{"id":4213,"date":"2020-01-28T01:45:55","date_gmt":"2020-01-28T01:45:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/?p=4213"},"modified":"2020-10-09T23:44:40","modified_gmt":"2020-10-09T23:44:40","slug":"review-of-meditations-of-a-beast","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/2020\/01\/28\/review-of-meditations-of-a-beast\/","title":{"rendered":"Review of Meditations of a Beast"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Frances Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

“The world of her poems is populated with ghosts and angels, living dolls and their owners, burglars and assassins.  This is a world of flickering streetlights, of trash accumulating in the gutters. It is a worse place, a hard place.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

By Frances Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The multiverse theory posits that there are an infinite number of\nparallel universes that exist alongside our own.  Some people believe that\nthese universes lay on top of one another like a stack of papers,\ndifferentiated only by small changes in the distribution of matter.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kristine Ong Muslim must be writing from one such parallel universe in her 2016 collection Meditations of a Beast<\/a><\/em>. Her poems come from a world that is like ours, but distorted.  The world of her poems is populated with ghosts and angels, living dolls and their owners, burglars and assassins.  This is a world of flickering streetlights, of trash accumulating in the gutters. It is a worse place, a hard place.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The strongest poems in this collection leave you with an unsettled\nfeeling, the unease that comes from deja vu. The standout of the collection is\n\u201cP is for Pavlov\u2019s Best Friend,\u201d which is told from the point of view of a dog\nin one of Pavlov\u2019s conditioning experiments. \u201cI really did not want to\nsalivate,\u2019 says the narrator, \u201cbut Master was salivating for me to salivate and\nI should not disappoint him.\u201d Muslim\u2019s approach to the structure of the poem is\nthe most interesting part–the dog\u2019s thoughts are communicated through\nfootnotes on a synopsis of the study.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Another standout poem, \u201cThe System of Enchantment,\u201d comes from the\nfirst section.  The poem reads as a lament for our dying climate, with\n\u201cferal forms find[ing] peace in the last of the forests.\u201d  Unlike most of\nthe collection, this poem ends on a hopeful note, with the speaker reminding us\nthat \u201cwe don\u2019t bruise easily…we can always heal and be healed.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a reader, I did find myself wishing for more consistency in the\nstructure of Meditations of a Beast<\/em>.  The collection is divided\ninto four sections.  Each section attempts a unifying theme, but some are\nmore successful than others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The first section is the most consistent, with an identifiable\npattern: the last line of each poem appears as the first line of the following\npoem.  This conceit mostly works, giving section one a unified feel, a\nnarrative and thematic thread that is carried throughout.  I found, at times, feeling like the repeated\nline was the weakest part of a particular poem, like it didn\u2019t quite fit with\nthe rest of the piece.  (See, for example, the transition between the\npoems \u201cThe People Outside\u201d and \u201cThe Oil Spill.\u201d)  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I am immensely sympathetic to this problem.  As a writer\nmyself, I have written countless pieces based on a writing exercise or guiding\nprinciple, only to go back and find later that the inciting word\/quote\/line no\nlonger fits with the rest of the work. Yet, it feels somehow like a betrayal of\nthe piece to remove the words or words that started it, like cutting a plant at\nthe root. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I can see editing being an especially fraught task for Muslim, as\nchanging the first or last line of any poem would necessitate changing another\npoem, which has the risk of then snowballing into even more massive and\nstructural changes in the work as a whole. A quote often attributed to William\nFaulkner tells writers that they have to \u201ckill all their darlings.\u201d In Section\nI of the piece Muslim rejects that advice wholeheartedly, gathering her\ndarlings close. Whether each individual piece is better for it may be a matter\nof taste. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Section III is another unified section.  Each poem is about\nor refers to dolls in some way.  This is where the parallel universe\nfeeling hits most strongly. These are not the fondly remembered dolls of\nchildhood. These dolls have bloody dresses and long fingernails. They pound on\nthe outside of the dollhouse while you cringe within. If a poet\u2019s hope is to\nleave you feeling the poems long after you have ceased reading, then these are\nthe most effective of the collection. I felt, afterward, like I had heard a\nparticularly good campfire story.  A little spooked, a little more aware\nof every bump and creak in a dark house. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The other sections are less collected. Section II, for instance,\nstarts with a series of poems that are loosely united by a common theme of\ncriminals and crime.  The strongest poem in this section is \u201cBurglars,\u201d\nwhere the titular criminals \u201cstayed for two months, unable to decide what to\nsteal.\u201d I admit, I\u2019m a sucker for magical realism, but that wasn\u2019t what I liked\nbest about this poem.  This piece showcases what Muslim can do when she\npares down her words.  The spare language\nof this piece–as well as its companion piece, \u201cAssassins\u201d–is Muslim at her\nbest.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Halfway through the section, though, the common thread\ndisappears.  I found myself re-reading poems about clones and ghosts,\ntrying to figure out how they fit with the first group of poems in the\nsection. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same can be said about Section IV, which starts as a series of\npoems all addressed to objects.  Each poem, whether it is written to \u201cThe\nHeavy Luggage\u201d or \u201cThe Half Butterfly,\u201d starts with the same line, \u201cwhat were\nyou like before you came here?\u201d The intention to link these together is so\nclear that I again found myself having to stop and re-read when the sequence\nended, shifting to unrelated poems.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s possible that there were not enough of these linked poems to\nmake an entire section, and I am certainly sympathetic to the difficult choices\nthat go into deciding how to order and group poems in a work.  It is\npossible as well that I am losing sight of the trees as I gaze at the forest.\nMuslim\u2019s strength lies in her individual poems, and less attention to how those\npoems are grouped and sequenced may allow the reader to enjoy each individual\nwork. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although there has been much writing about parallel universes, there is little agreement as to whether it would be possible to move from one universe to another. If there is, and an entry to Muslim\u2019s universe becomes available, I think I will decline. I\u2019ll stay here on our side, the safe side, enjoying poems of dangerous gods, ghosts, and ordinary people at a remove. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Read an excerpt from Meditations of a Beast<\/em>, “Burglars<\/a>“, reprinted with permission from Cornerstone Press<\/em> on 87 Bedford<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u00a9 Copyright 2020 Frances Klein<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Frances Klein is a high school English teacher. She was born and raised in Southeast Alaska, and taught in Bolivia and California before settling in Indianapolis with her husband Kris. She has been published in the Indiana Voice Journal, GFT Press, and Autumn Sky Poetry, and is forthcoming in several other journals.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Frances Klein “The world of her poems is populated with ghosts and angels, living dolls and their owners, burglars and assassins.  This is a world of flickering streetlights, of trash accumulating in the gutters. It is a worse place, a hard place.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":5245,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4213"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5246,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4213\/revisions\/5246"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5245"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/87bedford.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}