MICRO REVIEWS | VOL. 3

The sum of its parts

on Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World & Lesle Lewis’ Rainy Days

on the farm

by Sally Ashton

Last summer I came home from a camping trip to discover a broken pipe upstairs had slowly seeped below—floors, walls, ceilings, carpeting destroyed. The subsequent demolition and reconstruction became a watershed experience of 2019, an inundation of loss. Life upended. As is often the case, my own preoccupations first drew me to Lesle Lewis’ Rainy Days on the Farm and Meg Eden’s Drowning in the Floating World, titles resonant with my frame of mind. 

Of course, the books present two distinctive projects, not only in focus but in strategies and form. And where Meg Eden focuses on water in extremis—tidal wave, flood, drowning, destruction—in Lesle Lewis’ collection a rainy day suggests a tone, the commonplace, at worst an oppressive backdrop: “A futile rain, a cement rain, an odd-shaped rain, a death rain, a modest rain, a stopped rain, a coffee rain, a yellow rain.” 

In spite of essential differences, both books reveal poet deeply engaged with how fragments—parts of a story—can be put together for greater impact.

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one

Meg Eden, Drowning in the Floating World (Press 53, 2020)

In Drowning in the Floating World, Meg Eden immerses the reader in accounts of 3/11, the name given to the March 11, 2011 Japanese earthquake, subsequent tsunami, and Fukushima nuclear power plant disaster. Rescuing historical fragments from the news, videos, first-hand accounts, and likely personal experiences, Eden fills in the blanks to reconstruct a coherent narrative of disaster. 

The first poem, “Hokotashi City, Ibarki Prefecture,” recounts an incident when 50 melon-headed whales beached themselves in areas near where the magnitude-9 earthquake would occur only six days later, a seeming premonition. The poem ends with these lines that speak to the precarious nature of life, a theme running throughout the book.

Can anyone know what will happen
six days from now? Six hours?                           

On the shore, one body flails against 
the others, craving the water                   

that pulls—both killing
and sustaining. 

Drowning is always the story of bodies. But it is not simply bodies; Eden memorializes individuals whose names might be lost but whose stories she resurrects, creating unique voices to speak to the living. In so doing she proves a master ventriloquist. With a near-deadly empathy, her speakers often invite the dead to possess the speakers’ own bodies, a type of extreme survivor’s guilt threatening to drown the living with the dead.

Earlier in the poem above, the speaker decries forgetting even as life dares to go on, the whales’ bodies sufficient for mourning but also foreshadowing, “like tea leaves,” the deaths that will follow. That will always follow.

People still surf but how can they ignore
the fifty bodies, like tea leaves                               

at the bottom of a scryer’s glass,
heavy and loud in memorial? 

Eden’s poems do not forget. From symbolic sneakers washed ashore to a daughter “without her head” used as repetan in “Villanelle from an Okawa School Mother,” dead people, animals, and their artifacts reappear to create a narrative of disaster told by its victims. In “Ningyo Kuyo (Doll Funeral Ceremony)” even a lost child’s doll cries out:

The worst fate for any body: to be left

without a home. If only someone would take 

a moment to burn me! Hanabi body, sinking 
ship of me, I cannot bear the entropy 

of an abandoned house, my dead owner 
who has outgrown her need for toys. 

Through such voices the book’s first three sections recount the unthinkable losses from earthquake, tidal wave, and nuclear disaster. In the fourth and final, Eden exposes an underlying metaphor that complicates the narrative in such an intriguing way, though those familiar with the term, “the floating world,” will have wondered at parallels all along. Ukiyo, The Floating World, refers to the transient world of pleasure-seeking or sin with roots in Japan’s Edo period, a concept that remains in modern cultural practices from brothels to bathhouses, paid companions, and geishas. The term also refers to the Buddhist notion of death and rebirth. That’s a lot to unpack!

Hope isn’t easy to find amidst such abject tragedy. Eden’s religious faith, seemingly, is what sustains her in the end. “Baptism,” the final poem, describes an ocean ceremony where a friend is dunked under the waves, a ritual drowning symbolizing rebirth.

Strange, this water: the same 
that buried five cities, now over Kaylee’s shoulders, 
a celebration. From the shore, we, the church, stand holding 
our shoes, feet bare
in the sand, waiting. Out east, 
new cities will be built. Inside Kaylee, a renovated 
 city is filling.
She rises from the water. 
Life does go on, renewing itself in time.

Christian regeneration may prove small comfort for many. But by reconstructing the stories of the lost, Eden assures that their lives will go on in the memory of the living.       

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two

Lesle Lewis, Rainy Days on the Farm (Fence Books, 2019)

Where Eden deals with historical particulars, salvaging individuals from the remnants of disaster, in Rainy Days on the Farm, 2019 winner of Fence Books’ Ottoline Prize, Lesle Lewis’ prose poems reside in seemingly mundane situations. Lewis also relies on fragments—of observations, abstracted settings, and in the suggested relationships between unidentified pronouns—but she declines to fill in the gaps. The speaker remains an anonymous “I” or a “we,” while “you” could refer to anyone. There are particulars, but not specific particulars; the poems float free of most recognizable reference. Who, what, or where doesn’t seem to matter. If Eden privileges narrative by rebuilding fragments, Lewis decenters linear narrative through elision, ellipses, and collage. Connections are left to the reader.  

Lewis is a prose poet, one who confesses to “not knowing how to make good line-break decisions.” While I doubt that to be the case, her preferred style of prose poem uses the free-line strategy in which stand-alone sentences run margin to margin and are separated by a skipped line (sometimes more). Free-line poems use the sentence as the lyrical line as seen in her poem “She stands in the moonlight measuring moonshine.”

This poem could be taken as an ars poetica and reflects Lewis’ distinctly associative approach to poem-making, something she is quite good at. 

“Ah,” she says at 11:15, “to intend then is to hope, is it not?” 

Her brain flips back and forth between concave and convex. 

Three straight lines that meet each other at their end points and leave a space in the middle might be her family. 

Fabric hung on the insides of glass squares that punctuate house walls might be her underthings. 

Imaginary letters combined to make imaginary words might be her weekends. 

But what if her adventure is no metaphor for bigger things and the bigger things are a metaphor for just this? 

The poem begins in medias res with a female character it seems we should know, captured in some specific moment responding to some specific but unexpressed problem (hope?), though what the first line refers to is completely out of the poem’s narrative frame. Indeterminacy leads to a certain puzzling-through, where the reader’s “brain flips back and forth” seeking connections that “might be” or again might not. Lewis plays with our capacity to look for a “metaphor for bigger things,” in a poem, in life.  

In the recent prose poem anthology A Cast-Iron Aeroplane That Can Actually Fly, where one of Lewis’ poems appears, she comments on her poem-making process. “I don’t have conscious intentions for poems, but when I read what a poem has become I see what I have learned in the writing” (131). Her not-conscious process suggests that fragments of lived experience can create meaningful connections that click into place with each kaleidoscopic twist from sentence to seeming non sequitur sentence. The synaptic white space standing between each line further emphasizes the associative leap. 

What can the sentence untethered from linear narrative achieve?

This inquiry figures throughout her collection. An excerpt from the beginning of the poem, “The sentence is an industrial building,” offers a series of playful and puzzling metaphors for the “industrial” nature of sentences, their ability to build, to cohere. 

Four sentences are like four sleeping dogs or four visible wavelengths.


They have small hearts or gills.


They are impossible.


You find yourself at an unexpected age in an unexpected airport in an unexpected mood. 

The sentence aims to be not proud, and to not judge harshly the conversations of the drunk. 

The information with which we make choices and the floors we sleep on are sentences. 

The sentence battles blindness to horizons, blindness to temperatures, empty space blindness, and line orientation blindness. 

All the ways to be human: six bad and six good. 

The sentence has pathetic, poetic bones.


This one is in the water.                      

In a prose poem, cadence is achieved through phrasing, variations in sentence length, as well as any sonic devices derived through repetition. However, a free-line style also uses white space as an additional metering device. In Lewis’ hands, the sentences progress by leaps of associations vs. linear logic. So while the poem unspools and pauses—each new line offering a piece to puzzle over and each skipped line lending space to do so—the poem is more satisfying when taken as an impressionistic whole. Let the poems’ suggestions accrue as you read straight through. As Lewis says, “when I read what a poem has become I see what I have learned.”

“How far can a conceptual sphere stretch before it pops?” one poem’s title asks. Ultimately the reader will decide. In Rainy Days on the Farm, Lewis pursues this inquiry with affection and whimsy, often with wry humor. She sets sentences adrift, fragments of human experience, trusting them to reveal a greater whole.

Lesle Lewis’ books include Small Boat (winner of the 2002 Iowa Poetry Prize), Landscapes I & II (Alice James Books, 2006), lie down too (2011, winner of Beatrice Hawley Award), A Boot’s a Boot (winner of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Book Competition), the chapbook It’s Rothko in Winter or Belgium (Factory Hollow Press, 2012), and her new book Rainy Days on the Farm (2019, Ottoline Prize, Fence Books). She has had poems appear in numerous journals including American Letters and Commentary, Northern New England Review, Green Mountains Review, Barrow Street, Sentence, The Massachusetts Review, The Cincinnati Review, Mississippi Review, and jubilat. She lives in Alstead, New Hampshire. 

Meg Eden's work is published or forthcoming in magazines including Prairie Schooner, Poetry Northwest, Crab Orchard Review, RHINO and CV2. She teaches creative writing at Anne Arundel Community College. She is the author of five poetry chapbooks, the novel "Post-High School Reality Quest” (2017), and the poetry collection “Drowning in the Floating World” (Press 53, 2020). She runs the Magfest MAGES Library blog, which posts accessible academic articles about video games (https://super.magfest.org/mages-blog). Find her online at www.megedenbooks.com or on Twitter at @ConfusedNarwhal.