Poetry. IF NOT METAMORPHIC uses the long form, frequently in choral antiphon, to ask what kind of pressures exert change—as in the title poem, where war and human cruelty have turned even the kelp murderous—and what exactly is changed: sometimes words take on other forms before our eyes, sometimes sentences try on new endings in shameless view, and puns on popular culture poke through the deepest meditation. These poems truncate and disrupt narrative, borrowing now from the parataxis of renku, now from the verse-prose travelogue of haibun, but do not foreclose the possiblity of ephiphany; Iijima still envisions a "Great Swan" that holds within it creation and destruction: "Eureka / Or death?" The book was Peter Gizzi's selection for runner-up in the 2007 Sawtooth Poetry Prize contest.
Author Hometown: BROOKLYN, NY USA
About the author: Brenda Iijima is the author of IF NOT METAMORPHIC (Ahsahta Press, 2010), REVV. YOU'LL—UTION (Displaced Press, 2009) SUBSISTENCE EQUIPMENT (Faux Press, 2008) ANIMATE, INANIMATE AIMS (Litmus, 2007) and AROUND SEA (O Books, 2004). She edited the collection ECO LANGUAGE READER (Nightboat Books, 2010) and is currently the editor of Portable Press at Yo-Yo Labs. She is the art editor at Boog City—a newspaper and online source for artists and poets in East Village—and she is a visual artist. She lives in Brooklyn, New York, and teaches at Cooper Union.
Reviews:
"Panthering" from the book recipient of CAConrad's Annual Sexiest Poem of the Year Award 2010
Patrick Dunagan @ Tarpaulin Sky Reviews
Christopher Kondrich @ CutBank Reviews
Harry Thorne @ Galatea Resurrects
Tom Beckett @ Galatea Resurrects
Ellen Welcker @ The Quarterly Conversation
Greg Bem @ The Set
"Iijima's eco-provocations have the lightness and gravitas of an improbably reconsecrated world glimpsed at its hectic, interrogatively driven conception. On the edge of loss, words have taken on direct agency."
—Joan Retallack
"Plato, arguably the philosopher with the most influence on the development of Western culture, famously banished poets from the idea city in the name of the philosophos with a tacitly hegemonic regard for the danger posed to the State by the massive social power of poetic eros. The title of Brenda Iijima's new work, IF NOT METAMORPHIC, promises the emergence of an 'unhindered and spiraling' structure that, as it turns out, recoups and transforms this marginalized power of eros. What occurs is nothing less than the ramified beauty of the work's own variegated measures in a 'continuum of elaboration,' wherein 'Essentiality becomes / Phantasmal' and 'Erotic / Rebellion' flies in the face of a Platonically underwritten Occident that by philosophical default knows one habitually physiopsychical state, so to speak: 'The state / Would have us / Becoming / Bland.' Anything but bland, Iijima's fantastically life-affirming work asks: 'Eureka / Or death?' My response is to read aloud in wonder and appreciation."
—Christopher Rizzo