review of Jane Jortiz-Nakagawa Aquiline -- by Alan Botsford

AQUILINE by Jane Joritz-Nakagawa. Printed Matter Press, 2007, 65 pp., $12.00 (paper).

Brief review by Alan Botsford

Jane Joritz-Nakagawa is a poet who works, or one should say plays, with (and among) multiple literary and non-literary sources. A long-term resident of Japan, she makes hay with the English language any way she can, and for the many experimental impulses she follows, the results--some dodgy, some very moving—throw interesting light on the relation between poet and language, between (non) comprehensibility and (non) context, between word and flesh.

There’s a fallenness embedded in the life and experience of flesh that she will not shy away from, and which indeed she makes--despite deflections and reflections of all kinds-- into her main subject: The body betrays, is forever a wound, wounding:

My eyes sting, my body

Flat and immobile

I want to crush my head against

The dark sparkly pavement

But hers are takes on much more than the fallen world in all its inglorious Faustian bargains (“stepping over the bodies of the dead” etc.). ‘Sparkly,’ in the above-cited poem for example, offers wit, a word choice-- by eschewing ‘sparkling’-- which has ethical ramifications. Joritz-Nakawaga won’t be seduced by anything less than her own resistances to language (“loss of being price of comedy” indeed—this reviewer is not so sure). The distances traversed, and treasured, between “Her stunned immobile/ Body” and “my stunned immobile body” suggest elusive dramas that move in and out of focus, in and out of view. The unsaid, the unread, the as it were undead all converge in cinematic/real-time actions and axioms (i.e. “our natural language is translation & we cannot get it right”). In sum, these are poems swollen with physicality, half-felt presences, and an intelligence that leaves nothing off its radar. “Who is speaking for us, among the/ colonized clouds…” she asks in her long poem ‘Evil Nature (3)’. Perhaps we can ask instead-- who is speaking for us in (as she writes) “our wounded beauty”? The short answer is, Jane Joritz-Nakagawa does.

-- Alan Botsford