Review of A Model Year by Gina Myers

A Model Year
Poems by Gina Myers
Coconut Books, 2009

Buy it Here

When I’m in an airport, I tend get this no name feeling. It’s sort of part loneliness, part exhilaration, part meditation, part fear. That nameless feeling is the one I got reading Gina Myers’ A Model Year. An empty-full feeling (emptyfullenshlage?) that she is able to conjure in her descriptions of New York City, Saginaw, Michigan as well as the abstract landscapes of the mind. Her chief concern appears to be the relationship between loneliness and connection. How does one create intimacy as an anonymous worker in a city of anonymous workers? The answer seems to be that it’s pretty difficult.

It’s a model year but not in the glamorous fashion model sense. More in the newest model, this day, which looks a lot like the old model, yesterday. And the days are filled with lots of cheap crap designed to keep the workers working as in “My only companion. / a 99 cent cup of coffee,” from the poem Saginaw. From the same poem: “dirty shopping carts / in dirty parking lots.” The promise of the future is “enclosed” in a “brown paper bag.” But she also points to the cultural sickness here: “I can name my favorite Rolling Stones song but can’t tell you / how I’ll make the rent next month.” I think a lot of us have been there.

So how does one keep afloat in this world? The answer seems to be chores and things, the mechanical chores and things we do to keep being (or maybe, and probably more interestingly, from being). She doesn’t romanticize the tedium of these daily activities, but she doesn’t really complain either. From “A Model Year” she writes, ”Attempting to fill an empty space with anything: yesterday’s news, photographs, a box of buttons & loose thread.” There’s an obvious problem: the same things that keep us going also keep us not going.

Now the language of the poems themselves is not frilly. Her influences seem to be Black Mountain School poetry, maybe a little bit of Celan as in “Words: ash in our mouths,” and sometimes she even sounds like Niedecker if Niedecker had lived in a city. (I’m not sure if that’s actually possible to imagine). There aren’t any pyrotechnic language tricks or acrobatics going on, but at the same time it’s really not “plainspoken” since the poems are poised and crafted and you really don’t hear the “spoken”  English language in the poetry. So, unlike Joseph Lease, I don’t see that much of a connection between her poetry and the “talky” quality of the New York School.

The book really saves the best for last, the title poem, a longish (it’s seven pages) and very moving poem about a breakup which somehow centers the earlier themes of work and alienation. ”Build your day around re-setting the clocks: rise & fall & compile a new grocery list” is all emptiness but some great moments of hope too like when she says “a blank page can mean a fresh start or nothing/ to say.” Sometimes nothing to say is okay too. The poem is really beautiful. And after reading this poem several times, one gets the distinctive feeling that breakups are harder on the poor than they are on the rich. The book is worth buying for this poem alone.