Songs from a Mountain

April 18, 2016
If an oracle’s pronouncements were pitched into the cacophony of modern life and then retuned as scrambled wisdom coalesced into poems, what might result is this third collection from Nadelberg (Bright Brave Phenomena), a wild, careening, conceptually wily (yet somehow ruly) book that refuses to keep its feet on the ground. “Let me go again into the/ epileptic air that will render a body capable or/ less dumb to the sun signaling its framed song,” she writes early on, before noting “how the act/ of putting your shoes on is a set of expectations.” Such incisive moments stand out against the collection’s ruling chaos, especially in the longer poems (“I Steal Care 4 U,” “Mont America,” “Rad Silence Crystal Weapon Wave Mont”). It is there that Nadelberg most consistently hits her stride in a tumbling, almost overwhelming medley of various sources, even as many of the shorter poems in the collection offer elegance (“nothing could/ be clearer and everything was”) and sly riffing off their titles (for instance, in “Big Data”: “like porn I wonder if I’m/ being impossible in a new/ way. People have tickets/ for the theater. Push the/ plant into the sun.”). Through the de- and recontextualization of what was first familiar and is now strange, Nadelberg establishes herself as an exemplar of early 21st-century artistic practice.

April 15, 2016
By offering a quote from Will Ferrell's character in Anchorman, Ron Burgundy, poet Nadelberg foreshadows her collection's playful, satirical, and defiant linguistic exploration as well as the influence of movies and music on her writing. The poems self-referentially ( This is about that ) hint at her process, which involves collisions and bouncing of words, ideas, and feelings off one another. When Nadelberg writes I don't know / the rule I'm supposed to follow but frankly / nor do I care, she means it, even as she toys with grammar. Repetitions in poems like Siren force us to consider multilayered meanings and associations, and the use of intriguing stanza shifts in The Victory Portfolios reshuffles images, ideas, feelings, and phrases like a deck of cards to create new opportunities for understanding. A reader may not always know what Nadelberg is trying to convey, nor can one assume she always knows. But the act of reading these verbal experiments both pleasantly trips us up and trips a thinking switch that illuminates exciting new poetic territory.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)