Realm Sixty-Four

Kristi Maxwell

Reviews of the book

 

“Kristi Maxwell’s Realm Sixty-Four is comprised of eleven long poems moving amongst and beyond the formal intricacies and history of chess. By turns the poems gather a lovely collection of automata, magic, historical fiction, and formal meditations on truth and illusion. The number 64 is a reference to the chess board’s 64 squares. However, Maxwell’s subject is not the literal game of chess but being in the game; the mind believing in the service of the game. Being inside is some shorthand for truth in games. Truth doesn’t possess, it embodies. . . . In her refusal of the easy, Maxwell makes a case for the utility of the lyric—the original “less in its more-masquerade.” The truth, in a poem, is not really the point. As Maxwell’s subjects demonstrate, truth is piecemeal; a set of agreements we make to finally give ourselves over to belief. Films, literature, games, relationships—all amount to a series of agreements we make with ourselves in order to participate in the spectacle. The lyric, like magic or love, can’t be fact checked. And this seems to be a key distinction for Maxwell—things are not true but they are real. . . .

“Generally, poems appeal simultaneously to our sense of truth and our willingness to abandon it. Realm’s poems reveal reading as a simultaneous act, occurring in the real world of the reader and the world of the book, whose truth is always in the process of revelation. Realm is an ambitious collection and Maxwell is an exceptionally promising poet. What small faults the concept carries are offset by the sheer versatility of her work.” —from the review by Meg Barboza in Colorado Review

 

“Realm Sixty-Four is a love poem, filled with what are sometimes almost erotic references (“that those lips might later re-lip themselves\on a cheek to which they are held” p.99). It is a chessboard where opponents meet. It is filled with oppositions: illusion vs. reality, human vs. machine, chess opponents, one seemingly automaton, the other human, facing each other against a backdrop of history. And then there is the literary illusion: this question of prose vs. poetry, of prose poetry combined with non-prose poetry. Realm Sixty-Four expands this concept in ways that move the art of poetry forward.” —from the review by Mike Maggio in Phoebe