Knot: Poems(The Contemporary Poetry)

What follows occurs in a moment; a flash. It would detail a single tangibility if that did not entail all sensation. Stacy Doris charts the invisible, investigates the unborn, and describes everything not yet imagined. The tightly constructed verses of Knot weave imagery of decay and birth, science and culture: the warp and weft of cloth, digestion, wave particles, and a talking cat. Linguistic play abounds, and Doris presents us with a human double bind: to cling to the stability of the tangle or to participate in the circuits of entanglement. From "Under Fire, i.VII": "Each moment, fifteen pounds of air pin us by gravity. Then / anyone / Needs sixteen pounds of lightness to ever budge. Such compliance / Demands levitation, must generate excitement, which passion enact; / Thus dreams have all they can handle. From a stone, anchored, / is how / We rise, where faith is placed only in potential, miracle without / Dimension's measure so opening, unhinged at least, where each "they" / Is porous, in penetrability dunked and enriched.

About the Author :
STACY DORIS earned her AB in literature and society at Brown University, and her MFA in English and creative writing from the Iowa Writers' Workshop. She is the author of Kildare, Paramour, and Conference in English, as well as three books written in French. An active translator, she has coedited three anthologies of recent French poetry translated into English.

Review :
Like music, this Knot. What's inside it also the outside. Stacy Doris is careful enough to risk it all—and tie it off. Knot, is making as bequeathing, 'violated, thus wholly inviolate.' That kind of strength. She states at the entrance to this book: 'What follows occurs in a moment; a flash.' This is an articulation of peril which, in order not to perish, performs a momentum entirely original. What stuns is the intensity, how much is captured, how much captures. Between birth and death, the meandering. Living. Stacy Doris's Knot is Poetry, clear-headed and restrained. 'Harmony and form, each song, these constructs serve law.' This law is a puzzle the cat keeps. Doris's succinct diction records the care where trace recovers. Signs remain, ties bind. So it's timely, Dear Readers, to address this Knot. Their paradoxical faith to what’s never present makes Knot’s anarchic lyrics hum instead of merely sing: apocryphal protocharacters and mock cantos chart out a future as well as a history for themselves and for us, even as they refuse those tenses for the terrorized current of complicity—and they ward away all but faultfully proliferating third persons. If there’s a little less oooh baby, more kid as maculated concept in Ms. Doris’s latest lush essay in marriage, there’s also less privacy here than even before, more imploding within the wound. What’s never present is always felt; what’s always passing is ever—achingly—contemporary, like the formless definitive cat’s disquieting purring, like this langue-twisting that tracks it so closely, bellicosely.