Little Ease
Aaron McCollough
Reviews of the book
“By the end of the book, McCollough has twisted the explorations of the poems in Little Ease to lay out his final, and most daunting, challenge to readers: an uncynical (and atypical) optimism. Pure un-ironic hope, in the face of a world where suffering is the norm rather than the exception. Hope does not come easily or conveniently in Little Ease (nothing in this book is convenient), but it does come, as the wandering path drawn by the poems leads not out of darkness and into light, but further into darkness until the traveler can somehow see past the dark, or through it. For McCollough, the isolation and loneliness alluded to by the title of the book are painful—and he painstakingly catalogues them—but they are, in the end, not all we have.
“A perfect example of this distressed optimism appears late in the book, in the stunning ‘Adam Names the Diseases.’ Here, the titular diseases which afflict humanity are all given human names:
from the mountains between jerusalem
I see them kreutsfeldt jakob lou gehrig
before [my] eyes sad noysom dark in which
the bandage “reeks” the landscape has no term*
“This connection, wherein the illness and afflicted are the same, blurs all borders, even the final ones between life and death / corporality and spirituality. As McCollough writes in the second stanza of the poem, ‘in living death in dying living lies.’
“Even at the very fringe of human experience, McCollough chooses to do more with his poetry than merely deconstruct. As elsewhere in this book, his catalogue of careful images and meticulous phrases draw a strange, palpable optimism out of what—in a less wise work—could be simplistically chaotic. Here, division and incompleteness allow for access across seemingly impassable barriers. The afflicted can become the healer, and sickness is the only certain access we have to a cure. Here, again, McCollough takes an impressive risk: to propose a duality where the two halves interpenetrate so completely that the system ultimately isn’t a duality at all, but an integrated whole.
“The implications of this hope (hard-won) and this duality (that really isn’t) could be headache-inducing, but McCollough avoids this problem by grounding the ideas in so many surprising little details that by the end of the book, these conclusions—as counterintuitive as they may appear—seem natural, even essential. In its original usage, Little Ease may have been a cruelly ironic name, but as the title for this collection it fits exactly. McCollough’s poetry does offer ease, even if it is an ease that can only be appreciated after all of the suffering that has come before, and clouded by the awareness that suffering may come again.” —from the review by Steven Byrd in Free Verse (read the entire review here).
“[P]oets who consider the written page their primary mode of transmission actually write ‘on the page’ and ‘for their reader’ and Aaron McCollough is engaged in a compelling exploration of just what that page makes possible—and without quoting Derrida (though it would only be fair—McCullough quotes Foucault, and many of his ideas about surveillance and confinement seem to come directly from Foucault), McCollough challenges that connection between written language and voice. For me, as a reader whose reading practice is intimately bound up in the connections of voice and print, reading McCollough is often a dazzling experience, ranging from the simple integration of new symbols (his frequent use of ‘@’ seems a pleasant analog to the frequent Pound & Creeley shorthand of ‘yr’) to the introduction of the unpronounceable ‘[::]’ (It’s not part of an analogy, so don’t try ‘as’). In some places it feels like a surrealist experiment, where my internal voice modulates itself without being able to explain why—and in other places it feels like a challenge. . . .
“The major achievement of the book seems to me its stunning pacing. The book is a study in density—it manages to move between incredibly concentrated prose poems and incredibly airy free verse, with its ‘sonnets manqués’ treading a kind of middle ground . . . . This volume is primarily playful, and refreshingly so.” —from the review by Jason Schneiderman in Coldfront (read the entire review here).
“McCollough writes as a distant but psychologically aware and keenly watchful thinker. He renders a subtle moral angst with phenomenal control and depth of feeling, but, here, even feeling seems to be navigated by a removed intellect’s ‘cold humors’ as the breath roams, disconnected, ‘above the city’s face far from the body.’ I am not a reader easily sympathetic to such intellectualized remove, but I do find that if I invest myself and allow the poems their speculative voice, they unpack a startling sadness and awe: ‘Old wobbly world tearing down you make me hate me/ You fling light around your dark flung fill.’” —from the review by Andrea Baker in Galatea Resurrects 4 (read the entire review here).
“When McCollough is on, he’s on. The most successful poems here mix archaic language . . . with quotidiana that is both utterly banal and heartbreaking in its employ and implications. I have a feeling that this book is one I will return to for some time to come. It's just obtuse and ‘difficult’ enough to turn me off, but has sections of such stunning and compelling lyrical clarity and sound . . . that I can’t dismiss it, no matter how jealous I may be of the author. And, as usual, it’s a beautifully made book. Ahsahta keeps getting better and better.” —Anthony Robinson, in Rust Buckle Reviews (read the entire review here).
“Aaron is high art in his self-contextualizing. Little Ease opens with a quote from Foucalt and a snippet from Richard Cranshaw. The sections have strange, allusive titles: ‘Prologues from the Reformations,’ ‘Superliminare’, ‘Hospitality.’ There are no explainatory notes to guide you into these things: they are just there, leaving you feeling either curious or rebuked depending on your relationship to high culture, continental thought and the American avant garde that has taken them up. . . . What is terrific about Aaron is that he gets all of this in a really kind of unsnobby way, which means that the first poem of Jan Vandermeer goes like this:
a florid sunsets [nice grammatical arabesque there, by the way] evening a drifting
eyes my michigan (camaro hood propped
up with a hockey stick) of netherlands
Ever since, let’s say, Pound, the idea of swirling together high and pop culture has been growing stale, but Aaron makes it new in a really subtle way. This is not flarf-fireworks, but something very measured. Under a poem with this kind of ponderous 16th century (or 1905) title comes this incredibly light jaunt. It’s really fantastic.
“I don’t want to do a reading of Aaron w/r/t my own surprise and excitement that he is dealing with high culture without being a snob. There’s so much going on in this poem and I think the best way to think of it is as a kind of string quartet of voices that both clash and build upon each other.” —Simon DeDeo in Rhubarb is Susan (read the entire review here).
