The Do-Over

February 2, 2015
At the core of this third collection from Ossip (The Cold War) is a desire to perform elegyâto speak of and to the deadâand, in the process, to imbue a new luster to the world of the living. "The songs are all a pleasure," she writes, "and one day// we won't have the pleasure of breathing." There is a masterful control at play, a firm lyric that returns to the theme of death without suffocating or trivializing it; it's a voice that can be intimate and quiet as well as urgent. This two-fold approach is encapsulated neatly in her line: "But silence has a way of making you want to fill it." That cruxâthe need to perform elegy despite the fact that it will not and cannot literally bring back the deadâis the engine of the collection; the inability of the poet to remain silent while staring into silence. These tendencies are pushed further by the extent to which contemplating mortality becomes a self-reflexive and romanticizing process. In a gesture towards themes of re-birth, Ossip admits that "Of course we are/ endlessly/ fascinating to ourselves." But Ossip is neither selfish nor self-serving, rather she understands well how "Love triumphs/ over brutality// because brutality/ must end/ with death, and love// never does."

January 1, 2015

In her third full collection (after The Cold War), Ossip presents poems that explore celebrity, mourn a loved one who has died (the mysterious A.), and share vignettes of daily life. The poet employs many modernistic and postmodernistic techniques: the use of white space, varying line and font sizes, repetition, capitalization, and freestanding punctuation marks. That said, several of the poems have a traditional stanza format, a few are prose poems, and one is not a poem at all but a short story. Ossip's strengths include humor, a distinct way of looking at the world, and a fearless approach to the famous: in "The Road Trip and the Apron String" she says, "A spurt of attention yields up/ me and Keats, iris to iris." At times, her phrasing veers toward slogans or makes little sense: "Perseverance is beautiful, and embarrassing./ How many institutions of power remain?/ Several. Several...." Too many metaphors either fall flat or seem so unconnected as to interrupt the flow of the poem, as in the long piece "What Is Death": "Morphine is the prototype narcotic drug and is the standard against which all other/ opiates are tested/ like a mother's arms." And in the poem, "Words to a Newborn," the poet advises, "You'll learn many procedures/ for mastering everyday life. You'll learn/ to think like a computer and like a plant." VERDICT On the whole, this is a disappointing collection. The poems lack music, and the language often diverges into prose except for the infrequent occasion when Ossip makes the experience being described new: "I sit/ with hands folded, by a pond, a pool, wimpled by unknowing."--Doris Lynch, Monroe Cty. P.L., Bloomington, IN

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