Visceral Juxtaposition: A Review of Sherwin Bitsui’s Dissolve
Dissolve
Sherwin Bistui
Copper Canyon Press
October 2018
ISBN: 978-1556595455
80 pages
Reviewed by Abby Seethoff
Crisp and laced with poignancy, Dissolve by Sherwin Bitsui is a haunting book of poetry. To haunt is to be tenacious, to hold on well past your expiration date. Dissolve calls forth characters who struggle in the oily, buzzing morass of modernity but seem unlikely to succumb. They are current: pixilation and plastic ensnare their land. Yet they are ancient: through violence they endure. If the book exudes cynicism, that cynicism is borne of realism. The speaker wonders whether the whirlwinds will become “cousins to the knife” because it has happened before. Bloodlines, both in-veined and drawn, run deep.
Dissolve is a study in visceral juxtaposition. The “flattened field,” though razed, appears “chandeliered / by desert animal constellations.” The sea “ponders the lake’s questions / their secret conversations / thatching howls to whimpers exhaled,” a communication that sounds both generative and calcifying. The threat of eradication hangs heavy in the air; mechanical and technological infringement are inevitable. Natural beauty cannot be separated from urban wastelands, the tow truck a hearse for the dying buck with “butterflies leaking from its nostrils / dark clouds draining off its cedar coat.” The poems locate “where the dissection begins” and map how “the trail to here / is a bullet’s path to back there” with unflinching candor.
Two parts comprise the book: the first, “Caravan,” is a one-poem prologue to “Dissolve,” the much longer second section. If we understand “Caravan” as instructions for how to read what follows, we learn to reach for characters who are slipping away, to carry them for a bit longer by paying attention to their “waxen-eyed” sorrow and their waning turquoise talismans, lit by the neon Budweiser signs of encroaching development. The caravan beckons. It promises escape as it guarantees entrapment. It brands the body rescued from the concrete with its quid pro quo offer. The people who’ve managed to save the owner of that body know the caravan is a fool’s bargain. Destruction looms, implicating the reader as witness.
The subsequent poems perform the collection’s name and, without titles to break them up, dissolve into one another. Smoldering embers, glimpses of ankles, and powders ground from bone form the palette of images deployed throughout the book. Each piece can fend for itself, but across the collection various ingredients appear repeatedly, comprising some larger meta-recipe or extended spell. We receive incantatory instructions for how to “window the past” and “door the future,” actions that seem more protective than investigative. We learn that the sun is “not carried by horse / but a ceiling lamp / flickering on our computer screens.” Perhaps this explanation debunks Helios to destabilize the hegemony of Greek mythology. Perhaps it mourns how technology erases traditions with teeth and feet and backs, replacing something to saddle and hold onto with the reflection of manufactured light, an unstable simulation.
This critique of degradation and of privileging image over essence permeates the book. “Doves, shrink-wrapped in brown skin,” Bitsui writes, “swallow stiff voices / atop the hum of closed envelopes.” These three lines unmask commercial packaging, racial discomfort, and bureaucracy as well as the dove’s inadequacy as a symbol, its inability to enact the peace it’s been yoked to representing. On the “shores of evaporating lakes” we see a plot of land, “now a hotel garden / its fountain gushing forth / the slashed wrists of the Colorado.” This speaker has transcended anger. This speaker has reached the point of cool observation, an ability more terrifying than fury for its incinerating precision. “How self-indulgent that moon,” the speaker smirks, “always looking down.”
Dissolve may not offer much in the way of unbridled hope, but it nudges the reader toward other ways of encountering the future. “Always the swarm when we crest the story’s hive,” a poem reminds us. “Always smoke roosting among swallows nesting in cupped hands.” Always, decay accompanies growth; always, anticipation imbricates excitement and fear. With this knowledge, or warning, in mind, we can remember that feeling “dog-eared in amnesia,” though frustrating, indicates that we may know more than we realize. It’s evidence that someone, after all, left a trail of those dog ears to follow. We are only ever groping through these circumstances but proceed regardless. If there’s any way out, it’s to “plunge through our closed minds—open palmed.”
Originally from White Cone, Arizona, on the Navajo Reservation, Sherwin Bitsui (@SherwinBitsui) is the author of three collections of poetry, Dissolve (Copper Canyon, 2018), Flood Song (Copper Canyon), and Shapeshift (University of Arizona Press). He is Diné of the Todích’ii’nii (Bitter Water Clan), born for the Tlizílaaní (Many Goats Clan) and holds an AFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts Creative Writing Program and a BA from University of Arizona in Tucson. His recent honors include a 2011 Lannan Foundation Literary Fellowship and a 2011 Native Arts & Culture Foundation Arts Fellowship. He is also the recipient of 2010 PEN Open Book Award, an American Book Award, and a Whiting Writers Award. Bitsui has published his poems in Narrative, Black Renaissance Noir, American Poet, The Iowa Review, LIT, and elsewhere.
Abby Seethoff is an essayist and poet from Bellevue, Washington. Some of her work interrogates gender, industrial complexes, and the American culture of atonement. Some of it illuminates her senses of curiosity, wonder, and humor. Her best pieces do both. Nowadays she resides in Missoula, Montana, where she plays a lot of volleyball and eats a lot of cake.