Arc also not a big fan of Joy Is So Exhausting

Susan Holbrook has a lot of tricks up her sleeve. In this, her second collection, her favourite is to rework borrowed texts, including poems by Lorca, a pet-training website, and a report from a home-inspection consultant. It is refreshing to encounter such a range of sources, especially from everyday ephemera (two poems even use the form of a Sudoku). For Holbrook, the joy is in dismantling language -- and she is devilishly playful, digging into words and phrases like a toddler with a box of crayons. When this child-like abandon is coupled with her intelligence as a wordsmith, the result is lively and confident. Holbrook may be commenting on the innate disorder of language, but she is also telling jokes, some of which are hilarious. Try these lines, reworked instructions from a box of tampons: 'Slide the outer inversion taboo all the wah-wah into your Valhalla until your finches touch your bongo.' The poem is a modern Jabberwocky. Unfortunately, few poems in the collection are this successful. Holbrook relies too heavily on the assumption that the random, in and of itself, is humourous. In 'Q&A,' she answers a list of conversational questions by disintegrating them, the lines falling apart and mixing together. 'Who’s a handsome mister cat? Is it Wednesday already?' becomes: 'He’s a handful, missing cat burglar weddings,' and finally, by the fifth permutation: 'A husky Annie rings moist hickory around single slings.' What has Holbrook accomplished here? Is she revelling in a new liberty with language, or has she simply created a pleasing disorder? Her lines sound funny, but often as not they are merely confounding. In the poem 'A Kitten Sits Still' we scratch our heads, reading: “Marlboro flirty putts Rural Route minty pants / Bib Tip. / Tippet.' If we laugh, we do so simply because of the surprise created when random phrases are taken out of context and placed side by side. The words and voices rarely play off each other. And the further Holbrook strays into this territory, the less clever her poems become. Much of her work also suffers from a lack of momentum. The poem 'Good Egg Bad Seed' is made up entirely of a back-and-forth of dichotomies, such as 'You are in tiptop shape or you are a teapot shape.' The poem displays Holbrook’s capacity for wit, but the lines (and punchlines) fail to resonate and build -- their sequence lacks an arc -- and after nine pages the joke has become old. In a particularly frustrating series, Holbrook rewrites several Lorca poems by responding not to Lorca’s words or ideas, but to the sounds of the original Spanish (a conceit that will be lost on most readers, given the absence of the original in reprint). Compare Lorca’s original: 'Los laberintos / que crea el tiempo / se desvanecen' to Holbrook’s: 'Lost labials in / colloquial time, / evanesence.' Of course, 'labials' have nothing to do with Lorca’s intended 'labyrinths,' but that’s the point. The words have lost their original sense, and the poem becomes, to Holbrook’s delight, completely nonsensical. And while her poems succeed in this regard, they end up sounding like vaguely-Spanish fridge magnet poetry: 'Quell la de da / more nub!¡Ada’s rump / lassie jubes / filling rocks ya' Attempts to find double meanings or a response to the intention of the original poem are futile. In her fascination with the absurdity of language (and despite her obvious prowess), Holbrook misses the opportunity for a more intimate response to the texts.

Taken from arcpoetry.ca.