Chelsey Minnis
Zirconia
New York City: Fence Books, 2001
............................................................................................................as
a child..........................
......................................................................................I
was........................................................
...............red hot and very lonely................
I have to admit that I’m obsessed with those ellipsis. With the exception
of five prose pieces, Zirconia, the very fine winner of Fence Book’s
first ever Alberta Prize, is strung out entirely between lines and lines
of them. Punctuation being the perverse creature it is, the ellipsis serve
to tighten the poems structurally rather than trail off...a s you might
expect. Just like the way this book is so icy, so spiral staircase, but
rendered in hyperbolic shades of red: supervermillion, blood, burgundy,
auburn, cherry.
Zirconia isn’t just sparkly effects, although it does dazzle.
I almost wanted to write the whole book out by hand, minus ellipsis, just
to see what that would do. Chelsey Minnis short circuits her own elliptical
effects by separating phrases that would ‘work’ just fine as
complete syntactic units. The breaks don’t point towards empty space
or missing words so much as they construct a refracted and intuitive logic
that the book is always working on. It is the logic of description, a
pla nk one has to walk even though it’s only now been built by the
phrase before it. This is a poetics of the conjunction, a just-add-water
palimpsest occurring before our very eyes:
........................................................................................................doves............are
rolling out of my heart......................................................................................and..................................................
.................just rolling out of my heart...........................................................................................
Rarely do even her most strung out lines descend into lists of words without
connective tissue. By breaking the sentence unit apart with insistently
linear punctuation, the poems become monolithic, solid blocks stacked
side by side. One period being equal to another. Almost like reading a
pictograp h. Which is why it is alarming to stumble across something like
a cleverly enjambed ‘line’. But also somehow defiant, Minnis
playing jokes on her own innovation.
She plays similar jokes on her fierceness. She writes "A skull ring
is actually a good complement to my diabolical will" right before
the next poem launches into beating a rapist with "a bronze statuette".
The poems do stagger around, full 5 of bravado, taking turns at fairy
tale, melodrama, feminine revenge, fashionista manifestos. They also throw
their body around in a serious way:
...I desire to be pushed or shoved down...in a grassy area........................................................
....................................................................................................and
this is a real hope.............
Because I’m writing this as the weekly papers come out with their
"best of the movies 2001" articles, I keep thinking about the
"Ghost World" and "Amelie" reviews, which all talk
one way or another about outsider status and girls who would rather intellectualize
their world than live in it. Zirconia takes a bloody dagger to
that idea. There is no doubt that the leather couch in "Sectional",
along with the "o ralized" caramel melting in the speaker’s
mouth are real, in the poem or outside of it. The zirconia or a diamond:
who’s to know? Is there really any difference?
But getting back to my obsession with the ellipsis--their trick is how
they distance the poems from themselves, the poem from its own ecstatic
relationship with the leather couch, the caramel. I’m beginning to
think that something bad, that is, something dangerous or orgiastic, might
happen if the ellipsis were removed and these poems went running helter
skelter across the page single spaced without the buffering of punctuation.
I mean, could I stand it if the poem went like this?
doves
are rolling out of my heart and
just rolling out of my heart
and molten ice is twisting out of my
heart like a frozen drink because
doves are flapping in my
heart
There’s a secret to ellipsis, and Chelsey Minnis knows it.
-- Stephanie Young
