Excuse me while I wring this long swim out of my hair
By Sarah J. Sloat

Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk

Dancing Girl Press, 2011
saddle-stapled chapbook, no page numbers, $7

There’s always something unsaid in Sarah J. Sloat’s poems. Something a little twisted and untold. Take this couplet from “Ghazal of the Jack Pines”:

Ages since I looked through this box of old bruises.
It took a whole ocean to live the mêlée down.

Oh, how I’d love to know more about that mêlée! But it’s a ghazal, a form that does not rely on narrative or even connection between stanzas, except for an ongoing rhyme. So here’s the next, and last, couplet:

Before sun-up, a vixen slips from the henhouse.
Let bellowing hounds come and blow the day down.

True, there’s a “hunt” in the first line of this poem, bringing it full circle, but the full story is never told. We don’t know why the speaker had to cross the ocean to get away. We don’t know why she’s on the porch watching the sad, slow snow. And where is she, exactly, on which continent at this moment, since she’s noticing the Jack Pines, native to North America? Maybe she was a “vixen” who escaped a conventional “henhouse” existence. If so, we don’t know why she welcomes the hounds now. And what of the ghazal’s own convention of putting the poet herself (by name or suggestion) in the last couplet, or last line? Also escaped or ignored? Or is that why I’m asking the questions?

And that’s what I love about Sloat. Though I don’t always know exactly what she’s saying, and I sometimes even feel a little mocked by it, I always connect. It’s like an electrical connection. Flicking on the light switch to find a brightly lit, almost empty room. Spare, elegant, practical furnishings, little decoration.

“On the Way to Meet My Daughter’s Teacher” begins with this marvelously shocking switcheroo in line 2. “I was about 15 minutes early / so I figured I’d kill myself a little bit.” I might panic a little for the speaker’s daughter before I go on, but I hear a level-headed voice continue, so the panic subsides, even as she confesses, “But hell if I could handle / 15 minutes of thinking.” By the time we get to the “bus stop ringed / with weeds,” I’m thinking, not suicide but smoking break. And I’m thinking I’m right, and feeling mildly mocked, as I said, by “kill myself a little bit.” All our healthy little caveats, and the world’s still falling apart, and we’re still living in it, meeting our children’s teachers, as if the world will go on. As it surely will.

This level-headed sardonic melancholy about the world is present again in “My Money is on Fire,” a fine poem to read in dire economic times when we still hope to do some good in the world, for instance, with our money, but can’t, if we really follow its trail. “Whenever I read the newspaper / I learn my money is going to hell.” Whether we use it or lose it, it’s money to burn in this poem:

Every time I wear green or live
my secret life, no matter what
innocence I’m up to,
I’m sponsoring a disease
somewhere, making
souvenirs of the populace.

I love how “my secret life” might be charity (unannounced generosity) or the annoyance of finding it everywhere, in loudly announced causes, charity-sponsored sports events, recycled-paper jewelry, relentless Internet commercials. You can keep making your “minted clean” but soon-dirty money as long as you give some to feel-good causes. I’ll leave you to grapple with the rest of that poem, and to decide how to handle your own money, which is clearly too hot to handle here.

The melancholy-with-a-sense-of-humor persists “In Frankfort Cemetery” where the “rain thinks twice about landing” and traffic continues just beyond the imagined silence.

Not the past, but the present makes me sad.
The eviction notice on the headstone.
Now what?

Sloat makes the day-to-day gently surreal, whether floating to the ceiling or entering a snow globe with the force of her concentration. “Even the dust has a life of its own,” she claims in “Sworn to Observance,” but I think her attention to the dust and her imagination are what give life to the dust. “I sit nearby in my saint suit,” she says, evoking her earlier, Tilt Press chapbook, In the Voice of a Minor Saint, “no intention of action.” But looking closely and writing stuff down is action, too.

Saints and poets have to aim for immortality, “no matter what innocence [they’re] up to,” I suppose. “I’m thinking of living forever,” says Sloat in her opening poem, “Training.” “I’m considering outlasting everyone / although I know I’d have a hard time / explaining not having read Ulysses / past the first chapter.” Again, for me, electric connection. I’m having a hard time explaining that, too. No, I’m not. I’m having a hard time actually reading it. I might get around to it someday. For now, give me a spare, elegant chapbook by Sarah J. Sloat.

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Kathleen Kirk is a writer whose work appears online and in print in Eclectica, Leveler, Poems & Plays, Poetry East, Right Hand Pointing, and elsewhere. She is the author of Selected Roles, Broken Sonnets, and Living on the Earth, plus Nocturnes, forthcoming winter 2011 from Hyacinth Girl Press. A past editor and reviewer for RHINO, Kirk is poetry editor for Escape Into Life. She blogs about poetry, reading, and life eight days a week at Wait! I Have a Blog?!

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