Maps and Transcripts of the Ordinary World

February 17, 2020
A book-length sequence of linked poems, collages, and hybrid texts, the innovative latest from Cowles (Eleanor, Eleanor, not your real name) uses text and image to explore the strangeness inherent in everyday experience. Cowles’s collages do not serve as mere illustrations, but rather complicate, call into question, and layer interpretations onto the poems proper. Her approach to defamiliarizing mundane tasks (“Every morning we open the curtains./ Every evening we sit on the porch”) is multifaceted and intriguing. As the book unfolds, her stylistic gestures juxtaposed alongside
collages combining photography and text evoke the strangeness in that “same view of the terraces” and “the sky in the late afternoon.” However, the writer occasionally loses sight of deeper meaning in her weaving of the two forms. In “I AM ON A PLANE,” Cowles writes: “Have I been/ on a plane/ the greater part/ of the day?/ I believe I have.” Here, Cowles strives for a refreshing simplicity of presentation, but ultimately fails to do justice to the complexity of her thinking. Readers will nonetheless find Cowles’s latest book an intriguing approach to exploring representation and narrative.

March 1, 2020

It's hardly surprising that a collection whose title references "maps and transcripts" addresses our desire to nail down experience, but the award-winning Cowles (Eleanor, Eleanor) deftly shows that as we struggle to transform into language what we see and hear and feel, the results are inevitably incomplete; there's a gap between what we want to say and what we actually manage. Of course, she faces the same problem, and sometimes the poems feel unsatisfactory--which is exactly the point. Life doesn't happen as neatly as art can make us believe, and Cowles can be good at capturing that disjunction: "and one day everyone decides/ to bale their hay/ every single field down/ all at once everyone// all at once/ my friend is sick/ sick and far away." VERDICT An intriguing, risk-taking work, with special appeal for millennials and crossover readers; poem-photograph collages throughout.

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