Reviews

Revenants by Mark Nowak

laurelinwonder's review against another edition

5.0

Nowak’s strange, intelligent, and often opaque collection is the apparent fact that the motives and aims of his poetry are usually not poetic. In another sense, perhaps less easy to pinpoint, this wariness of poetry describes the shape and sounds of his lines, which are generally disjointed, difficult to parse, and obstinately unmusical: “Light with these the entrance among them, who begin to rule / my house.” The subject of the texts is Nowak’s Polish-American ancestry, its myths and odd collection of particular details; he approaches this heritage as both an insider (because born into it) and outsider (an exile incurred by education), which explains his attraction to the role of anthropologist. Nowak splices his own words into an assemblage of photographs and citations, some taken from interviews and conversations conducted among pierogi workers, others from Malinowski’s field notes, and others from graduate-school textbooks. The result is an unusual kind of work, borrowed rather than made, more collage than poem. Nowak’s poetry has provided a music, a record toward an unknown future, a book for all of us to experience, to breathe through.