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NAMED THE BEST POETRY OF 2020 BY THE NEW YORK TIMES
My Daily Actions, or The Meteorites is the result of a daily investigative writing practice, in which I was worried that a poem invested in the particulars of my life would be uninteresting—that the "ordinary" would be mundane. Instead memory, dreams, and the associative power of the imagination filled each moment with meaning, each tv show I watched or friend I spoke with, each outfit I wore or nail polish color I chose. In these poems, a combination of dread (for something approaching) and anxiety (for what might be approaching but isn't yet known) undid a sense of the present separate from climate change, global racial capitalism, whiteness, and gender-based violence, especially as I wrote as I tried to find out how my own gender fit into the world. The prose poem is the vehicle by which a recording practice ("journaling") meets the associative power of the poem.
‘To move on and through a feeling,’ writes S. Brook Corfman, ‘a feeling must be honored.’ These poems survive the fraught journey from the inner and outermost spaces and leave their permanent marks. Like the still photographs of Cassils’s Becoming an Image, each poem offers a new view of the pained Earth, the uncertain self, and the meteoric woman. When ‘[a] woman died and we cannot even agree she was a woman,’ not even the weather can be relied upon. These poems are stark and tender compressions that artfully and achingly reckon with what is imminent, what is private, and what is unknown.---Yona Harvey, author of Hemming the Water and You Don’t Have to Go to Mars for Love
‘There’s a kind of suspension in a car on a highway, so that to stop feels a great affront.’ This line, from near the end of S. Brook Corfman’s new book, describes the poet’s own power to ‘gather the propulsive forces’ that carry us through worlds lived, felt, and dreamt. From these, the subject emerges as an energy, a force seen in its passing: ‘I, the death wail of each passing car; I, a late night but still somehow bright sky.’ This is subjectivity in motion, a self in transformation, through emotion’s mutable ground.---Jessica Fisher, author of Frail-Craft and Inmost
Generated from a daily writing practice, these poems highlight ordinary moments, weighing gender, violence, and capitalism in the process, with a foreword by Cathy Park Hong.
Poems of fear and foreboding that live with the knowledge of climate crisis, without resorting to self-righteousness or self-flagellation. The form is mostly prose blocks, built of elusive, mysteriously fascinating sentences that often hinge on apparent contradiction, the simultaneity of seemingly opposite states: 'Even if Tuxedo Mask kissed me back to life, all Endymion, I think I would stay dead.' 'I am a bad imitator and yet this is a good imitation.' 'It is hard to talk about. And yet I have filled a notebook.'"---Elisa Gabbert, The New York Times
The structure of Corfman's poems shines here, as many of the selections in My Daily Actions come in neat, tidy block of text as if trying to literally box in and contain the disorder and confusion with which the author is grappling.
Foreword | ix
Premonition | 1
Meteor | 3
Apparent Corona | 27
Cold Meteor | 41
Premonition | 67
Notes | 69
Acknowledgments | 70