Being a person is hard; we got spiritual longings while only having the equipment of an animal. All poetry derives from this ontological tension, I guess.
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Frey does her best in Lovability (a title that wickedly goes two ways at once) to make the prosaic sublime. It’s a tragic errand (which she’s hilariously aware of) but a courageous one too.
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You should know this: the poet double spaces all of her poems and this surplus of white space (along with her unpunctuated lines and teasing enjambments) always strike me as either a somatic blankness we can breathe our eyes into, or an absence symbolizing that which cannot be symbolized.
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Lovability is long, clocking in at 155. According to a podcast interview with the poet I listened to, the collection represents about ten years worth of poems.
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One key aspect to Frey’s poems is that they’re rife with people. Even in poems that seem like there’s no chance of a person appearing, someone gets smuggled in. The longer you read Lovability, it dawns on you that the poet’s entire subjectivity is wholly dependent on the other, for whom without there is no self. There’s nothing remarkable about this observation (most of us are like that), yet I make it because Frey is deeply irritated, in a striking way, by having involuntary social instincts. Family, lovers, friends, bystanders—her attachments to all of them—create (for better or worse) who she is which opens her up to, among other things, traumatization. And yet the fact Frey’s cast of characters appear at all in her work suggests the poet’s desire to be independent from those she’s closest to; routinely the poet writes about isolation, modulating between wanting to be left alone and feeling lonely, which shows how the yearning for solitude is actual proof we’re not autonomous.
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Frey kicks off her wonderful book with a poem called “The Trees,” a symbol that regularly repeats itself throughout Lovability, and it’s a real stunner. It’s mostly about family, that peculiar system of personalities that bridge society and individual, and the dramas it creates reverberate in the poet’s mental life like few other topics do.
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In addition to people, Frey has a thing for food. There is something edible in just about every poem, and it made me super uncomfortable, like staring at your mouth in the mirror for too long. I leave it up to the reader to determine what it all means, but I suspect it has something to do with our half-veiled creatureliness; our death, or whatever. Maybe she just notices food a lot or cooks a lot, I don’t know. When food is mentioned, it’s rarely being eaten or prepped or ruminated upon; rather, the item of food behaves as pure symbol, metaphor. Obviously, food is often associated with sex, and there is a disturbing pork poem in Lovability, so maybe, I don’t know, maybe I just need to go back and look at those passages again.
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Frey is an intimate and restless poet whose unrepressed, free-associative style makes her work surreal and unpredictable; you’re never quite sure what the poet will say next because she rarely dwells on one thing for too long, and yet one of the strange pleasures of reading her poetry is getting the sense that each poem is about the same thing.
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She has a profusion of unique perspectives and each one deserves its moment in the sun, apparently. She packs a lot into a poem and both the cerebral and mundane get their due. This might explain why many of the poems in Lovability are so long, to give proper shape to her overflowing psychic energy, although in the middle of Lovability an unanticipated selection of smaller poems appear, and I confess that sometimes I wish they hadn’t; they just seem a bit…thrown in.
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Although Frey is wed to the fragment, it doesn’t mean the narrative impulse is never explored; the poem “Jerry,” a railway poem about the cross-grained experience of grieving in public (and trying not to drink), tells a harrowing story of loss and anxiety that I still think about today. There’s a scene, beautifully understated, of a boat in the middle of a lake, with a father and daughter in it, that is so sad.
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Even though the poet’s wounds are routinely on full-display, her poems are rarely poisoned by her personal disclosures; she dodges saccharinity with a set of lyric (and grammatical) instincts deftly applied so that her words remain, remarkably, immune to the pitfalls of melodrama.
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Although she has an ironic animosity towards the most basic facts of life, she endows her disappointments with wry significance, knowing that nature isn’t a joke on us, but that we’re nature’s joke.
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There’s a reasonableness (maybe its wisdom?) to Frey’s work in that the poet has neither the desire to completely slay the humanist subject, nor be ashamed of its desire for agency and freedom. Because of this incongruity (maybe it’s generosity?), Frey’s work reflects the ways in which life warps us over and over again. Is it really any mystery why we structure our private lives around relationships; that we sense in the other our own potential coherence? Frey’s book is testimony, if not to the falseness of this view, then at least to its precarity, and that when it comes to living, there is no end in the task.
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JOHN EBERSOLE is co-editor of Tourniquet Review. He lives in Houston, Texas.