Wendy Lotterman. A Reaction to Someone Coming In. New York: Futurepoem. 96 pages.





What they don’t tell you about Proust is that he’s always going off about his crushes. Proust—or his adolescent narrator, I should say—is, by Within a Budding Grove, In Search of Lost Time’s second volume, of that incurably, insufferably romantic disposition liable to take any encounter with a rosy-cheeked youth and transform it into a nauseous mixture lust, derangement, and uncut fantasy. The more fleeting the encounter the better: for Proust’s narrator, the living, breathing girl in question is generally little more than dead weight, a sandbag dragging fantasy back down to earth. This leaves the crush-stricken protagonist in a strangely liminal place: experiencing, on the one hand, a ravening desire to be at all times near his crush, and on the other, a terror of drawing too close, lest his fantasy be upended by the mundanity and imperfection of an actual human being. In Proust’s rendering, to limit oneself to this crusher’s purgatory and, in doing so, cultivate a fantasy more vivid and beautiful than real life could ever be, is a no-brainer. Absurd and self-involved as he is, the narrator’s not wrong: to crush is to have a stake in a certain experience of a desire, one in which the object is secondary to an intimate knowledge of the contours of desire itself.

A Reaction to Someone Coming In, Wendy Lotterman’s ingenious, musical, and disarmingly funny debut poetry collection, grants the crush a similar psychic import but shifts its vantage. While Proust’s narrator binds us in a web of syntax to the very moment of sensation, Lotterman’s mode is more distant, retrospective. To declare, as Lotterman does in the aptly titled “Crush,” that “some summers ghostwrite the blueprint of all desire to follow” (29) is to turn one’s gaze back toward the past, well after those summers have past, with full knowledge of how that blueprint has come to construct a home: your life, which you live inside of. A Reaction to Someone Coming In is a collection concerned with mapping the mental terrain via which these summers, blueprints, loadbearing crushes, and childhood bedrooms come to be an object of attention and, ultimately, a source of knowledge.

Within a Budding Grove is not a direct translation of Proust’s title; rendered literally, it’s In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower, a phrase which appears in inverted form as the title of the opening poem in Reaction, “In the Flowers of Young Girls in Shadow.” It’s a comic tweak: I get visions of Marcel coming of age in some Bush-era suburb, haunting MySpace, heartsick amongst blooms of mall goths. Taking after Proust, too, are Lotterman’s sentences, which favor—in lieu of the predominant experimental-flavored modes of fragmentation, parataxis, or talky run-ons—a distended and intricate syntax.  “In the Flowers” opens:

Lifted up by blonds and the comic victory of the particular, like the city and my mom in a fake, spontaneous duet. The financial district falls into her lap so that no good thing can be saved from a three-legged relay with the bad. Layers of grudge and wonder collapse into a single, unsalted cracker while miles of superstitious sun signs combust in a triangle of fire with liquor and wet-wipes.

It’s worth tracking just what is going here when it comes to physical and abstract nouns. The first sentence opens a distinct subject and action—the lifting blonds—only to trip over the abstraction of ensuing noun phrase. We’re then invited to misread ‘comic’ as ‘cosmic,’ and wonder if this might be part of the joke. “Comic” deflates the triumphal air of “victory,” as if the blonds immediately dropped whatever or whomever they’d lifted (it isn’t specified; note that this sentence, composed of two dependent clauses, does not actually have a subject). If the particular is victorious, over whom? The universal? This does not even begin to answer the question of what the word “like” is up to, in its setting up a comparison whose terms evade identification. Wasn’t the particular was supposed to be victorious?

The poem’s second sentence (beginning “The financial district...”) riffs on but doesn’t repeat the work of the previous one, which marks the difference between chance and method. Like the first, this sentence solders together two clauses with a conjunction, establishing a logical relation that isn’t borne out by meaning. The sentence then cobbles together some like an image from incommensurable parts: the somatic vividness of a “three-legged relay” can’t hold itself up with abstractions like “good” and “bad.” Lotterman smashes the concrete and abstract together like a child trying to make a Barbie and tort reform kiss, leaving no shared ground where the action could be meaningful. Nevertheless, two particulars, “the city and my mom,” remain stubbornly present; the financial district has fallen (dropped, again, by the blonds?) into the speaker’s mother’s lap, and thematic contours have begun to take shape: childhood, urban space, and capital’s pervasive logic.

The third sentence proves none of this was a fluke: the “collapse” of the distinction between the abstract and concrete is explicit, as realms of vivid internal experience (“layers of grudge and wonder”) are transfigured into Proust’s madeleine’s bland equivalent (“a single, unsalted cracker”), and the image of a great human inferno is undercut by the alliterative banality of “wet-wipes.” It’s a wisdom expressed, in part, through the particular’s comic victory, as what at first trends toward the intangible is snatched back to earth.

I focus on these three sentences not because they’re remarkable (though they are), but because they’re representative of what Lotterman is able to do with the sentence as a unit; they torque our understanding of what a poetic image even is. It’s beguiling, yes, but crucially gives way to the comic. Midway through “Flowers,” we’re informed that “Jackie says her nipples are the smallest in a competition to which no one consented,” a deadpan line unable to hide its grin.

Proust provides one point of reference for Reaction’s excavations of interior life; psychoanalysis provides another. (The field stands as an abiding interest; Lotterman, whose mother is a psychoanalyst, is also an Associate Editor at the psychoanalysis magazine Parapraxis.) Like poetry, psychoanalysis is a program for articulating what ordinary pathways of thought and modes of expression would be unable to access or render meaningful; and, like poetry, it leaves unresolved the question of what to do with the knowledge it creates, knowledge which takes a form less like practical wisdom than retrospective clarity, a precise and belated understanding of how the past became the present. This question’s canned answer—equipped with this knowledge, we won’t repeat those same mistakes—is satisfying only to the extent that we believe those mistakes were repeatable in the first place; as if we could ever be again the person we were when we made them; as if the future mistakes we’re sure to make won’t be just different enough to thwart our efforts to prevent them, like a vaccine’s perpetual lag behind the latest mutations of a virus.

Endeavoring to prevent future errors may well be fruitless, but to see how our past errors (plus our past devastations, crushes, compulsions, hesitations, regrets, and moments of recognition) composed us and made us legible to ourselves can establish a baseline sense of order—or, at the very least, a disorder that’s familiar, and as reliable as any other method of asserting that one’s past has meant something. This sense of latent clarity—resigned, wistful, inwardly smirking, and deeply wise—is the affective terrain Lotterman’s poetry is built on; it is reflective but not detached, bound to the past but unafflicted by nostalgia, raging sentiment tempered by retrospection.

Formative scenes from childhood and adolescence flash up regularly from the outset of the collection. There are the “[e]arly attempts to tuck your chin as you dive” (3); “a nylon rip-stop rainbow that / Trapped us, shapeless, with the wind / during gym class” (15); the speaker’s mother being sent “to retract me, / mid-bar-mitzvah, in the silver Mercury wagon” (30). The book’s title, too, connotes a certain species of childhood experience: the invasions of privacy we, as children, were subjected to and perpetrated in turn. As Lotterman writes in “In the Flowers”: “…I forget to say I couldn’t come home on half-days to find the light of two perverted suns doing sex things on the bed…” (3). The sentence’s double counterfactual casts the image in an unclear light; thus distorted, the suns’ perversion blurs into the childish argot of “doing sex things,” a phrase that indicates an incomprehension not just of what the suns are doing but of the language used to describe them.

This line’s comic underspecificity complements Lotterman’s frequent overspecificity, sound-driven lexical landslides that feint at only to steamroll the possibility of becoming images. (When I asked Bing Image Creator to render “Layers of grudge and wonder collapse into a single unsalted cracker,” the results were lackluster; you’d hope that at the very least it would get the number of crackers right.)

In Reaction, the past exists in the kind of perpetual half-light of moments whose significance is indexed to the simple fact that we remember them. Lotterman doesn’t dwell on these memories so much as permit them to bob to the surface, often in the midst of tumbling hypotaxis that abandons context in the act of introducing it. The opening line of “Crush” presents us with a particular setting—“On line for the bathroom at Crush”—only to let it dissolve in the abstractedness of the remainder of the sentence: “I dissimulate the vibe and learn that Hannah / absolutely loves the ground” (28).

But language is a context all its own, and Lotterman’s regular deployment of proper nouns and brand names amounts to its own instantiation of time and place. “[T]o wake up as a gummy / LIVESTRONG bracelet” (29); “the rightful / froth of your licit CostCo screen” (21); “the irreducible mystery of Cool Whip” (51)—each phrase is its own oversaturated sensorium, one indelibly tied to a childhood induction into rituals of mass consumption. Lotterman takes the desire latent in the experience of, say, spying some forbidden name-brand snack deep the pantry at a friend’s house and refracts it through the names themselves, letting a sense of genuine attachment ring through the sonic aftershocks of their delicious, barely imaginable sound. A phrase like “an axis of appetite wrapped in plastic and dipped in Teflon honey” (3) conjures a chemical grotesque only to spin that would-be repulsion into something analogous to beauty. Intermittent bursts of prosody and internal rhyme; phrases of such sonic and imagistic splendor that it that one could taste them; these are Lotterman’s mechanisms of enchantment, and essential to how Reaction accomplishes what it does. They take an equanimous, glassy surface and imbue it with lushness, splendor, and depth.

Lotterman’s poetic gifts are not limited to words whipped up by marketing departments. Any given line or sentence in Reaction may contain a whole dynamo of sound. Take another sentence from “In the Flowers”: “[a]wakened by the displaced taste of inverted cane, you realize anxiety always rides before the reason it is anxious to erase” (3). Here, the opening assonance of “displaced taste” sidles up against the subsequent clause’s alliterative burst of r’s, only to get a callback in the terminal “erase,” all while the sentence slowly settles into iambs. The tactility of these pleasures lends the sentence a concreteness, a sensory presence, that possesses a countervailing weight in the abstraction of its content. Lotterman is deeply attuned to the beauty of what could accurately if uncharitably be referred to as jargon—the Latinate cant of academic monographs and fine print. Lotterman treats such words not as the single hook to hang a poem’s meaning on but as simply one site of meaning-making among many, letting concepts and objects dance their dance of mutual influence. This relationship to language spawns a register I’d characterize as a quasi-satirical, post-structructuralist baroque: “psychodynamic / melon toss” (21), “evidentiary backstroke” (69), and “baby’s first anaphasic splash.” Against this backdrop, the more traditional pleasures layered into Lotterman’s work stand out with even greater force, such as when, in “Intense Holiday,” Lotterman buries a rhymimng couplet within in a multipage block of prose: “Anguilla quits before the dye sets. The bugs leave your pillow inexplicably wet” (23). This is the toy at the bottom of your cereal box, the green slime in the center of your Nickelodeon Ice Pop.

One can love a word or a consumer good, but this love is categorically different from the familial or romantic: the former carry neither the blatant need nor inherent potential for suffering as the latter. But if love is a site of (often self-inflicted) suffering, it’s also a source of knowledge; and even if the love object remains a mystery, perpetually closed to the one in love, they are necessarily changed by the act of searching. At the close of “In the Flowers,” Lotterman writes:

I cover the airspace with my grandma’s checkered afghan, swapping one profanity for another, weaving secrets, which I pay to reveal. On another couch, I confess to jealousies that won’t leave the session. Tonight is different from all other nights. But there is a reason why the question is asked so many times, even if it is obvious why we dip twice, and why you and I choose to recline. (5)

To recline on the couch, whether an analyst’s or a lover’s, is to reveal oneself in hope of receiving revelation in return—of being, if only momentarily, in the presence of something like knowledge. Lotterman maps this emotional territory most explicitly in the aforementioned “Intense Holiday” and “Powers of Ten.” Here, the well-modulated surface of the narrator’s affect is beset by the agitations of a more anguished, frenetic voice. “Intense Holiday,” providing the collection with a rare moment of wistfulness, indulges in an extended depiction of a reimaged past:

There is a stage at which the world empties out every proper noun, and you, specifically you, sub-in as the tailored fulfillment of what life would like to bat next…I imagine a trip to Grove where those two years scurry back through a perfect reversal of what was taken and what was shamed, redeeming my sexless teens before we go up the mountains where I’ve never been. (24)

The past in which the crush was never brought to term is, via fantasy, revised into more than it ever could have been: a “tailored fulfillment” with redemptive power in excess what any actual human being could do. What we gain from our delusions are the dividends of experiencing them: a knowledge of “the fictive adherence to another that hides the shape of what it’s missing” (27). A crush may obscure its object, but in doing so brings its holder into clearer light.

 “Powers of Ten” is, according to Lotterman, among the earliest poems in Reaction, a fact that befits its texture: jagged, raw, and possessed of a vague inelegance compared to most other poems in the collection—qualities which only amplify the poem’s frantic, fracturing insistence:

One of a kind is really a veiled declaration of plurality,

so heartbreaking in its accidental complacency.

I know you know also this;

I am everyone down there.

To be real, I fucking love this shit.

I was hacked for nine months and I wish I still

vacationed inside the company of

anonymous invasion. (36)

In an interview with Violet Spurlock, Lotterman notes that “Powers of Ten” draws on a real-life AOL email hack, in which an anonymous non-stranger—the culprit knew the answers to the security questions—would read emails and chat with Lotterman’s sister, although “she made too many weed-jokes in the AIM chat / to fool Jenny into thinking she was Wendy” (37). The poem’s title refers to “the Nickelodeon Jr. trope of logarithmic zoom” (41), a descent from the planetary down to the molecular as an illustration of scale, a “hot pigment of / animated de-magnification.” This figure serves dual purposes: as a reference to the degree to which human intimacy can be scaled, and as an aspect of reading Lotterman’s poems themselves.

One could argue that the signature of a great poem is that it produces the particular derangement that every thing in the poem is about every other thing, each word or phrase or line or poem networked with all those surrounding it. For poems as dense and intricate as Lotterman’s, this soon becomes an oversaturation; the poem is a machine for producing more meaning than we could ever apprehend, increasing logarithmically—that is to say, by powers of ten.