Albany NY: Fence Books, 2009
$16 US; isbn 978-1-934200-26-1
reviewed by rob mclennan

Ohio poet Catherine Wagner’s third poetry collection, My New Job (Albany NY: Fence Books, 2009) sets itself through the framing of things that one must, I suppose, do, from physical therapy to employment to sex. Part collection of allusive, illusive, lyrically-tangentical poems and part instructive sex manual, Wagner’s is a book that works and celebrates and even complains the body through a series of devastating poems, through a series of devastating lines. One only needs to read the poem “OH” to see the force of how much she can accomplish with such a compact set of lines, the second half of the two-page piece that includes:

My grandfather spent the thirties
Thus on the beach.

Abundant poverty to live in. Many years.

Between you and me is chestbone.
No meshing.
So eat my face for hours.

If a poem is active
Its action aborts in you
As colored light flies into black.

Keeps flying
The light from long ago
Until the night-blockade.

So shut the book.

Or the expansive poem/section “Roaring Spring,” that includes:

28
I need to be fucked, but not by you
[repeat to all compass points] (“Roaring Spring”)

Written out in five sections—Exercises, Hole in the Ground, Everyone in the Room is a Representative of the World at Large, Roaring Spring and My New Job—each comes out of its own structural and compositional variant. As she writes in her acknowledgements, for example, the first section of the collection “was written between sets of physical therapy exercises, one line per set” with the third section “written with at least one other person present in the room.” It’s as though Wagner wants to create poems that relate outward, interacting directly with the world, as opposed to merely writing poems as something that comes out the other end of a particular set of filters; these are poems that engage with her immediate, even if her immediate isn’t always aware of the conversation they are having. Wasn’t Jack Spicer the one who said that poems can’t live alone any better than we can?

EXERCISE 3 (11/20/00 PM)

Try not to say it so joltingly. Panorama
and pattern and glorious intention and derailed
streak of yellow up the left eyelid and a cramp in the groin
Who is still awake after I’ve taken my watch off
Two fingers upward and a thumb clasping
My rabbit my pine trees by a lake and the roots protrude
Here the sexual exercise the embarrassing
Want this bathwater? Yes.
Drum immemorially my heart in the face and hands
Push to the night a tender sacrum
You’re taking awhile to drink that beer.
Yeah.
The unlock on the desk & graceful woodhoney chair unsat
Pink, pink pink beep he is calling and strolling the room in rich creaks
A long number quoted and a check will be sent

Bio: Born in Ottawa, Canada’s glorious capital city, rob mclennan currently lives in Ottawa. The author of some twenty trade books of poetry, fiction and non-fiction, his most recent titles are the poetry collections gifts (Talonbooks), a compact of words (Salmon Poetry, Ireland), wild horses (University of Alberta Press) and a second novel, missing persons (The Mercury Press). An editor and publisher, he runs above/ground press, Chaudiere Books (with Jennifer Mulligan), seventeen seconds: a journal of poetry and poetics (ottawater.com/seventeenseconds) and the Ottawa poetry pdf annual ottawater (ottawater.com). He spent the 2007-8 academic year in Edmonton as writer-in-residence at the University of Alberta, and regularly posts reviews, essays, interviews and other notices at robmclennan.blogspot.com. He is spending much of the current year in Toronto.