In No One’s Land

Paige Ackerson-Kiely

Selected for the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize by D.A. Powell

Reviews of the book

 

“In ‘Foreplay,’ the opening poem of In No One’s Land, Paige Ackerson-Kiely wryly notes, ‘There are times when an absence of pride means the lion is eating his cub.’ Unflinching and steel-eyed, this hallmark Ackerson-Kiely moment abruptly enters the reader into a hard-surfaced land of diners and liquor stores where, in landscapes of the arctic north and the edge of wilderness, the urban has neither taken over nor entirely stopped trying . . . . These poems are rooted in the earth and in the animal world, impressively aware of the soil and convenience stores and atmospheric pressure of existence. To read In No One’s Land is to look into a beautiful and disconcerting reflective surface and to find that the image there is too alien to be ourselves, and too familiar not to be. The effect is as mesmerizing as it is disconcerting. We hear and see these poems, they touch us and inhabit us, before they begin to work on the intellect. In No One’s Land is a highly sensual collection and also the keenly observed reflections of a quasi-hermetic figure who knows ‘I will build the home I will die in / the home I will build.’ It is one of the best debut collections of this decade, and it has the temerity and quietness to end, in the afterhours of a diner, with a gratitude that resists our notions of what gratitude is: ‘The desserts offered are too beautiful. No, nothing else // thank-you.’” —from the review by Lytton Smith in Verse Online [read the entire review here].

 

“These are poems of gravity and some sort of omniscience. The narrator knows the boundaries, passions, and intentions of her characters as if better than they do, and has little doubt as to how the poetry will react. What’s most refreshing is that there is little abstraction and self-conscious irony in the language, but still the opportunity for the mind to fill in its share of blanks. We don’t have to learn to read these poems, but we have no choice but to react to them. Most lines are declarative and, though often neurotically considerate, the voice employed can be chastising and stark. In ‘Instructional Lecture for a Liquor Store Clerk,’ Ackerson-Kiely brings across the immediacy of not only the poem, but of the entire collection:

The customers want something from you that you do not own but in fact lord over. Let the older men call you baby or hon, it relaxes them. See how they tremble, hands like a wet fawn one hour old pushing up to stand. It will be a hard winter and the fawn won’t make it. Mostly it is bleak.

“It’s this sense of awareness she holds over the poems that keeps us willing to find out and discover. What else does she know? The poems seem to understand too well their surroundings and apologize for that fact only by exploring some more. It’s as if they are telling the reader, See? It’s not that bad. We all do it; it happens to everyone. The odd stability on the part of the narrator, even when the circumstances should elicit trepidation or some morose eeriness, is compulsive and pure.” —from the review by DJ Dolack in Octopus [read the entire review here].

 

“The menace of potential violence is never far from the surface of these poems, but that is hardly their only emotional register. Ackerson-Kiely can be playful, wistful and melodic: ‘One by one mason jars are filled; / my beet-struck heart vinegared,’ she writes in ‘A Moment as Roscoe Holcomb,’ in tribute to the old-time banjo player. Likewise, in ‘An Old Recording,’ rustling newspapers are ‘like I love you whispered / over and over until / the awkward place which is neither / the ear or the throat itches terribly / and cannot be found with a finger.’

“The unscratchable itch lives, like many of the objects of desire Ackerson-Kiely summons, somewhere between the imagination and the viscera. To say that her poetic subject is inwardness would be understatement; to call it confessional would miss the point. It follows a trajectory from the personal to the private, the private to the hidden, the hidden to the unsayable.

“In No One’s Land is a personal archaeology of loss, one inscribed in the flesh like faded bruises and improperly set bones. Ackerson-Kiely’s high lonesome verses pose unformable questions and answer them in the only way possible: crab-wise and tentatively.” —from Matt Frassica’s review in Seven Days [read the entire review here].

 

“Ackerson-Kiely, winner of the 2006 Sawtooth Poetry Prize, delivers to the reader an attitude translated by smaller journeys and moments, implying a past worth more than the telling, a past worth living both through and beyond. Sometimes this is demonstrated in a line as simple as ‘it is true I am afraid of the stranger in men,’ from her poem ‘To the Understudy'; at other times the sentiment is more complex, riddled into the precious by her use of imagery to create a second world within the poem, as in ‘Foucault’s Bed’: ‘The bed is where you work, castigated, is not like / two mares staring down the girder of their noses. . . . Crawl or jump in, death just makes the other saddest. Woe. Like / what you would say to horses if you ever wanted them to stop.’” —from J. Noel Trapp’s review in ForeWord [read the entire review here].

 

“[Ackerson-Kiely], in other words, is making not a dramatic script for performance but in a way a specification, a scenario, a kind of forestory whose force comes from the inflection it gives to the imagination after it finishes with the work itself. This is the kind of poem that is difficult to end, one wishes with this kind of poem sometimes that there was some kind of musical track that could slowly swell and drown out the speaking voice, but I think Paige’s ‘solution’ — to give a kind of sentience to the rust itself, to complete the population of this world, is pure skill.

“In the end the cliché of the New York Times Book Review — that this or that inanimate object (‘New York!’ ‘Ambition!’ ‘The Fashion Line of Gianni Versace!’) has become a character itself is indeed brought overabundantly to the reader in Paige’s text. D.A. Powells’ blurb on the back describes Paige’s work as ‘joyful’ (actually, since this is a blurb, he describes it as ‘joyful joyful’) — I think better a way to describe this poem is as triumphant, with the sensation of a poetic mistress leaning down over a world and inbreathing a strange kind of life.

“P.S.: if you are wondering who Roscoe Holcomb is, we have wikipedia: Roscoe Holcomb (1911-1981) was an American singer, banjo player, and guitarist from Daisy, Kentucky. A prominent figure in Appalachian folk music, Holcomb was the inspiration for John Cohen’s coining of the term ‘high, lonesome sound.’” —from Simon DeDeo’s review of “A Day as Roscoe Holcomb,” from In No One’s Land [read the entire review here].