic yet hyper-sensualized atmosphere ofnew-age music. One panic room “is reinforcedwith 500 overlaid vocal tracks / and paintingsof the moon” and, in an attempt to find balance